More than 120,000 school pupils in England were reported as persistently absent during the last school year, with Covid and other illnesses the biggest contributors to soaring classroom absence rates compared with pre-pandemic years. Analysis of attendance rates at more than 7,000 state schools in England has found that 14 and 15 year-olds – pupils in years 9 (the year I am in) and 10 – have been worst affected, closely followed by those in year 11.
A sharp drop in school attendance should concern us all. Going to school is directly linked to improved exam performance which in turn leads to further learning opportunities and better job prospects. Going to school helps young people to develop social skills, friendships, cooperative working, career pathways and life skills.
It comes after two years of on and off unnecessary and enforced absence. Even one of the architects of the school closures in Scotland, Dr. Jason Leitch, now admits this may have been a mistake.
Schools temporarily closed in March 2020 and did not reopen fully until April 2021, which led to over a year’s worth of sub-standard education for many pupils. Despite the best efforts of teachers, online learning was especially damaging for children from poorer backgrounds. I was a school student during this time and the closures and disruptions had a huge impact on my learning, which I have already written about in the Daily Sceptic. I was in Year 6 when this started. My SATs were just around the corner, which would determine my attainment level for secondary education, and I was not able to sit them. Instead, I had to sit at home reflecting on how pointless all the revision I had put in was.
When the schools reopened properly, I was starting secondary school and I was initially placed in a class that was well below my abilities. If the schools had not closed and the exams ben cancelled, I would have been placed in the correct class to get the education that I needed. Now in year 9, two years later, I have finally been put in the right group; however, due to being wrongly placed in the previous years, I have knowledge gaps relative to some of my classmates, and I am not the only one.
Our education was further affected by all the regulations that we now know were unnecessary. For example, if somebody in a classroom – which were referred to as ’bubbles’ – tested positive for Covid, the whole class had to evacuate the building and self-isolate for 14 days. There were over 20 pupils in a class and if one person tested positive for Covid, the chances were that many of the other students would test positive. This meant that when we returned from the first two weeks of isolation, we would have to immediately return home for another two weeks. We did have online lessons, but they were a poor substitute for classroom education. Finding out that Matt Hancock rejected advice to cut self-isolation to five days instead of 14 simply to avoid being viewed as having made a mistake was galling. Rather than preventing children from missing school and family members from seeing each other, he wanted to save face and avoid staining his reputation.
Another rule that had a profound impact on my and my classmates’ education when we were permitted to attend school was mask-wearing – enforced even when walking in corridors. Any pupils who failed to meet the expectations were punished and put in isolation where they spent many hours doing nothing. It turns out that the mask mandate in schools was nothing to do with evidence that they worked. Partly, the education trade unions insisted, but also the Westminster Government did not want to be out of step with Scotland where Nicola Sturgeon had imposed them in schools.
People are saying that we are back to normal in schools now; however, we are a long way from it. Pupils use Covid as an excuse to be off school, even though you can still attend if you have it, and many have become accustomed to missing school and staying at home, as shown by the figures quoted above. This is what is really happening, and I hope nothing like it will ever happen again.
Jack Watson is a 14 year-old Hull City fan. You can subscribe to his Substack newsletter, Ten Foot Tigers, here.
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Beautifully expressed, Jack. I have a child your age and thank you for speaking up on his behalf.
Seconded…except my kiddo is still in primary school. Always enjoy reading Jack’s articles as it’s so important and insightful to hear from a kid’s perspective just how much this whole fiasco impacted them. Never ever to be repeated. :-/
A suggestion I feel like making here: Can we perhaps stop making a topic out of the age of this guy? He tends to write sensible stuff and that’s what matters. Compared to that, whether he’s 14 or 1400 isn’t important.
It’s the perspective that matters, as Mogwai rightly says. my year 9 certainly couldn’t write like that so it’s great that Jack can represent his generation so eloquently.
