Covid-19: Children

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I also offer the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, best wishes for a very happy birthday. She is a doughty champion of education and skills, as was evidenced in her brilliant opening speech, and that is the area on which I will speak. It is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam.

We are all only too aware that the Covid pandemic has severely affected children’s education. As lessons went online, with children to be taught by parents at home, parents realised that teaching is a skilled profession and began to appreciate teachers as never before. Children whose parents did not have the time, the education or the will to become teachers suffered most, and they were often those who were most deprived in the first place. It has been reported that the social and emotional development of those in the early years has been negatively impacted. Over two-thirds felt that children had suffered through lack of play and interaction with other children. When they could no longer ignore the situation, the Government woke up to the fact that, for children to learn online, they would need a computer, laptop, iPad—some device to be able to access online lessons. The distribution of this equipment did not go altogether smoothly. Many children found themselves having to share with one or more siblings. The Government made efforts to distribute kit to the most needy, but then came the question: did they know how to use computers? The families most in need were those most baffled. These children also lost out most from the lack of social contact with their contemporaries, and they often missed the free school meals which would have helped their physical strength, even as their academic skills were withering.

I note that there is a Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill in the offing which will include new duties on public bodies, government and companies to work towards the realisation of a series of national well-being goals, in addition to creating the post of a UK future generations commissioner and a Joint Committee on future generations. But how long will all that take? Children have lost months of school time. Many have lost the ability to sit still in class, concentrate and enjoy learning. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, they have lost ambition and resilience. Some, with a diet of finger meals on the sofa, have lost the ability to hold a knife and fork to eat a proper school dinner at the table. As with so many Covid outcomes, it will take money, but also dedication, time, patience and skill for teachers to recapture that lost time. The main burden will fall on teachers, many of whom burnt themselves out creating meaningful and fun lessons during lockdown, in the hope that the children had the tools to access them and the encouragement to concentrate. Will they be incentivised by increased access to bursaries and by increased pay?

The most disadvantaged children could neither access the lessons nor had the parental support to learn. What plans do the Government have to focus on these children, who lost most without the discipline and society of school? There have been suggestions of summer camps and of recruiting volunteers to help with catching up. The localities where this will work best will, of course, be those with benefits already. Those in inner cities or remote rural areas will probably have little access to these ventures. Will the pupil premium be extended to 16 to 19 year-olds? They need all the help they can get. How about an extended school programme, to include music, art, drama, sport and all the other life-enhancing activities which can do so much to help children shine when academic work is proving challenging? We also need positive recruitment of teachers for digital skills, which have been woefully underfunded but will be so critical to the next generation, as they are proving to ours. There is so very much to do; how can we trust this wavering Government to work with experts and professionals to find the best way forward to ensure that our children are equipped for adult life and employment? We cannot afford to lose a whole generation. We do not just need warm words; we need real, joined-up actions. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Coaker.

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[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.

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[Lord Woodley (Lab)]

I thank Estelle, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, although she is not here at the moment. What a wonderful introduction and contribution.

With more than 500,000 under-25s presently unemployed, we have a duty to act now for those individuals and for our country. Of course we do. In my view, an important way of levelling up opportunities for children—in particular furthering their skills and helping to eliminate inequality and child poverty—is reinvesting in our manufacturing industry, which different Governments have allowed to wither on the vine for many years.

Today’s announcement that Vauxhall is offering new product for my plant at Ellesmere Port is potentially great news not only for the workers whose jobs could be at risk, but for the children of those workers and of workers in the vast supply chains that depend on the continued existence of this and other like-minded plants. They will have the chance to acquire useful skills, serve apprenticeships, obtain well-paid jobs and have a future with dignity. In fact, noble Lords may be surprised to know that, through the sports and social club at this one plant, of which I am chairman, 40,000 children—including boys and girls from the age of five upwards—are given sporting activities in just one year. It helps their mental well-being.

Will the Minister join me in calling for a positive strategy to revive not merely the British car industry, which is crying out for investment, but British manufacturing generally and green manufacturing in particular? Every country depends on what it makes. We have a brilliant workforce with all the necessary skills. What we need is a Government committed to investing in it and supporting British manufacturers. This is one way to ensure that children acquire useful training and skills and eliminate inequality and child poverty.

Friends, in my town, my son is a third-generation car worker. He is just about to become a father. I want to make sure that there is a future for this plant and other plants. With that in mind, I thank the House—both Houses, actually—for the tremendous support given in recent times to encourage investment in this plant. On behalf of my town and my family, thank you very much, everybody.

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

The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, has withdrawn so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton.