Coronavirus pandemic risks creating ‘lost generation of children’, warns former Ofsted chief

‘What is absolutely clear is that a lot of youngsters have lost a considerable amount of time while this lockdown has taken place.’ By Kate Ng

Notices advising staff and pupils to maintain 2m of separation to create an environment safe from Coronavirus are displayed at Slaithwaite C of E Junior and Infant School in Slaithwaite, near Huddersfield (AFP)

Pupils may have to face cancelling their summer holidays to make up for lost time during the coronavirus lockdown, or Britain faces a “lost generation of children”, a former Ofsted chief has warned.

Sir Michael Wilshaw said in an interview with Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme that some children “have regressed” in their studies while in lockdown.

“That’s a great shame because we want every year group to have the same opportunities as others,” he said, adding that schools and head teachers are responsible for implementing recovery programmes, which may mean cancelling holidays.

“We’ll wait and see. What is absolutely clear is that a lot of youngsters have lost a considerable amount of time while this lockdown has taken place.”

Boris Johnson confirmed on Sunday that the partial reopening of primary schools is to go ahead on 1 June.

“In line with the approach being taken in many other countries, we want to start getting our children back into the classroom in a way that is as manageable and as safe as possible.”

Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, will continue to consult with teaching unions, local authorities and school leaders over the next week, Mr Johnson said.

However, he added: “I think it is important for us to be clear about the government’s intentions now, so that teachers and parents can plan in earnest for schools to open a week on Monday.”

But a leading public health academic said the government needs to decide what “threshold of risk” is acceptable to the public in making the decision to reopen schools.

Professor Devi Sridhar, personal chair in global public health at the University of Edinburgh, said politicians must be “completely honest with teachers and parents about scientific uncertainty” to earn their trust.

“We know children carry the virus, we don’t know the degree they transmit it to adults,” she said on the Sophy Ridge programme.

“We need to have monitoring in place – testing, tracing and the ability to break chains of transmission and identify quickly clusters in schools.”

The decision-making process to reopen schools would not necessarily be uniform across the country, said Prof Sridhar, noting that some parts of the country have a higher rate of infection than others.

“In some parts of the country when we look at local authorities, there are thousands of daily cases – look at the northeast of England. In other parts, there are a few dozen – it obviously makes a difference whether you are going to open a school when there is a lot of community transmission or where there is very little.”

Mr Wilshaw reiterated that the government must decide what measures should be put in place to protect schools, and local authorities should be tasked with enforcing them.

“It is no good saying we are going to let schools do what they want because some schools will do it extremely well and other schools won’t,” he said.

“Some schools will ensure there is a triage system in place, there is temperature testing and classrooms are intensively cleaned and so on.

“Other schools might not be doing that, so it is really important that the government is very prescriptive in what they would expect schools to do.”

In France, one headteacher’s advice to the UK on the matter is to be “well-prepared” and “make decisions as early as possible”.

Laurent David, headteacher of the Ecole elementaire la Metairie near Nantes, said his pupils aged between five and 11 years old are keeping their distance from one another and using hand sanitising gel regularly as part of the new measures to allow children to return to school.

Many schools in France allowed children back in school last week, but schools were under no obligation to open and parents were consulted for their opinions before decisions were made.

In response to Mr Wilshaw’s suggestion that summer holidays may be cancelled, the Department for Education said there are no plans to run schools through the holiday period.

“The education secretary has said that we are not planning to run schools through the summer,” a spokesperson for the department said.

“But we are working with partners to look at what additional measures may be required to ensure every child has the support they need to deal with the impact of coronavirus on their education.”