Much has been made of the impact of the pandemic on children and how this has played out in schools, such as ongoing attendance issues and a notable rise in suspensions across year groups.
This has chiefly been analysed through a lens of how the pandemic directly affected children, such as by harming wellbeing, reducing opportunities for socialisation or increasing social and emotional mental health (SEMH) issues.
However, a recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies reveals another perhaps overlooked issue that schools should bear in mind: how the negative impact of furlough and redundancy - real or feared - faced by many parents during Covid transferred directly to their children.
Pupil behaviour and parents’ Covid job worries
For example, the report notes a clear (9 per cent) worsening in “socio-emotional development” for children with parents who had with significant uncertainty in their jobs during Covid. And that impact of job disruption was the same whether parents were in low- or high-paid jobs.
On a very practical level, families losing income during Covid would have resulted in a fall in the expected quality of their lives; from no foreign holiday for some families through to relying on food banks for others, with a noticeable negative impact on the lives of children.
By contrast, children with parents who kept their job and were not furloughed had far better scores for socio-emotional development.
There are also two significant details within the data of the report that are important for schools to note.
The first of these is the clear positive impact of special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) support for students in schools. This is a particularly important point given that school budgets are under increasing pressure.
Despite the often great social needs of students with SEND, only around 37 per cent of children with SEND support saw worsening socio-emotional skills during Covid, while the figure was around 52 per cent for children who did not have SEND support.
It is probable that this difference stems from the larger numbers of students with SEND who were able to come into school during Covid, giving them a more normal school experience throughout the lockdowns.
More broadly, though, it also shows how important, and effective, the right SEND support is for pupils.
The impact of unauthorised absence
The second detail that is very clear, if not surprising, is the strongly negative impact of unauthorised absence from school.
On average, around 43 per cent of children who had no unauthorised absence had worsening socio-emotional skills during Covid, while that number increased to around 53 per cent for children who had any unauthorised absence.
This is yet another powerful indicator of the impact of good school attendance. It was certainly something that had an influence during Covid, just as it continues to do now.
The clear message for schools is that it is more important than ever that they understand the family context of their children. Schools should to talk to families about whether they did experience difficulties from furlough or redundancy.
Often families can be reluctant to discuss difficulties that they have had with their school. However, armed with the information in this report, school leaders could share these findings with their parent body and suggest that parents would benefit from letting the school know if they did have difficulties with redundancy or furlough during Covid (or, indeed, after).
Knowing that their school will use this knowledge to channel support to a group of students that might not have been a focus in the past would hopefully encourage parents to participate.
It is also probable that class teachers do already know a lot of this information, having got it from the children directly, but they might not have thought this was important information to add on to a pupil’s pastoral file.
Family knowledge helps support
With increasing concerns about mental health and behaviour across the country, an extra piece of information like this that can help schools to understand particular students is invaluable.
Far from feeling that they should be returning to “no nonsense” discipline in the face of growing concerns about pupils, schools should be taking on board the lessons from this and other reports.
All the evidence from this report, and others, shows that the more schools know about - and empathise with - children’s and families’ experiences of Covid, the better they can support children and their families to get the very best possible outcomes.
Luke Ramsden is deputy head of an independent senior school and chair of trustees of the Schools Consent Project