”The origin of all correlation is causality.” I like that and think I’ll start using it. Anyway, here is a recent research paper which shows a strong relationship between the death jabs and infection/mortality in Europe. Any data-heads in the house may want to scrutinise it further as it gets very technical so here’s the abstract;
”This report investigates short-term causal vaccine-mortality interactions during booster campaigns in 2022 in 30 European countries (population ~530M). An infection-vaccination-mortality model is introduced with causal aspects of repeatability, random chance, temporal order and confounding. The model is simple, has few or even zero prior model parameters and is unbiased in causal mechanisms and strengths. Confounders are taken into account explicitly of mortality-caused fear incentivizing vaccinations and four related to covid infections, and generically for all long-term confounding. Bayesian probabilities quantify all interactions, and from
observed weekly administered vaccine doses and all-cause mortality, mortality on short-term caused by a vaccination dose is estimated as Vaccine Fatality Ratio (VFR).”
#VFR results are 0.13% (0.05%-0.21%, 95% confidence interval) in The Netherlands and 0.35% (0.15%-0.55%) in Europe, subtantially transcending covid IFR. Additionally, sewer-viral-particle experiments suggested vaccination induces covid-infections and/or reactivates latent viral reservoirs.”
#The evidence of a causal relationship from vaccination to both infection and mortality is a very strong alarm signal to immediately stop current mass vaccination programmes.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368777703_Causal_effect_of_covid_vaccination_on_mortality_in_Europe
During the Covid years children were treated appallingly; our authorities most certainly took advantage of their ‘good nature’ and tolerance of authority.
IMO the worst aspect of this abuse was in the deliberate (and documented) use of peer pressure to force hesitant children to comply with state diktat (eg, in making peers socially isolate children who didn’t get a dose of vaccine) — this is deeply unethical and I can only hope that there is a review of the way in which psychological techniques were used to manipulate (relatively) innocent children.
Adults should be reminded that today’s children are tomorrow’s adults. It is always a mistake to treat children unfairly, as in time they’ll be making decisions on our behalf.
The way that children were treated was child abuse. I had regular training in child protection throughout my career, the frequency & quality of which decreased over time, it was emotional abuse & neglect.
Incredibly few professionals working with or advocating for children called it out for what it was. Abuse. Pure & simple.
Agreed. And delivered solely to support the fragile ego of an incompetent politician and the power trip of teaching union leaders. And none of the above will be called to account and suffer any sanctions for the suffering they caused. See you next Tuesdays the lot of them. A plague on all their houses.
Jack … this is a very well-written testimony to the damage done to a generation of schoolchildren by the egotistical idiots in Government. There is no justification for what was done to you and your cohorts.
However, I am very confident that you will “survive and thrive” and have a great career. Anyone who can write and express themselves so fluently at age 15 (or thereabouts) has a bright future.
Whilst I’m not trivialising the situation you have had to deal with, my late father who lived in a rural location in Hampshire, was age 13 when WW2 broke out. That’s when his education was permanently terminated …. he and the other older boys were needed to work on the farms, replacing the men who had been called up.
He continued to educate himself throughout his life.
What a sensible young man and well written. I wept just reading how that imbecile of a health minister has ruined so many young lives spuriously and idiotically.
Judging by the recent disgusting behaviour of those in our Parliament walking out during Andrew Bridgen‘s speech it would appear things haven’t changed much.
The really worrying thing is that governments are full of Hancocks.
My daughter dropped out from her degree in music technology because despite that her last year and a bit was supposed to be heavily biased towards practical work, she was told it was all going to be on-line and there would be no practical work due to covid. The course had already had less practical work than she expected and as the practical aspect was what she had hoped to be instructed in and was the reason she took the course, once this was eliminated from it, she saw no point in continuing with it. I imagine there are many similar cases in many courses that needed similar person to person interfaces, which became inadequate or not completed due to educational establishments following Hancock’s unnecessary restrictions.
Hancock and I agree about one thing: Teachers are lazy buggers who don’t want to work.