A Primer for the Education Secretary
School Closures – the fallacy of the hindsight argument and why Government must stop using it as an excuse for poor decision-making.
Gillian Keegan, the current Secretary of State for Education, has spent the exam results period repeating the trope that the decision to close schools was difficult but, based on what was then known, inevitable. On Thursday morning, Ms Keegan said that it was difficult to judge in “hindsight” as “people were panicking” and “we have lots more information now”, and “knowing what we know now about the impact on children, of course, we would be very reluctant” to close schools.1
It is simply not true that in 2020 and 2021 the government did not have the information to make an informed decision about school closures.
It is neither surprising nor forgivable that Ms Keegan is not across the detail of what the government knew when the decisions (repeatedly) to close schools were made. She is, after all, the sixth Secretary of State since the start of the pandemic.
UsForThem has compiled this primer on the information that, in real-time, was available to the key decision-makers at the time. It draws on a series of detailed special reports on failures of pandemic decision-making that we will be releasing in the Autumn.
Perhaps aided by our detailed and referenced account of what happened, Ms Keegan will recognise that hindsight was not needed to understand that closing schools would reap widespread harm on children. We hope it may also illuminate the reality that schools are, in fact, essential infrastructure, so that in the future any decision to order mass school closures should require Parliament’s consent.
Nine examples of real-time information that should have led to better decision making
Pre-pandemic: Previous pandemic plans had been predicated on the basis that mass school closures were to be avoided. Learning 14 from Operation Cygnus in 2016 had provided “DfE should study the impact of school closures and also examine the possibility of keeping schools open by getting retired teaching staff to return to support the profession and by the temporary upskilling of students”2; but it appears this had never been followed up on. DfE did not have a plan for continuity of education, either by way of keeping schools open, or via remote learning. Indeed, in a fieldwork exercise that ended on 7 March 2020, just before the first lockdown, Ofcom had estimated that “between 1.14 million and 1.78 million children under the age of 18 lived in households without access to a laptop, desktop or tablet in the UK”, and that between 227,000 and 559,000 children lived in homes with no access to the internet. 3
February to March 2020: It was clearly documented in SAGE papers during these months that the impact that school closures would have on stemming transmission was likely to be “highly limited”, and was uncertain. 4 This view was reconfirmed as late as 17 March 2020, the day before the first school closures, in a published paper in which SAGE also made clear that if schools closed, they would need to be closed for a lengthy period of time to have any impact. This was never communicated to the public. The same paper also noted that “The impact of closing universities is expected to be relatively small, because university students are a relatively small proportion of the UK population (around 2.5 million)”. 5
Spring 2020: Following the first school closures, a series of safeguarding flags were raised by the Education Select Committee, SPI-M, the Children’s Commissioner and children’s charities, but they were not addressed.67
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Vicky Ford told the ESC in April 2020 that “We have put vulnerable children at the forefront of our thinking, right from day one. That is why we took the…important decision to make sure that [schools] would remain open for key workers’ children and vulnerable children.”10 The week earlier, however, an SPI-M paper, drawing on school attendance figures provided by the DfE, had revealed that “94% of vulnerable children are not in school”11. “This does not mean that those children are not being safeguarded in other ways”, said Ford, apparently overlooking that by this time social work protections for vulnerable children had either been suspended outright or moved to a remote footing.12
Summer 2020: Failure to contingency plan for Autumn term 2020. There was no plan for schools returning when it was inevitable there would be a winter uplift in illness. This meant that, when the new term started in September, children, and staff, had to cope with frequently changing guidance and legal implications13. Schools had to focus on adapting their premises and practices to fit the new rules rather than on teaching and helping their pupils to catch up. Children had to spend time at home rather than in school, and had sport, music, drama and other non-academic activities repeatedly cancelled.
