Five years on, we're only just starting to understand how much lockdown damaged our children

Yahoo

19-03-2025

One of the lovely things about the breadth of Radio 4 is the station's ability to take a single subject and, via its various programmes, examine it from many different angles. Over the past few days, though mainly on Monday, Radio 4 has been marking five years since the UK's first Covid lockdown and has managed to give us distinct perspectives on that momentous event from children, parents, teachers, doctors, scientists, farmers, arts professionals, dramatists, data crunchers, psychologists and an Icelandic concert pianist.
If I have one complaint, it's that the station didn't go the whole hog and make every programme on Monday about the March 2020 restrictions – give us the comedic perspective, the literary perspective, the meteorological perspective, the culinary perspective, the Ambridge perspective. Heck, I'd have even listened to a Thought for the Day on the subject (well, perhaps not).
Things kicked off on Saturday with the reliably excellent Archive on 4, which went over the events from December 13, 2019 (Boris Johnson wins a landslide) to March 23, 2020 (Boris Johnson tells us we can't leave the house any more) and stirred up all sorts of repressed memories – Johnson singing Happy Birthday as he washed his hands, racegoers at Cheltenham delighted the event wasn't cancelled, Patrick Vallance. It was a guilty listen in many ways – those poor people we heard in the clips had no idea what was about to hit them. It was hard to know what to do with all that hindsight.
Far more illuminating, yet arguably even more depressing, was Monday's analysis of the long-term impacts of lockdown, particularly on children. On Woman's Hour we heard about babies not learning to point or wave; in the trio of reports titled Lockdown's Legacy, children, teachers and medics lined up to lay bare just how scarring that period of isolation was for the young; on Start the Week we learnt that adults whose mental health suffered in lockdown have largely recovered – but children haven't.
'We had this haloed image of kids doing Joe Wicks videos in the garden and sitting doing their homework,' said one doctor, 'but for many children that was just not the case.' Those children, he said, are the ones we should worry about. Later he spoke of seeing 'Victorian levels of abuse and neglect' when lockdown restrictions eased.
The day was a parade of anecdotes about stunted development, poor educational attainment, malnutrition, mental health epidemics, spiralling standards of behaviour and a lost generation. We heard statements such as, 'Many believe this [lack of social development in reception-aged children] is because of Covid-19' and, 'It's clear a year out of traditional schooling will have lasting impacts', and while it was all largely convincing you yearned for a bit of roughage in your diet: where was the data to support all this?
Step forward the excellent More or Less, Tim Harford's wonderfully clear-eyed, no bulls--t programme that sloughs away anecdote and asks what the numbers are actually telling us. It gave Monday's day of programming a spine of steel. It was, and I mean this as a compliment, quite boring at times. Harford was not about to allow an eye-catching statistic to go unchallenged or a strong statement to be uninspected. He wanted to know what damage we did to our young when, with the lockdown, we sought to protect the adults – the 'intergenerational transfer of harms' as Harford called it.
It was bleak. For children who started school in 2020, there's an appreciable drop in learning attainment, just as there was for older primary-aged children (though the data showed the pupils could recover that loss).
Absence has rocketed – 10.5 per cent of children missed 10 per cent or more of school days in 2019. In 2023, it was more than 21 per cent. Suspensions have doubled. The truly depressing aspect was how lockdown acted as an 'amplifier', with more affluent children coping well, while the disadvantaged suffered even more. 'A decade of progress in closing the educational attainment gap was wiped out,' said one academic. 'We should never, ever have closed the schools,' said a teacher.
More or Less's refusal to supply easy headlines – on lockdown's impact on university students: 'We just don't know yet' – makes it all the more powerful when it finds hard evidence. Throughout the day we heard emotive stories about young people's mental health, and while they were affecting you wondered what the true picture was. More or Less had data to show it's every bit as bad as the anecdotes suggest, and it's getting worse: 'The figures are a gut-punch.' One in 10 young people showed signs of a mental health illness before the pandemic. Now it's one in five – and rising.
Radio 4 gave us all sorts of perspectives on lockdown and, in the main, the farmers, parents, teachers, artists and Icelandic concert pianists have managed to roll with the punches. For the young, however, it came at an enormous cost. And we're only just beginning to learn how much.
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