You learn a lot about people when they’re hit with a crisis. Two years ago this week, the Covid-19 virus led to the scaffolds that sit around British society being dismantled in an effort to prevent the country from experiencing the devastation already seen in parts of China and then Italy.

As part of this, on 23 March 2020, school gates remained closed indefinitely other than to the children of keyworkers and the vulnerable. And headteachers suddenly found themselves responsible not just for educating millions of children at home but, in many cases, keeping them fed and safe, too.

The response was incredibly impressive. At the school in North London where I’m a governor, the staff had a food bank running within days and a scheme was set up to get people to donate old computers to pupils. Similar stories were replicated across the country, with teachers and schools going above and beyond to support their communities.

Despite what you might read in some newspapers, teachers were already one of the most trusted professions in the country and the vast majority of parents tell pollsters they’re happy with their children’s schools. All of this, then, was only strengthened by the role that schools played during the pandemic.

But you also learn a lot about systems during a crisis. And while individual teachers and leaders went to great lengths to support pupils, they were repeatedly let down by a system that failed to provide clear direction and adequate support, both for schools and families.

Specifically, there were two distinct types of system failure that often intertwined to painful effects. The first was structural: the confusing and badly designed school system made it much harder than in other countries to coordinate and deliver an effective response.

The second was an inbuilt lack of resilience owing to a decade of underfunding, not just for schools but for the wider social policy infrastructure and for individual families because of a fraying welfare safety net.

These failures tell us a lot about the wider problems with our education system, and the welfare state, that will endure well beyond the pandemic itself.

Structural failures during the pandemic

The most visible indication of structural failure for schools was the clumsy and frustrating communication from the centre of government.

For example, by the end of May 2020, schools had already received 148 separate new guidance documents issued to them by the Department for Education - an average of almost two per day since the lockdown announcement.

This would have been hard enough for schools to manage, but it was compounded by the confusion caused by a lack of coordination between No 10 and the DfE.

For example, May 2020 also saw the prime minister announce that he wanted all primary-school children to be back in school over the summer, which was entirely different to what stakeholders had been discussing with the DfE at that point.

This made it much harder for organisations such as the headteachers’ unions, which had been working on plans, to trust the government.

Similarly, on the morning of 4 January 2021, the DfE was entirely unaware that the prime minister was going to announce, that evening, the cancellation of exams for the second year in a row. It meant that it had no plan B ready until weeks later - again, causing distrust and frustration within the education sector.

Indeed, the complete mess made of replacing A levels and GCSEs in both 2020 and 2021 was, in part, caused by internal confusion compounded by a failure to work with schools.

For instance, Ofqual could have checked teacher-assessed results against an algorithm in an iterative way. By doing this, it could have picked up the obvious errors that led the proposed grading system to fall apart in 2020. But it did not - and ended up having to scrap the whole system.

All of the issues caused by the government served to highlight the inherent problems with the highly centralised nature of the English schools system and the fact that, throughout the pandemic, the DfE tried to run much of its response directly - and, in doing so, ignored local knowledge.

The most egregious example was when the government threatened to sue Greenwich council for attempting to close schools just before Christmas 2020, and then went on to close them itself on the first day after the holidays (after inexplicably encouraging kids and teachers to mix for one day).

But this determination to run everything centrally caused problems throughout.

For example, the DfE could have decided to fund the provision of food to children on benefits during lockdown via local authorities. Instead, it tried to set up a national voucher scheme that initially collapsed when the chosen provider, Edenred, found that its IT systems were unable to cope with demand.

Similarly, the DfE chose to procure and distribute additional laptops nationally rather than consider local solutions; the initial attempts at procurement were described to me by one civil servant involved as an “astonishing shambles”.    

This wider lack of clarity over the purpose of the local authority is a bigger problem - one that the upcoming schools White Paper is expected to acknowledge.

As more and more schools have become academies, local authorities have struggled to coordinate between schools on issues that require local cooperation, such as exclusions and place planning.

They have also found it even more difficult than before to integrate other children’s services with schools.

The pandemic showed the importance of this integration, with many additional students requiring child protection plans and social services support as a result of lockdowns.

Fragility in the system

The failures caused by structural reform are, then, resolvable if the government makes the right policy decisions and the DfE accepts it can’t do everything itself.

The other profound system failures, though, are much harder to resolve because it requires significant investment in multiple areas where the state has become far too fragile.

In the years leading up to the pandemic, benefits had been frozen and capped. This had particularly hit families in London and other cities where housing is expensive.

So even before Covid-19 hit, 11 per cent (1.4 million) of children under the age of 16 were living in households that did not have enough food. And 8 million people were living in inadequate housing, including 3.6 million in overcrowded accommodation. Leaving so many people on the edge of destitution meant that any crisis would quickly push them over the edge.

