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When it comes to disasters, children are habitually “ignored and mistreated”, according to the disasters expert Prof Lucy Easthope. So five years ago, when schools were told to close and lessons went online, a siren went off inside her.
“The lockdown terrified me,” she said. The government’s planning was focused on keeping children safe, but many were at increased risk from domestic and family abuse at home. The introduction of online schooling, meanwhile, broke the hard-earned social contract between schools and parents “for a lifetime”.
Schools are still dealing with “terrifyingly high levels of school avoidance”, said Easthope. But where once parents and teachers worked together to help a school-refusing child back into class, suddenly there were parents who could no longer see the value of school.
Five years on the fallout continues. Uncertainty, increased inequality, accelerated screen use and crippling anxiety are just a few of the Covid legacies affecting children and young people. From Covid babies who are now five and struggling to meet basic developmental milestones, to the 1.6 million children in England still persistently absent from school, and students whose university years were stolen by the pandemic still struggling with low mental health.
Felix* was in his second year at university when the pandemic struck. His campus closed, lectures went online and his international student flatmates fled the country. He was left alone and is still counting the cost. “There’s a stark difference between me before and after,” he said.
“Outwardly I might appear the same but the profound loneliness of those two years stunted my social development. I feel massively let down. Those two years, I remember almost nothing.” Major milestones passed by almost unnoticed. “My 20th birthday I had a couple of glasses of champagne in the front garden with family. My 21st was two mates in the back garden.”
Faith in those who govern us was damaged. “I feel robbed by government and by the university. My ability to form relationships has been affected. I’m almost 25 and I’ve no idea what I want to do,” said Felix.
Easthope said: “It all comes back to calling this what it was. It was a disaster. We are all disaster survivors now. We were told for a period of time to be terrified, so there was this growth of the anxious parent because we gave them every bloody reason to be anxious.”
For many that anxiety never went away. “I saw a mum run behind a child the other day who was about six. She said ‘Rachel, Rachel, your rucksack is open.’ It was really dramatic, really hyperbolic. What I recognised in that mum was something I’m so used to seeing in disaster survivors – we’ve taken away their sense of safety. People are on edge.”
Simultaneously the relationship between children and screens changed irrevocably. Easthope remembers seeing her five-year-old with three devices open in front her to access online lessons during lockdown. “It was our laptop she was talking through, she had to load things on a tablet and she had a phone as well. I just felt this desperate sinking feeling about what we had just done.”
While many schools are now trying to take children’s phones away from them, Easthope, an international adviser on disaster response and recovery and the bestselling author of When the Dust Settles, says there are 18- and 19-year-olds who simply “cannot exist without technology. They cannot imagine putting [their phone] away.”
The children’s commissioner for England, the former head teacher Rachel de Souza, has been at the heart of efforts to get children back in school since lockdown and has highlighted the online safety issues that have become apparent since they were asked to move their lessons and social lives online. The “tsunami” of mental health problems affecting children and young people since lockdown – one in five experience a common mental health problem such as anxiety or depression – remains a huge concern.
De Souza is worried that children do not feel listened to by those in power, and fears the consequences that follow. “What I’m seeing is a surge of interest online in populism and the Reform party among young people,” said De Souza. She also flagged an increase in sexually transmitted diseases including gonorrhoea and syphilis among children and young people – the legacy of sexual health clinics closing during Covid and interruptions to sex education in school.
“The Covid-19 pandemic brought uncertainty to all our lives, but for children it disrupted their education, routines and social connections in ways we are still coming to understand,” said De Souza.
“Despite that, this is not a cynical generation. They saw their communities rally together with acts of kindness, and volunteers provide essential lifelines for people in isolation.
“For some, extra help is still needed to help them start regularly attending school again, to socialise confidently with their friends, or to overcome trauma – and for too many this has not been available.
“Many children face long waits for mental health care, there is poor oversight of children still missing from education and robust regulation of online spaces is needed urgently as children spend increasing amounts of time on the internet.
“It is more important than ever,” she concluded, “to listen to [children’s] voices and involve them in decisions that shape their future and the country’s recovery.”
The children’s laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, sees an analogy between children’s experiences of the pandemic and child evacuees in the second world war. “My mum was evacuated to north Wales, and one night she and her sisters were taken up on to a roof and shown a red glow in the sky across the water, and they were told, ‘That’s Liverpool in flames’. She’s dead now but she was still talking about that into her 80s.”
Although she had happy memories of evacuation, that terrifying image of her home city burning remained with her. It is the same with Covid. “After anything like this, there’s always a period of forgetting. But kids won’t have forgotten they were frightened. They won’t forget that their parents were scared, that’s a huge thing.”
Soon after lockdown, Cottrell-Boyce asked teachers what had changed. “They’re still a bit like toddlers,” he said one teacher told him. They can’t share. They’re bad at losing. “Musical statues, duck, duck, goose – we can barely get through a game without an outburst.”
He added: “They wouldn’t sing – that’s the one that broke my heart.” Visiting schools since, he said the most striking legacy was the uncertainty. “Stuff that you and I grew up thinking was as unnegotiable as the weather [like going to school] is suddenly negotiable for the cohort that’s gone through.”
He wants to be optimistic. “I really hope kids will carry forward with them into the future the sense of community and the knowledge that there very much is such a thing as society. That the things that connect us are more durable than the things that divide us.”
Helen Dodd, a professor of child psychology at the University of Exeter and an expert in children’s play, said the lockdown reminded people of the importance of children playing together, a small but important win. She warned however that non-attendance at school would have long-term consequences. “If they’re not in school they’re missing out on their education and that has long-term impacts in terms of what the rest of their life opportunities look like.”
Adults have largely gone back to what they always did. “We’ve stopped appreciating that, for our children, they can’t go back to being four and do that year again.” Life events during childhood “lay the foundations of who we are and how we see ourselves”. They cannot be easily replaced.
Anne Longfield was the children’s commissioner for England when Covid struck. She said children’s vulnerabilities – poor mental health, poverty, the attainment gap between rich and poor, and unmet special needs – were increasing even before the pandemic after years of austerity. Covid “poured rocket fuel” on them and the subsequent cost of living crisis compounded this.
“There’s a generation of children who’ve lost faith in the predictability of life and lost faith in normality remaining the same. It’s an uncertainty that they now live with, and that’s enormous really, isn’t it?”
* Name changed