Summer 2020 and ongoing: The educational damage to children was obvious and evidenced from early on in the pandemic. Boris Johnson and Gavin Williamson made many big promises about their commitment to providing catch up opportunities for children, including over the summer. But those plans were so under-resourced that their author, Sir Kevan Collins, resigned. The effective failure of the catch up programme was subsequently the subject of an Education Select Committee Report.
November 2020: A major report from Ofsted lamented the harm already caused by school closures. Ofsted’s conclusions echoed comments in a joint briefing paper from the SPI-B sub-group of SAGE and the Department for Education, dated 4 November, 14 15which had recorded a litany of harms flowing from the closure of schools (including negative impacts on educational outcomes, inequalities and attainment; loss of opportunity to identify emerging learning problems; impairments to mental health, and for adolescents in particular; cognitive, social, and emotional developmental outcomes at risk; physical health at risk; psychological inequalities; increased exposure to the internet, including harmful online content; missing of routine childhood vaccinations; increased isolation and loneliness exacerbating mental health issues; reduced access to essential services for vulnerable children, with the most vulnerable being the most negatively affected; missed opportunities for detecting early signs of abuse and neglect; and loss of access to free school meals and knock-on nutritional effects).
That paper stated that “many more children would die from suicide than Covid- 19 this year.”
The papers shared at SAGE on the 4th November also made clear that transmission in schools was likely to mimic community transmission, and the evidence that schools were drivers was very mixed. Teachers were considered to be at no more risk than any other professionals.
That SAGE meeting on 4 November was attended by at least six of the Government’s most senior scientific advisers, and at least ten senior officials from the Department for Education, the Cabinet Office, the Home Office and other government departments.
December 2020: SAGE refined its understanding of the role that children and schools had played in transmission, having commissioned further work on that topic at its meeting on 4 November 2020. By 10 December 2020, that further work had confirmed that: “Emerging SIS [School Infection Survey] data and further ONS analysis continue to support the statement from SAGE 65 [the meeting of 4 November] that “ONS data from 2 September to 16 October show no difference in the positivity rates of pre-school, primary and secondary school teachers and staff, relative to other workers of a similar age (medium confidence)”.” 16 In other words, transmission taking place in educational settings appeared to be no greater than transmission taking place in other settings.
January 2021: according to Education Select Committee records, the DfE sent a letter to the Chair of that committee (among others) on 2 January 2021 referencing a London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine report which states: “School closure would have only a minor and temporary effect on transmission rates, and the wider impact of this on children’s social, physical, educational and emotional development would be significant”17. On 4 January 2021, hours after he had told parents across the country that it was safe to send children back to the classroom, the Prime Minister announced the second period of prolonged school closures.
January 2021: with evidence of mounting harms flowing from school closures, Dr Hargreaves, Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser at DfE, reported to the Education Select Committee that “it is very much on the agenda that over the next six months we are looking up to build up a more comprehensive database” [of harms]. The Chair replied “shouldn’t this be done when the decision is made to close the Schools?”.18 At the same hearing Professor Viner, the President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health left the Select Committee in no doubt about the extent of accruing harm: “I am aware of about 75 reasonable quality international publications on the harms to children and young people from the first wave of the pandemic. We have around 25 academic publications from the UK and there is 50 from elsewhere and they tell a very consistent story. It is a story of considerable mental health harms”. Professor Viner added: “When we close schools we close [children’s] lives, not to benefit them but to benefit the rest of society. They reap harm when we close schools.”19
https://x.com/talktv/status/1692095026921136335?s=46&t=6Bmhlp3qjDJBtfe3ZIX8VA
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/927770/exercise-cygnus-report.pdf
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/spi-m-o-consensus-view-on-the-impact-of-mass-school-closures-17-march-2020/spi-m-o-consensus-view-on-the-impact-of-school-closures-on-covid-19-17-march-2020
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/been-more-900-calls-childline-17986993
These people need prosecuting. Endless lies and anti-accountability.
Thanks for continuing to report on all this.