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