Comment

It is fear – not science – that is stopping our children being educated 

Cruel social distancing measures in schools are unnecessary. It's time the Government stopped playing the Fear Card

I still can’t get over it. That photograph of little children sitting alone in chalk squares spread out across a playground. Was it a scene from some dystopian film, a creepy vision of life in a world where infants are permitted a simulacrum of togetherness yet cruelly kept apart? I’m sorry to say the picture is not fictional. It shows one French school’s attempt at social distancing for its youngest pupils. Not content with invisible cages in the playground, there are angry stripes of hazard tape around classrooms, segregated desks and “air hugs” instead of the joyous, real, touching kind. This is not the new normal this is the new nightmare.

Please don’t make the mistake of assuming British children will be spared such alienating horror. The NEU, the largest teaching union, has done its damndest to block the resumption of lessons, instructing members to demand strict social-distancing measures, warning, laughably, that it could be “unsafe” to mark children’s workbooks and insisting on a Coronavirus Workplace Checklist only marginally shorter than the Old Testament.  

Depressing plans are already afoot in our schools. Time slots for toilet breaks – “Sorry, Daniel, you’re not allowed a wee till quarter to eleven!” No help from teachers if youngsters fall over or wet themselves (despicable, frankly). “Triage” entry systems into reception with teachers in face masks, gloves and plastic aprons checking the temperature of every small person returning on June 1st. If, that is, teaching unions can be persuaded that an environment which will be a pullulating petri dish of normal flu by November can somehow clear an impossible bar and be guaranteed 100% Covid compliant.    

What makes all this even more disturbing is that such measures are almost entirely unnecessary. There is little about coronavirus we can be absolutely sure of – this is a brand new disease and our knowledge grows by the day -  but most of the available evidence so far strongly suggests that children are neither suffering from coronavirus nor spreading it. Studies in South Korea, Iceland, Italy, Japan, France, China, the Netherlands and Australia all concur that  youngsters are “not implicated significantly in transmitting Covid”, not even to parents and siblings.

Adult paranoia, stoked by over-the-top government messaging, union intransigence and media conniptions, is now being inflicted on the youngest members of our society to whom the virus poses a threat so tiny scientists call it “statistically irrelevant”. Instead of nursery rhymes, mixed infants may soon be invited to sing something called the “two-metre-song” as they stick their arms out to keep their friends at bay.

Dear God, do we really intend to turn our children and grandchildren into fearful little brainwashed North Koreans? If not, what the hell is going on and what is Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, doing about it?

Let’s rewind a bit. In its pre-lockdown assessment, SAGE (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) found that closing British schools would have a very limited impact on reducing transmission of the virus. In fact, senior scientists concluded that keeping children at home might make infections of elderly people within households and the community worse, leading to more deaths among vulnerable groups. (This chimes with the tragic experience of New York City where Governor  Cuomo admitted recently that 66% of new hospitalizations were people who had stayed home.) When it came to “potential effectiveness in reducing total number of cases and deaths”, SAGE said shutting schools would have only a “modest impact” compared to other measures.

Throughout the pandemic, the Government has claimed that it “followed the science”, but the decision to shut schools was quite clearly political. The science said having kids at home could cause more not fewer deaths. It was mounting pressure from  a baying chorus of critics which closed classrooms.

Now, far-left teaching unions, who have shamelessly weaponised Covid19 to get at a Prime Minister they hate, are demanding that schools be made “safe” when they were never unsafe in the first place. “Show us the science,” demands Labour’s Angela Rayner. How about the fact that the EU reported this week that reopening schools in 22 member states had not increased the incidence of the virus significantly among either children, families or staff. Is that enough science for you?

We are well into Emperor’s New Clothes territory here, dear reader. Mad and distressing things are about to happen to children in the name of protecting them against a monster which preys on the old but not the young.

Unwittingly, parents are colluding with this delusion. Terrified by misleading public-information films which insisted that everyone was at equal risk from the virus, and by exceptionally rare cases of sick babies and adolescents featured prominently on the news, mums and dads are understandably reluctant to see little Idris or Isla be used as a “guinea pig” when schools reopen.