The additional pressures caused by the pandemic, then, with people losing casual work, and being forced to feed family members for every meal, caused serious challenges, even with a £20-a-week uplift to universal credit (which has now ended). 

In turn, this put immense pressure on schools to provide additional support - as the need for food and laptop programmes that schools scrambled to provide underlined.

It is, again, illustrative of a wider shift over the past few years whereby schools have had to absorb pressures caused by wider cuts, not only in benefits but also in budgets councils used to support low-income families.

Schools have, in effect, become the provider of last resort when other parts of the state fail, and it costs a lot of staff time and money. 

For a long time now, there has been an increasingly frustrating debate between those who argue schools can, by themselves, offer a route out of poverty by providing an excellent education, and others who argue schools can do little in the face of challenges faced by struggling families.

In reality, of course, both positions contain some truth.

Poverty doesn’t prevent a great education, especially if you have an engaged family and lots of structured support in the school. But it does act as a huge barrier.

How could it not? It is much easier to learn when you have your own space, your own computer, are well-nourished and you are not having to deal with the deep stresses that a lack of money puts on families.

The government recently set a “mission” for 90 per cent of pupils to reach the expected level in reading, writing and maths at the end of key stage 2.

It would be an exceptionally ambitious target at the best of times, given the current rate is 65 per cent, but it is manifestly impossible to achieve while its welfare policies continue to push more and more children into poverty (now significantly exacerbated by the cost of living crisis).

Apart from the direct pressure it puts on families, it sucks up ever more time and resources from schools as they deal with the consequences. As one head put it to me: “Ofsted wants me to worry about the fine details of the curriculum but I’m spending half my time working with social services.”

We have also seen related problems with support for children with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND) and mental health issues, though this is more because of rapidly increasing demand than cuts.

The costs of education, health and care plans (EHCPs) has been increasing by 10 per cent year on year, putting more pressure on schools, while the growth in demand for mental health services has been even more dramatic.

In 2019-20, over half a million children were referred to CAMHS, an increase of 60 per cent since 2017-18. Then the pandemic caused another surge. By June last year, there were 51 per cent more children in contact with CAMHS than before Covid.

It seems reasonable to assume the pandemic-related increase was owing to the pressure of lockdowns, which left young people without the structure of school or the companionship of their friends.

The return to school has alleviated this, but some will be left with a longer-term need for support that cannot be met because the system was already under so much strain.

All told, it’s clear the pandemic has highlighted a need for much more concerted efforts from the government to tackle both cause and effect because, at the moment, it is another pressure on school leaders and teachers that takes time away from education.

Persistent absenteeism from pupils has also worsened because of lockdowns. The latest figures from the 10 February showed 10 per cent of pupils still missing from schools.

The government is rightly concerned about this, recently launching a consultation to encourage more liaison between schools and local authorities and a more hands-on approach to getting pupils back to school.

This, again, shows the structural problems caused by the lack of a clear local authority role, which has meant the government doesn’t always have the necessary information from schools to act.

Recovery or reboot?

While worse variants are possible in the future, for now, it seems that Covid will shift into a seasonal endemic illness that we can, hopefully, control with better vaccines and antivirals. 

We are now properly into a recovery phase. But the problems that dogged the government’s response to the pandemic itself are making that recovery much harder than it needs to be.

The government’s “recovery plan” has always been underpowered, after the Treasury nixed Sir Kevan Collins’ plans for a £15 billion investment in the system.

What’s more, the one promising offer - a National Tutoring Programme - has also fallen apart after yet another DfE procurement mess, where it chose a lowball bid for a commercial provider who has entirely, and predictably, failed to deliver.

I’ve written before about the numerous failings of procurement processes that this situation revealed. This is a problem at the best of times, but when it concerns a scheme designed to help try to mitigate two years of lost education, it seems a scandal that this was allowed to occur.

What’s more, the NTP situation also shows the problem of trying to centralise the delivery of programmes, because of a lack of trusted regional or local delivery mechanisms.  

There is a logic to coordinating the recruitment and training of tutors, rather than having individual schools do it, but trying to do it through a single national contract to a commercial provider with no real experience was always going to end in disaster.

On top of all this, the removal of the £20 universal credit uplift, combined with an inadequate response to the impact of inflation on struggling families, is putting yet more pressure on the school system to manage the fallout.

We saw two years ago that schools can step up and do remarkable things when required, while still doing the day job that is expected of them.

But until the DfE accepts that it cannot do everything itself and that it needs to devolve authority across the system, and until the Treasury accepts that deliberately increasing poverty is undermining public service reform, it’s hard to see how things will improve.

The lessons of the pandemic are there for all to see but there is no sign yet that they’re being acted on.  

Sam Freedman is a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education and a senior fellow at the Institute of Government