Children are the whipping girls and boys for our age of perpetual crisis
Our failing state is mired in constant crisis, and the perennial losers are children
For all of us concerned with children and their place in society, and for all those who see that the only way to a functioning, thriving society is through functioning, thriving children and young people, there should be no greater priority than reversing ruinous pandemic precedent by protecting and prioritising the needs of the next generation.
It has been incredibly dispiriting to see, then, an onslaught of news stories this week which appear to suggest that far from being a clean start, the new school year looks set to continue our unwholesome pandemic mistreatment of children: as a lever to be pulled whenever there is a saving to be made.
Throughout the pandemic response, we saw a disproportionate focus on ‘mitigations’ for kids - from school closures, to close contact isolation, to masking. Children were a ‘captive audience’, who unlike the adults in charge were compelled to follow the rules by dint of their attendance at state institutions. Children became ‘mere means’ in the pursuit of epidemiological trade-offs instead of a consideration in their own right.
Though the pandemic has receded, that status seems set to persist; their ‘function’ now, though, is not so much in reducing the R rate but as a pressure valve in reducing the burden on the state and society’s purse.
A few months ago, the government pitched proposals for a reduction in childcare ratios, selling the plan as a favour to parents - a way to support families by increasing flexibility and reducing costs. Whether it would do even this was heavily disputed, with industry stakeholders adamant no such benefits would accrue to parents, an argument which appears to have been borne out by DfE’s eventual retraction this week of the figures on which the savings were based. However, the plans have not yet been dropped, and if they eventually go through will almost certainly be to the detriment of early years children themselves: the children who are already struggling with development post-pandemic.
Steering education system into an iceberg
Earlier this week an even more preposterous idea entered public discourse when it was reported that some schools are considering 3-day weeks, in the face of rising energy costs and lack of funding for teacher pay rises. One of many desperate pleas on social media reads,
“We will go into deficit at Christmas. Our electricity is going from £9k per month to approx £20k. We literally cannot afford to heat the school. Teachers and support staff will not be replaced meaning curriculum subjects will be reduced and some classes doubled up & taught in the gym”.
In reality, this is the culmination of decades of chronic underinvestment coming home to roost, leaving school leaders eking out depleted funds and facing catastrophic energy price rises, along with teacher pay rises that were announced too late to be included in budgets. As headteacher Vic Goddard said on social media, responding to government push back against the 3-day per week rumours, “Don’t tell us what to do when you give us no support for the problems you’ve caused! What options do we have?” He went on to add, “ We could ask the children to bring a head torch and turn off the lights. I’ve had enough!” And he’s right: once again it’s kids who stand to pay the price. Were we to rewind 3 years the notion of a 3 day week would simply have been inconceivable, but now, by dint of seeing education through the lens of ‘pandemic lever’, school has changed status from a sacrosanct pillar of children’s lives, to something fluid and moveable that can be downgraded in response to environmental conditions.
In fact, decaying state provision for children, far from being an aberration, has been the status quo for many children’s services for some time - ask the parents of a disabled or a SEN child and they will tell you that the system is intractably broken and has been for many years. There is next to no attempt to fix it, either - take disabled children’s services where a woeful £1.5bn funding gap in 2016/7 had risen to £2.1bn by 2021.
The pandemic only made this worse, to an extent where it is now virtually impossible to find children’s services that work, for any child, anywhere in the UK - from maternity care where services, now thousands of midwives short, pose a mortal danger to the children they are trusted to birth, to healthcare where although waiting lists for planned hospital care for all age groups are up children’s show a more marked increase than adults (22% versus 17% for all ages), to dentistry where a staggering half of all children in England now do not have access to an NHS dentist, to mental health, where only one quarter of young people are able to access the treatment they need.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul
Government’s standard answer to requests for adequate funding for children’s services too often appears to be ‘computer says no more money’, but this line runs only so far. For, when the stakes were perceived to be life or death for adults different rules applied. Though Ministers would justify the £37 billion budgeted for test and trace (c. 70% of the entire schools budget for England) as necessary under the emergency state of exception, in reality there will be no greater public emergency than the one that awaits us should we steer our education system into an iceberg. Whilst the schools crisis is not quite as obviously about ‘immediate’ death, in fact it is entirely about life and death in the medium to long term. A functioning education system is critical not only for attainment, social mobility and prosperity but at a more basic human level to ensure a healthy population - links between education and health outcomes are well known.
In fact, a three-day school week should be no more a topic of conjecture than a 3-day NHS could ever be, or a 3-day fire service, but because children have no voice, no political power, the policy norm is to rob Peter to pay Paul - Peter the child and Paul their broken custodian.
This perennial pattern leaves parents begging for the slimmest of pickings - forget any hope of improvement or aspiration, the challenge for many is simply to protect what limited services there are. And it’s desperately counterproductive.
For, across children’s services, be that education, healthcare or social care, the failure to invest sparks a vicious cycle of reduced earnings and heightened costs - lower attainment decreasing productivity, decreasing GDP; worse health and wellbeing outcomes detrimental to the individual but increasing at many touchpoints the burden on the state at population level.
It is a burden we can ill afford and speaks to something fundamentally broken at the heart of our political system- embedded short-termism coupled with intergenerational theft which views children as low-hanging fruit. This has been allowed to happen because nothing is stopping it - a political system with broken or outright corrupted checks and balances and no mechanism to ensure that children’s interests are not only heard but held accountable.
The Children’s Commissioner has children’s interests at heart, but no power; politicians and Ministers have power but no reason to fight for children who are not their constituents. Although plenty of children’s organisations advocate for children, they collectively lack the leverage that would force accountability onto power.
We will be writing more about all of these things in the coming weeks, for the one certainty is that it is now not only a moral imperative, but an economic necessity, that this changes. For, until we better safeguard and further children’s interests, the destructive pattern will repeat itself ad infinitum and the squandered losses of our flailing, failing state will be borne, time and time again, by children - the whipping girls and boys for our age of perpetual crisis.
This is Broken Custodians: a new, no holds barred discussion from UsForThem of issues impacting children.