It has taken some time, but Labour has finally taken up the cause of the “ghost children”. It’s certainly a scandal. The idea of “home schooling” during lockdown was a cruel joke to those sharing one device per household, or to working single parents.
School closures sent a broader message: no one cares very much about children deemed “hard to reach”. Let them use laptops! When thousands didn’t properly come back to school, no one asked too many questions. Some 140,000 pupils were “severely absent” at the last count, twice the pre-lockdown level.
The shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is now talking about this. In a speech earlier this week, she said she’d been moved by pupils telling her how lockdown inflicted pain upon schools and communities. There was the isolation, the lack of learning, the destruction of progress made in narrowing inequality. Let’s set aside the fact that Phillipson voted for the lockdowns while Keir Starmer called for them to be harder and longer. There is a dire need, now, of politicians willing to highlight the harm done – and the urgent need for repair.
Phillipson does seem quite serious. She wants a national register of children supposedly being home-schooled, something the Tories should have done long ago. She wants Ofsted, the school inspector, to monitor pupil absence. While this is already part of the process, it can be beefed up. In planning to strengthen Ofsted, rather than abolish it as some teaching unions want, she’s setting up an interesting test of Labour’s commitment to reform.
To much of the Left, Ofsted is the enemy. The suicide of a head teacher a year ago after her school was judged “inadequate” was taken by some as proof that inspections are cruel. Ofsted’s new boss, Sir Martyn Oliver, has this month halted school visits as his staff take webinar training on teacher mental health awareness and similar issues. His plan didn’t go well (the tech failed and most staff were unable to join) but he also seemed to concede a principle: that Ofsted was being too harsh. In fact, the details of the case reveal something worse.
