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Covid inquiry: ‘Terrible mistake’ to keep schools shut [1]
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Date: 2023-10
Keeping schools shut as pubs and restaurants reopened during the pandemic was a “terrible mistake”, the former children's commissioner told the official Covid-19 inquiry today.
Anne Longfield said children were “at the back of the queue” when it came to the government’s initial response to the pandemic.
Appearing to aim a swipe at then-education secretary Gavin Williamson, she told counsel to the inquiry Dermot Keating: “It was very clear there was no one at the cabinet table who was taking children’s best interests to those decisions… There was an empty chair at the table.”
Longfield added that “the machinery of government [was] in no way set up to be able to support children and represent their best interests”.
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Referring to the decision to delay the reopening of all primary schools until September 2020, Longfield said: “Schools stayed closed and instead we had pubs, we had theme parks, we had restaurants, we had the Eat Out to Help Out. That for me was a terrible mistake and one which played a huge part in children's very negative experience of the lockdown period.”
In another apparent swipe at the former education secretary, who was sacked from his role by Boris Johnson in 2021, Longfield said the government “was indifferent to children's experience during Covid” and “weren’t creative, weren’t ambitious” when it came to education and the needs of children.
“We had the fantastic Nightingale endeavour for health, furlough in terms of employment, but actually for schools we failed quite miserably…children were very much at the back of the queue, coming second and always being overlooked when it came to an important decision,” she said.
Johnson also came under fire for failing to talk directly to children at any point during his daily press conferences.
Longfield said she repeatedly “asked the prime minister to do a briefing in the evenings for children”. She added: “They did it in many countries and it was really important for children to know that there were people thinking of them.
“It nearly got there several times, but it never did.”
The former children's commissioner also criticised the government's failure to adopt the 2021 recommendations made by its own education recovery commissioner Kevin Collins.
Collins resigned in June 2021 after his plan for helping children catch up on their education was ignored. In his resignation letter he called the government's own plan a “half-hearted approach” that risked “failing hundreds of thousands of pupils”.
Longfield said the government chose a “narrow, much cheaper option and that was another one of those huge mistakes of that time”.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/covid-inquiry-childrens-commissioner-gavin-williamson/
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