The middle-class obsession with safety – Volvoism as a droll teacher friend calls it – is another barrier to people being able to grasp, really grasp, the relative risks which say that their DCs (darling children) are as safe in school as they are at home. Ironically, they’re safer if they get Covid rather than normal flu because mortality in children in England under 15 years of age features about twelve “influenza-attributable” deaths every year.

Facts, eh? So strong is the prevailing groupthink that any mum who dares admit that, actually, she would rather like her child to go to school, indeed, she is rather worried about the effect on her child of not being in school, risks a public tongue-lashing. Gemma, who has two kiddies under 9 and is struggling to do her work while trying to home-school, told me at the weekend that the Mummies’ WhatsApp group for her son’s class has “gone mental”. The mums have convinced themselves that school is toxic for their DCs  and it’s “far too soon” to go back. One mother who dared to challenge this herd conformity attracted vicious comments including,  “Sorry your son misses his friends… he’ll miss them a lot more if he’s dead.”

As it happens, when I spoke to Gemma I had just been sent the comprehensive data for Italy’s 32,007 corona deaths. The average age of fatalities was 80 (85 for women, 79  for men) with the overwhelming majority of the deceased being over 70. Mercifully, so few children were lost to the virus that they didn’t even register on the graph; six deaths in the whole 0 to 19 age group. And only 3.9% of the total did not have pre-existing conditions.

I sent the data to Gemma. “Unreal,” she texted back immediately. “This needs to go to all the news media so parents know and we can stop the scaremongering.” And a squadron of wild boar will shortly be spotted in the skies over Tuscany.

You know, I haven’t even mentioned the disastrous effect the lockdown has had on education itself. Since 20th March, two-thirds of children have not taken part in a single online lessons. While privately-educated pupils still have full timetables many state-school students get no home teaching at all. Missing a third of a year of school could cut a pupil’s lifetime earnings by 4%, according to a new German study. How do Corbynist union leaders, who claim to be on the side of the disadvantaged, reconcile that with playing politics with the poorest children’s lives?   

Here’s the thing. More children are dying of the lockdown than of the virus. Two poor mites succumbed to sepsis after their parents were too frightened to take them to hospital. At least two youngsters have been murdered behind closed doors by a parent. Horrifying. This may come as a shock to the Volvoists, but not everyone is playing Happy Families and baking sourdough.

Next time you hear Mary Bousted, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, whining that, “If you have 15 four- or five-year-olds in the class it’s impossible to social distance” ask her how many Victoria Climbies she thinks there are, bruised and cowering in some flat, praying for school to reopen and spring them from their abusers?   

Bousted does not speak for all teachers. Far from it. Many have been absolutely brilliant, dedicated professionals who continued to teach the children of key workers for the past eight weeks. Here’s a puzzle for you: if it’s OK for teachers to already be working with the kids of NHS staff, who are most likely to be infected with Covid, how can it be a problem teaching the rest. Answer: it really isn’t.

So why is the Government allowing the teaching unions to shamelessly play the Fear Card and insist on psychologically disturbing social-distancing measures for small children when there is no scientific basis for any of it? Because the Government has played the Fear Card itself and is now a prisoner of its own propaganda.

At least one group of parents is so shocked and upset that they are refusing to allow their little ones to be enrolled in this dystopian nightmare. Us For Them is a national campaign to raise awareness of the fact that Covid-compliant measures in schools have taken no account of children’s welfare and are “damaging and disproportionate”. 

Gavin Williamson should channel this anger and tell the unions that all the odd years in primary school – Reception, 1,3 and 5 – are starting lessons on June 1st. If they want their members to wear PPE and look ridiculous then he’s happy to oblige. It would deprive the recalcitrant buggers of their excuse for not going back. I bet every school would ditch it as unworkable within a week. They’d only need a week of it before they realises they were getting dressed for Ebola when facing Crayola. Return to school should be voluntary for children; I'm sure any doubts will be overcome once they know their friends are having fun. 

That photo of French children in their isolated chalk squares didn’t just look chilling. It is chilling. Not only is it impossible to get mixed infants to observe social distancing measures, it is  unnatural, unnecessary and unconscionable. If adult paranoia is allowed to punish children, to stop them from being children, in the name of protecting them from a virus that can’t harm them what does that say about our society?

Mad. That’s it. Covid has unhinged us. We’ve gone stark staring mad.

Read Allison Pearson at telegraph.co.uk every Tuesday, from 7pm

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