"Won't somebody please think of the children?"

It's been a rather odd year… Like everyone, I’ve spent the last fifteen months in on-and-off lockdown, leaving school and not seeing my friends or family for months at a time. Numerous measures and restrictions have been put in place, for better or for worse, but one makes the least sense: the school closures, resulting in a collective fifty million hours of lost education. As I sit typing this, on week five of the seven weeks of inexplicable absence before the start of the summer holidays, I wonder why I’m here. Students missed a year of full-time education, had earlier examinations that were or weren’t as important as actual GCSEs depending on who you asked and when you asked. Sat next to me are three or four chastising letters I have collected over the years, explaining why being just five minutes late to school has catastrophic consequences. Yet, in the last year, I have missed almost forty thousand minutes of education during the first lockdown alone.

There are serious questions over whether closing society — but especially schools — was the right thing to do. Of course, these ideas can’t be voiced in school unless you wish to be labeled an extremely antisocial conspiracy theorist, for daring to disagree with the narrative and ideologies carved into stone there. Even when actually at school, it feels more like a young offenders unit with overzealous authoritarians commanding convicts down specific corridors in one direction, or shouting about putting masks on in the stifling heat of summer (even when they were not mandated). One particularly nasty encounter I had was with a member of staff screaming, “Don’t you dare come anywhere near me without a mask on!” down a large empty hallway in the middle of September.

Students have had no school at all for months at a time; no real experience working towards and sitting serious exams (come A-Levels, the last public examinations I will have done will be my SATs seven years ago); no social events, sports days, theatre or music performances; no end-of-year celebration; no in-person results day. Even the two Sixth Form induction days were cancelled and put online — whether for the benefit of vaccinated teachers or clinically invulnerable students, I do not know.

Assuming everything over the last fifteen months was done in good faith, some questions still remain.

Closing schools was one of the many sacrifices made in the name of health and safety — but whose health and safety was this to protect? Coronaviruses aren’t a new phenomenon. Influenza and the common cold are both coronaviruses; both also evolve frequently, but are yet to mutate into the bubonic plague. We know about the potentials of coronavirus epidemics from the SARS outbreak (albeit less contagious) in the early 2000s. All of these point to the fact that children are by far the least vulnerable. Yes, it was a new disease, and scientists and politicians alike didn’t know the full extent of what it was capable of. That alone, maybe, could be considered grounds for the precautions taken at first. “Two weeks to stop the spread.” That seemed reasonable. However, it very quickly became apparent that children were not affected at all by this new, novel coronavirus. While I have absolute compassion for the families of anyone affected by this, even now, only 32 children have died with (not ‘of’) Covid-19 between the start of the pandemic and March 2021. After a very short time, it became clear the health and safety of students was not the reason schools remained closed for sixteen weeks. Fifty-five million days of missed education. Twenty-seven thousand children prescribed with antidepressants in a single month during the closure. Thirty-three thousand students gone missing from the education system as a result of it. Two million students did very little or no learning at all during the first lockdown. Still, it went on: after the initial sixteen-week closure, after the summer of 2020, it happened again. This perpetual state of restrictions caused children’s education to be considered acceptable collateral damage.

How was this all allowed to happen? How is it still being overlooked? Millions of lives have been affected drastically by these measures. The single most important job of schools is to protect and nurture students, and push them to do their very best. They are in loco parentis: a societal pact is made that schools and teachers will do their very best to educate and keep safe the students in their care. This alone allows societies to continue to thrive — without the education of children, society ends. Even since the Elementary Education Act of 1870, it was recognised that the education of children is crucial. How can that possibly be fulfilled when they’re sat at home doing much less work (if any at all), with no teacher to physically talk to, no peers to bounce ideas off. The people who should care about children the most, have instead supported the decisions to jeopardise millions of futures. The ‘covid generation,’ soon to emerge into the real world, will have less education, less expertise and less experience. On top of that, exams were brought forward. While an extra seven weeks would in no way make up for the loss and disruption of the year, it might go some way to helping students just a little bit more, and reassuring them that they are actually cared about. Why, at this time when so many have lost so much, is everyone still so blasé about these missing, depressed and uneducated children?

After all this, you would think that every minute of possible education, particularly for years taking or about to take exams, would be of the utmost importance. No. Year 11 and 13 students were still sent home seven weeks before the end of term. Two weeks before we were cast away, we had just over a week of hastened, hour-long, shortened and cut-down assessments (after a couple of weeks of rushed lessons, trying to cram in as much as possible in between bouts of forced isolation, which more often than not were confirmed to be because of false positives). I was assured in equal measure that these assessments were nothing to worry about, and even more important than usual, by different teachers.

Hopefully, we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel. It seems unbelievable that these events have happened as they did, but perhaps there’s no point in losing sleep over it anymore. Fingers crossed, we can put all this behind us in September, when students should be able to expect a full, engaging academic year with no unnecessary interruptions — but I’m not holding my breath. Letters have already been going home to parents outlining measures for the next academic year, including weekly testing…