Express & Star comment: Pandemic creating further disadvantage for children
Coronavirus has brought new forms of disadvantage and discrimination in the realms of the education of our children.
Home schooling is a different kettle of fish to school schooling. And home schooling in one household may be very different to home schooling in another household – if it is taking place at all. Some schools hold daily live online lessons. Others simply don’t.
Parents will probably anecdotally have some idea of the vast differences of opportunity in accessing education, which will be for various reasons. For instance, according to one poll more than one in six households are struggling to afford broadband.
So the poorest are getting the rawest deal, and consequently some of the poorest children are being hit hardest. Citizens Advice is calling it a digital divide. Their plight underlines the importance of getting all children back into the school environment as soon as it is safe – and the meaning of safe during a pandemic can only be a relative term – to do so.
Labour has suggested teachers being moved up the vaccination queue to facilitate an early return, a controversial idea that would be a hard sell to over-65s still waiting for the jab.
Even in the best case scenario, it will be weeks before schools reopen, which will continue to impose a crushing burden on parents and children as they to do their best during lockdown, and schools do their best for them, which is not going to be easy if they do not have laptops in the first place.
While in the interests of the children we need to be in a hurry to reopen schools, being in too much of a hurry so that the return to school is not a stable one, and results in children being sent home again, would be demoralising and disruptive.
This time it needs to be right first time. And then there will be a lot of educational ground to recover. The Prime Minister has said a further £300 million of new funding will be given to schools for catch-up tutoring.
This is inevitably not going to be enough. But then nothing will be enough because it is difficult to imagine anything that can fully compensate for the time that has been lost.
