Month: January 2021

"Don't Put Children's Lives on Hold" – Ofsted Head Amanda Spielman, HM Chief Inspector of Education, Children's Services and Skills, has written a powerful opinion piece for today's Sunday Telegraph urging the Government not to close schools indefinitely. There is a real consensus that schools should be the last places to close and the first to re-open, and having argued for this since last spring, I welcome it. Because it is increasingly clear that children’s lives can’t just be put on hold while we wait for vaccination programmes to take effect, and for waves of infection to subside. We cannot furlough young people’s learning or their wider development.The longer the pandemic continues, the more true this is. Ofsted’s work in recent months has shown the cumulative effect of prolonged disruption on many children. We found some younger children had forgotten how to hold a pencil or use a knife and fork, and had regressed in basic language and numbers. In older children, we noted increases in eating disorders and self-harm, and anti-social behaviour problems at some schools. Social media and online gaming replaced in-person interaction more than ever before during lockdown, with all the risks that brings. Children are more sedentary and less fit.Some commentators suggested that this reflected failures of parenting. And pre-pandemic I have, for example, expressed concern ...

by Dr David McGrogan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko It must surely now be evident to all of us ‘sceptics’ that we have failed. Despite our efforts, the message simply has not got through. While there is clearly a sizeable minority of the population who feel as we do, it really is only a minority. This has been brought home to me very strongly while away visiting family over Christmas. While most of my relatives and old friends have been happy to meet up, they are simply uninterested in getting to the bottom of what has happened over the past year. If the virus comes up in conversation at all, it is only in reference to overcrowded hospitals, discussed with sad shakes of the head and much tut-tutting. We have to face facts: most people simply accept the mainstream narrative, and with the prospect of the magic spell of a vaccine in the offing, there is little incentive for them to change their minds. The thinking of the great majority of our fellow citizens can be summarised as: a few more months of this and then it will be spring, things will be back to normal, and we can forget about all of this. Why is it that so few of our fellow citizens seem willing to even listen to arguments which we find ...

Gavin Williamson U-Turns Over Primaries Reopening In a last-minute change-of-plan, the Education Secretary has declared that all primary schools in London will remain closed on Monday, regardless of whether they're located in Covid "hotspots" – prompting renewed calls from the teaching unions to close all schools across the country. MailOnline has more. A teaching union has called for all schools across the country to be closed for the start of the new term after the government U-turned on its decision to keep some primaries in London open despite rising Covid cases.The Government bowed to protests, legal pressure and scientific advice on New Year's Day after it initially omitted a number of the capital's boroughs from the forced closures.But Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, questioned why the same restrictions are not being rolled out across the rest of the country where cases are also surging.Gavin Williamson had this week released a list of London primary schools in coronavirus 'hotspots' that would stay shut for two weeks after the start of term next week.The list did not include areas where Covid rates are high such as Haringey whose leaders said they would defy the Government and support schools that decided to close.Under the Government's initial plan, schools in the City of London and Kingston were set ...

For the Fallen I'm kicking off the first update of 2021 with a comment that appeared beneath the last update of 2020. It was by Freddie Attenborough, a regular contributor to Lockdown Sceptics. To mark the last day of 2020, this post is dedicated to all those whose lives and livelihoods have been lost, diminished or tainted by our nascent, deeply illiberal and socially, economically and psychologically destructive lockdown societies; for all those whose jobs and businesses have been destroyed; those whose medical conditions have been left undiagnosed; those whose cancers have been left untreated whilst the Government ‘saves the NHS;’ those whose aspirations have been crushed; whose financial lifelines and supports have been laughed at, ripped up and thrown to the wolves by well-paid, cosseted and conceited scientific bureaucrats; those who’ve seen loved ones die long before their time at the hands of rescheduled and/or cancelled NHS appointments; for those citizens out on the streets exercising their democratic right to protest against lockdown who’ve been roughed up by the police; for the young woman in Victoria State, Australia, strangled to the floor by a policeman for the ‘crime’ of not wearing a mask; for the heavily pregnant woman led away from her home in handcuffs on a charge of promoting an anti-lockdown event on a Facebook page; for all ...