UK

How damaging were Covid lockdowns to children’s education?

Labour Hub Editors

AUGUST 27, 2024

Karam Bales separates the facts from the fiction and outlines what the new Labour Education Secretary needs to do next.

Last week’s GCSE results and A-level results the week before were higher than in 2019, the last year before the pandemic began. The results are testimony to the efforts of students and education workers to overcome the extraordinary circumstances they’ve faced, the ongoing cumulative impacts of austerity, the disruption caused by Covid and the stress many families have felt from the cost of living crisis.

Reading and listening to much of the media four years ago, you might have believed that this year’s exam results would have been an impossibility. Remember the headlines that dominated regarding the impact of lockdown on education. “Unsurmountable” and “permanent” damage had been done, terrifying statistics and calculations produced by economists were quoted, hundreds of millions of school days had been lost, which would equate to lower grades, which in turn would lead to lower earnings, and as life expectancy is linked to income, this generation of children would have reduced health and life expectancy.

The vision created was apocalyptic, but this year’s results show the catastrophizing was misplaced, built on an inaccurate time view of linear progression. The exam courses completed this summer began in September 2022, and the Key Stage 3 content covered in years 7 to 9 do not completely map onto the GCSE curriculum; also, students study subjects at GCSE and A-Level that they haven’t previously studied. While for many students remote learning wasn’t as effective as in-person teaching, not enough credit is given to how teachers adapted their lessons and resources to online learning. The economists’ calculations relied on remote lessons resulting in no learning rather than less.

This isn’t to diminish the impact the pandemic has had on students. Opponents of lockdown will cite rises in mental health concerns in students, but this worrying increase is on a similar trajectory as before the pandemic. However, it’s difficult to identify cause and effect from national statistics.

Thousands of children in the UK have lost parents or primary carers to Covid and many more will have lost loved relatives and family friends. Thousands of children were hospitalised: Office for National Statistics data currently estimates over 100,000 children have Long Covid, over 20,000 with a disability limiting day to day activity and many more will have parents struggling with Long Covid. At 80% of normal pay, furlough caused financial difficulty for lower income families and three million workers entirely slipped through the gaps in Rishi Sunak’s safety net.

Even if not directly affected, just living through a period of mass deaths and such uncertainty will have been difficult for some.

The media have regularly suggested the impact of fearmongering on children’s wellbeing citing the ‘don’t kill granny’ messaging, yet they have never considered the impact of their own messaging. What must it have felt like for children to read those headlines claiming the loss of learning they’d already faced by the summer of 2020 was irreparable and would blight their whole lives?

The same could be said of the narrative that school has become optional for many children. The Department for Education set clear instructions that even if students weren’t in school they were expected to attend a full timetable of remote lessons. In the autumn term of 2020, schools were told they had to provide these remote lessons for students who were isolating or when schools were partially or fully closed due to large outbreaks. The only sources saying that attending education was becoming optional was in fact the media.

This media-based narrative has turned into the concept of ghost children, who are described as children who have fallen out of education. However, this is also incorrect. The phrase comes from a report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), which is a think tank founded by former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan-Smith, and is actually refers to the number of students who are registered in education but are persistently absent. Persistently absent is classed as missing 10% or more of school. In a six-week half term this would equate to missing three school days.

The creation of the CSJ ‘ghost children’ report appears to be the result of a collaboration between Iain Duncan-Smith, the lobbying group UsForThem and the anti-vax HARTgroup to create “harder hitting” messaging “invoking ‘permanent harm’ to children.” The evidence has been publicly available and reported on by a few outlets including Byline Times since HARTgroup’s internal chat logs were leaked to a small number of journalists. 

There is no evidence that persistent absence is the direct consequence of lockdowns – the DfE’s data shows that the most common cause of absence is due to sickness. Considering the estimated prevalence of Covid, it’s likely a significant proportion of this persistent absence will be caused by Covid.

This is why Long Covid campaigners were concerned that our new Labour Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson chose to make a speech at the Centre for Social Justice prior to the general election. Since the election, Phillipson has followed the same narrative as her Conservative predecessors in regards to school attendance, announcing tougher sanctions on parents for taking their children out of school during term time, which ignores the primary causes of absence. There has been promising talk regarding improving access to mental health support; however, those working in education will judge the government by what change they see on the ground.

The exam results also showed a disparity of grades between regions and communities. In the same week, data was published showing that there was also a regional divide for Long Covid with the North recording higher incidence rates than the South, another study found that students in private and grammar schools had on average better air quality than students in crowded comprehensives.

It seems implausible that any study can isolate and quantify the direct cause and effect of a single measure such as lockdown from this melting pot of problems. The harm caused directly by Covid measures does not have much evidence to support the catastrophic headlines we’ve seen over the years. However, the evidence is steadily accumulating that Covid in children is not as benign as many implied. Several other recent studies have linked Covid to cognitive impairment and mental health conditions. Yale in the US has published a detailed paper on the mechanisms by which Covid can interfere with the immune system.

Previously in 2022, Phillipson called out the Conservative government’s failure to address clean air in schools by improving ventilation and introducing air filtration, measures which studies commissioned by the government have now shown to decrease sickness rates by over 20%.  Now that Phillipson has the power to implement change, will she remember what she said in Opposition?

Karam Bales is a former member of the National Education Union Executive, writing in a personal capacity.

Image: https://www.dmu.ac.uk/current-students/hot-topics/2021/march/important-information-about-your-results.aspx. Licence: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. CC BY-SA 3.0

Campaigners condemn the UK’s two-tier Covid vaccination policy

 

Labour Hub Editors

AUGUST 25, 2024

Covid Action UK’s spokesperson Joseph Healy says: “At a time when we are just beginning to emerge from the largest Covid wave since 2022, it is simply unbelievable that the JCVI (the body responsible for vaccine policy in the UK) has decided to use an old vaccine as its autumn booster offer on the NHS. This booster will be made available to some of the most vulnerable groups in society – those aged over 65, the immunocompromised and frontline health and social care staff. However, on grounds of cost effectiveness, they have decided to use an old version of the vaccine which was targeted at last winter’s variant instead of the updated vaccines which countries like the US are making available to all.

 “The UK now has a two-tier approach to vaccination. The elderly and most vulnerable will be offered an out-of-date vaccine, while those who can afford to buy vaccines privately will be getting the most up-to-date and effective version.”

As Professor Sheila Cruickshank ( Professor in Biomedical Sciences, University of Manchester) says: “Although using pre-procured doses means less money will be spent on the autumn booster programme, research shows older formulations of vaccines are less effective against variants which emerged after they were developed (such as the JN.1 variant). Modelling suggests they’ll be up to a third less protective against severe disease.” She goes on to point out that only those with the means available will be able to purchase updated vaccines on the private market from pharmacies, thus cementing a two-tier health system.

Joseph Healy adds: “This is an appalling decision and makes the UK not only an outlier, with updated vaccines available in most other European countries, but also could contribute to the deaths and hospitalisation of some of the most vulnerable as well as increasing the levels of Long Covid considerably. There is a need for a serious rethink and for the government to intervene. This decision makes a mockery of the concept of Public Health.”

COVID ACTION UK is grassroots, activist campaign of individuals and affiliated labour and trade union organisations who came together in November 2020 to challenge the then UK government’s approach to the pandemic. It puts forward an alternative strategy, aimed at eliminating community transmission of Covid-19 and campaigns for this to be adopted by the Westminster government, and the governments of the devolved nations, in order to save lives, prevent the collapse of the NHS and care systems, and stamp down on Covid-19 and all its variants.   Website: https://covidaction.uk/

Establish ‘Special COVID Sickness Leave’ for NHS Staff

In a separate initiative, petitioners are proposing a separate classification, namely ‘Special COVID Sickness Leave’, for all past, present, and future COVID-19 related absences, exempt from ordinary sickness management or recording. A similar policy was recently implemented in New Zealand’s healthcare system where they established a separate COVID-19 leave scheme for healthcare workers. They are calling upon the NHS authorities and the government to establish the ‘Special COVID Sickness Leave’ for all NHS staff. This will not only shield us from unfair reprimands but will also reinforce our fight against the pandemic by securing the workforce’s morale and wellbeing. Please sign the petition here.

Model Motion for Labour Party Conference

LONG COVID: INCREASE SUPPORT TO SUFFERERS AND INVESTMENT IN RESEARCH

The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy is proposing the following motion for CLPs to submit to Labour Party Conference:

Conference notes a review paper on long Covid by the Universities of Oxford, Leeds and Arizona, published in August 2024 in The Lancet, reported that long Covid now affects nearly 2% of the UK population, with 71% of long Covid sufferers having the condition for more than a year. Strikingly, the rate of long Covid in the most deprived fifth of the UK population (3.2%) is more than twice as high as that in the least deprived fifth (1.5%).

Furthermore, another recent study by the Universities of Birmingham and Keele of more than 9,000 people, who were in work before the pandemic, has found that people with long Covid are at three times higher risk of leaving employment compared to those without Covid symptoms.

Conference calls upon our Labour Government to:

1) guarantee sufficient funds for research both into identifying the complex causes of long Covid and its effective treatment;

2) ensure that people with long Covid receive benefits to which they are entitled; and

3) introduce legislation requiring employers to provide support for their employees with long Covid and other serious post-viral conditions, as this will benefit both employees and employers alike.

Supporting arguments:

A new review paper from the Universities of Oxford, Leeds and Arizona analysed dozens of previous studies into Long covid examined the number and range of people affected, the underlying mechanisms of disease, the many symptoms that patients develop, and current and future treatments.

Long Covid is generally defined as symptoms persisting for three months or more. The condition can affect and damage many organ systems, leading to severe and long-term impaired function and a broad range of symptoms, including fatigue, cognitive impairment (often referred to as ‘brain fog’), breathlessness and pain.

Long Covid can affect almost anyone, including all age groups, even children. The researchers found that while some people gradually get better from long Covid, in others the condition can persist for years. Many people who developed long Covid before the advent of vaccines are still unwell. Even among those who those who have been fully vaccinated and up to date with their boosters, 3 to 5% of people can still develop Long Covid after a Covid-19 infection.

Researchers have found that a wide range of biological mechanisms are involved, including persistence of the original virus in the body, disruption of the normal immune response, and microscopic blood clotting, even in some people who had only mild initial infections.

There are no proven treatments for Long Covid yet, and current management of the condition focuses on ways to relieve symptoms or provide rehabilitation. There is a dire need to develop and test biomarkers (for example, blood tests) to diagnose and monitor Long Covid and to find therapies that address root causes of the disease.

Trish Greenhalgh, Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences at Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, said: “Long Covid is a dismal condition but there are grounds for cautious optimism. Various mechanism-based treatments are being tested in research trials. If proven effective, these would allow us to target particular sub-groups of people with precision therapies.

“Treatments aside, it is becoming increasingly clear that long Covid places an enormous social and economic burden on individuals, families and society. In particular, we need to find better ways to treat and support the ‘long-haulers’—people who have been unwell for two years or more and whose lives have often been turned upside down.”

The full paper “Long Covid: a clinical update” is published in The Lancet.

The deadline for submitting these motions for Annual Conference is 5pm Thursday 12th September. A fuller selection of model ‘contemporary motions’ that CLPD is proposing for consideration by CLPs can be found here as a MS Word document and here as a PDF file.

Together Against Covid – time to get organised!

An online conference to bring people together to fight for Covid protections and clean air in workplaces, education, health and social care. Saturday 28th September 10:00 – Sunday 29th September 16:00. Details here.

Image: https://healthwatchbury.co.uk/advice-and-information/2022-06-08/covid-19-vaccination-people-aged-12-and-over-who-have-weakened. Licence: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. CC BY-SA 3.0