School

Britain’s children go back to school this week. But after months of chatter about grade inflation and the harmful effects of lockdown on learning, is it parenting, rather than schooling, that actually needs attention? New polling reveals that one in ten younger parents think it’s down to someone else to teach their pre-school children to speak. Dig a little deeper and this number doubles to almost a fifth for the very poorest parents. Getting the basics right is seen as someone else’s job. Too many children fall behind before they have even started school. Many never catch up. By the time they leave school, children from the poorest backgrounds are on average almost three years behind those from the most affluent homes in reading and writing.

After two years of nonsense messaging on masks, some liberal politicians are ready to hang up their KN95s. Numerous blue states such as California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Oregon have announced wind-down plans for their mask mandates this week. All this comes on the tail of a spate of Democratic politicians being pictured unmasked with masked schoolchildren or workers. A complete coincidence, I am sure. Some of the recent images seem tailored to piss voters off. Last week, Stacey Abrams tweeted out a photo with a group of masked school children in Georgia. The Democratic candidate for governor posed proudly without a mask. The image was so blatantly callous, it almost made you wonder if she was trying to rub her hypocrisy in people’s faces.

After the JCVI recommended against offering vaccines to children aged 12 to 15 on health grounds, the government asked the four chief medical officers to consider the broader case, including the impact on schooling. As we know, the government has now accepted the chief medical officers’ recommendation: that all 12 to 15 year olds should be offered one dose of Pfizer on the grounds that doing so will reduce disruption to education. The government has released details of the modelling that underpins that rationale. The approach was first to estimate the number of infections with and without vaccination under different scenarios of infection spread. Next, they used this to model the number of days of lost education that could be prevented by vaccination.

In some senses, life in Britain is slowly returning to normal. Thousands of people gathered to watch Royal Ascot last week. Next week is Wimbledon, where 15,000 fans will pack into centre court to watch the finals. Meanwhile at Euro 2021, up to 65,000 people are expected to attend the tournament's climax at Wembley. It’s wonderful to see these sporting events back. However, it is deeply troubling that this ‘can do’ attitude doesn't seem to apply to events holding equivalent significance in children’s lives. The end of what has been a historically troubled school year is upon us.

Oh for a normal summer – so close now, but Covid remains capricious, a wave across Europe threatening to wash it all away. But just think: for some schoolchildren, and their parents, the normality of the long six-week summer break may not be such an appealing prospect. Sure, the middle-classes are able to pack it with enriching activities – exciting new skills, friendships and memories. But, for kids in families with stretched budgets, it can be isolating, impoverishing, boring. And, as quite a substantial body of evidence now shows, very bad for their emotional and cognitive development – some studies even conclude that the majority of the attainment gap between rich and poor children can be explained by the cumulative impact of successive summer breaks.

In the wake of last summer's Black Lives Matter protests, a number of leading British private schools announced plans to decolonise their syllabus. Winchester, Fettes, Ampleforth and St Paul's Girls were all reported to be 'formulating new approaches' to teaching about Britain's colonial past and whether subject curriculums were inclusive enough. Now Mr S can reveal that the Haberdashers' Aske's schools are the latest to join the list. The governing body of the Haberdashers' Company has written to parents and guardians at its famous boys and girls schools in Elstree and its sister Federation in South London about its benefactor Robert Aske, a London merchant who died in 1689.

Secondary-school children returning to school from 8 March will be required to wear masks in classrooms, at least for several weeks. That is in contrast to the initial return of children to school last summer. It wasn’t until November that they were required to wear masks at school, and then only in corridors and other communal areas. But should we be forcing children to wear masks? A German study – in a preprint which has yet to be peer-reviewed – has reported negative symptoms of children who wear masks in that country.