Covid-19: Children

Debate between Lord Hannan of Kingsclere and Baroness Garden of Frognal

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, not just for securing this debate but for introducing it so eloquently. I am sure that all of us, on all sides, were moved by her passion and evident conviction. She is of course right that we have an obligation; it is one of our deepest instincts as a species to want to do things for the young.

I cannot help feeling that these lockdowns have had a real disproportionate impact: they have been asymmetric in their effect, hitting people in the private sector harder than those in the public sector and those in cities harder than those in villages. Above all, they have hit young people harder than middle-aged and elderly people.

I have not been teaching all three of my children during the lockdown, as my noble friend Lady Wyld has. They span or bookend the system: one is in reception and one is in her first year at university. I can see that, in different ways, every one of those cohorts has been negatively impacted, if not for any other reason than the most obvious one, which we are all grimly aware of: time subjectively speeds up as we get older. The 15 months of lockdown are a very different experience when seen through the eyes of my four year-old than through those of his parents’ generation. It is almost difficult for the small children to recall a previous time.

The negative impact on older children relates to a time that cannot be given back. Leaving school is one of the closest things that we have as a society to a collective rite of passage to adulthood—it is not something that you can go back and do a second time round. For two years in a row, that has been permanently lost. Of course, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, is absolutely right that we should keep a sense of perspective and should not catastrophise: this is not a world war. None the less, from the point of view of the young people themselves, the impact has been pretty awful. If your dream was, say, to captain the school cricket XI and you will never be able to do so, that cannot ever be given back to you.

Young people are quite solipsistic—we all were when we were young. In reading the memoirs of the late Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, I was struck that he talked about being at Oxford during the Second World War and being more upset by failing to be elected president of the Oxford Union than he was by news of the fall of France, which happened to be on the same day. It is a very natural thing for young people to be quite self-centred, and the impact on their lives has been frightful.

Here is the more difficult thing that needs saying. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about ambition, and she was absolutely right. It would be so easy, and I could secure a certain amount of plaudits from all sides, if I just said that we need to spend more money. No one ever shakes their head when you say that—or very few people in this place do. But this is not just about resources; it is about ambition too. I have been shocked by the gap in ambition between some of the schools that have treated the restrictions as a challenge to overcome and some that have treated them, frankly, as an excuse to do less.

We heard the figures quoted about online teaching. According to the Children’s Commissioner, in the summer term of last year, half of secondary school students and 60% of primary school students got no online teaching at all. This is not a question of resources—once you have installed Zoom or Teams, it is effectively free—it is simply a question of ambition. Although there were exceptions, there was, as we heard, some correlation: generally, the schools that had the least online teaching were the ones whose children could least afford that loss. Of course, there were some schools in very deprived areas that rose to the challenge, and there were some well-off schools that did not, but, as a general rule, there was a pretty unpleasant correlation.

I make that point because, if we are now going to try to make up the lost time, it is about not just budgets but ambition. That means that, if we are serious about putting children first, we have to be prepared to give them priority over some competing interests. It might mean a longer school day or shorter school holidays. I am very struck by the way in which the National Education Union, having campaigned furiously against schools coming back at all and having demanded that everything be done online, started campaigning against online tuition the moment that it was conceded, so that a lesson effectively became just a video and then a PDF worksheet. Imagine if, pre-lockdown, you had gone into a classroom and that had been the style of teaching —would any of us have regarded that as adequate?

We do indeed owe a debt to what Kipling called our “angry and defrauded young”, and we—all of us—need to start paying that debt now. That will mean not just decreeing greater resources but putting in the hours as well.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe.