Covid is back on the agenda following the opening of the inquiry into the UK’s response to the pandemic.
While rows over access to government WhatsApp messages and Partygate are about the events of two or three years ago, in many ways Covid has not gone away.
As so many of those working with children will tell you - and as Professor Dame Sally Davies, the country’s former top doctor, said in her evidence to the Inquiry - its aftershocks still shape the lives of many children, families, schools and teaching staff.
The Covid effect on school attendance
Recently, I visited a school that, like so many, was trying to boost its attendance.
The headteacher told me that since Covid almost one in three pupils have been severely absent, and said that this was causing serious safeguarding issues, as well as huge damage to their education and life chances.
Some of these children were growing up in difficult circumstances before the pandemic but home had become even more chaotic over the past three years.
Since 2020 teachers, youth practitioners and other professionals have told me again and again how problems in secondary schools have become more serious and frequent, particularly around behaviour, attendance, mental health and wellbeing, and vulnerability to violence and exploitation.
Primary school leaders have told me about the challenges facing some of those toddlers and preschool children who came straight into school not potty-trained, struggling to regulate their behaviour, and missing vital social skills.
What chance do some of these six-year-olds have to progress with their education when so much time needs to be spent just trying to manage developmental problems?
Appreciating the scale of the problems
I know that many of those working in schools feel worried, frustrated, angry and sometimes quite broken by this situation, particularly on top of 10 years of austerity and pay freezes.
Yet I don’t get the sense that ministers understand the sheer extent of these challenges, or the enormous problems that are being stored up for the future.
Do they appreciate that many schools have become a secondary branch of children’s social services, that we have schools with food banks, washing machines, and that the goodwill of staff cannot be stretched indefinitely?
I worry that some in government are treating these problems as if they are now a normal part of every education system, rather than crises that need urgent solutions.
Schools and teachers will go that extra mile for their students, but they need an education system that supports them to teach, rather than one that expects them to pick up the pieces of the broken special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), care and mental health systems, or to be the last line of defence against poverty.
The chance to build a joined-up support system
As always, it is about choices.
A government can choose to invest in its schools’ workforce and to widen it to include mental health support teams in every school, education psychologists and youth workers to help those that are struggling and to divert vulnerable children away from potential harms.
It can choose to recognise that there needs to be a strategy to reduce poverty.
It can use the light the pandemic has shone on many generational problems to rethink what we want from our education system, and to build a wider joined-up support system in and around schools.
Politicians should be using recent experiences to work out how to expand pastoral support and inclusivity, recognising that this is not an add-on but an essential tool that can enable more children to succeed, and a driver of high standards and achievement.
Yes, money would be needed - and schools cannot continue to be asked to do more without significant extra resources - but it would be nothing compared with how much we would save in the longer term.
The alternative is to carry on as we are, give up on ever improving social mobility, and accept the serious dent on life chances and the economic decline that this would bring.
Three years on from the first lockdown, the persistent problems holding children back show no sign of solving themselves, and many of them are becoming worse.
We don’t need to wait for an inquiry to tell us that.
Anne Longfield CBE is chair of the Commission on Young Lives and the former children’s commissioner for England
