It’s only four years since Covid was used as a pretext to turn whole nations upside down. Evidence for the devastating effect on economies, education and public health continues to mount up. Even the BBC, one of the chief supporters of lockdowns, can’t avoid the issue.
Lantern Academy is a primary school in Telford where Michelle Skidmore is the 14th headteacher in eight years:
“We have a number of children who struggle with basic communication,” says Ms. Skidmore. “‘Can I go to the toilet? Can I have a drink?’ These are some of the basic sentences we have to teach our children to say.”
The children, whose parents speak English at home and have no learning disabilities, are coming to school unable to communicate. The staff therefore have to teach them Makaton, a basic form of sign language that uses symbols and signs to allow them to express themselves.
Some of the children who cannot talk are not toilet-trained either. At the start of Reception in September, eight of the 27 four year-olds came to school in nappies. The school has had to develop “intimate care plans” to keep them clean as well as providing potty training.
While some of these social problems were already a challenge, there’s no doubt in Ms. Skidmore’s mind about what has made them far worse:
Forty-eight per cent of pupils receive free school meals – about double the England average. But the new ethos that Ms. Skidmore has worked hard to create is being severely tested by challenges resulting from the Covid pandemic. “For some people, the role of parenting has changed – 100%,” she says.
Educational experts and teaching unions say the forced closure of schools during the pandemic meant some families lost sight of the value of education. In some cases, they were too busy working to home school their children, or didn’t have the space. When schools reopened, they placed less importance on ensuring their children attended.
In addition, many schools found that parents’ mental health became strained. And this coincided with the closure of services where people with young children could meet, and receive professional support. Some parents today do not know how to play with their children, the school has discovered, so it now runs a weekly class to teach them.
“I keep going back to that competition element – my child’s walking, my child’s no longer in nappies – those milestone moments, they’ve gone now because those parent and toddler groups, where you’d see all that, have gone,” Ms. Skidmore says.
Parents at Lantern Academy also sometimes struggle to keep their children healthy. School welfare officers now sometimes accompany them to doctors’ appointments, at the parents’ request, so they can be confident of fully understanding the medical advice.
Children’s mental health has also become an ever greater challenge since the pandemic, and it is the key driver behind the biggest problem faced by all the schools in the trust – attendance.
Obviously, since these are small children, it doesn’t take a genius to see that many of them could be living with the consequences of the reckless insanity of lockdowns for the rest of the 21st Century, right down to their old age. Unfortunately, by then those responsible will be long gone, having left devastation in their wake.
The real mystery, though, is why the terrible epoch-changing impact of lockdowns, which was so obvious at the time to anyone with an ounce of common sense, is only now starting to sink in among those at the time who lined up to cheer on the Government and its gaggle of ‘scientific experts’, and to pour foul scorn on any dissenters.
But you’ll have noticed that even in this story, the BBC blames the pandemic rather than the lockdown measures, as if the latter were unavoidable.
Worth reading in full.
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