In the wake of the pandemic, a staggering 1.7 million children are missing the equivalent of a morning a week of school. Author and journalist Harriet Sergeant argues that in the wake of the pandemic, the government has let children down
“There was this one boy in my class who disappeared after lockdown,” a 14-year-old girl from the Midlands explained. “Then one day I saw him near the shopping centre. He was sitting on a bit of old cardboard by the side of the road. He was all dirty and looked homeless. He’d always been popular so we bought him food and clothes.” Eventually a teacher was alerted and the boy came back into school. But he was so far behind, he grew frustrated and angry. Finally he left for good.
This boy is a “ghost child” and a casualty of the calamitous decision to lock down our schools. With all the attention on the elderly, young people were left to cope. It was an unplanned, social experiment that impacted children at every stage of their lives – from toddlers to teens – and its consequences are only now becoming clear.
The numbers are brutal. A staggering 1.7 million children are missing the equivalent of a morning a week of school – that is 10 per cent of all children. Absences are up 104 per cent since the pandemic and still rising “at an alarming pace”, says the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). At the same time 140,000 children are classed as severely absent. That is they spend more time out of school than in it. In the autumn of 2019, before lockdown, just 60,202 pupils were severely absent.
