When Will the Apology Come to Children?

Metal cages were used in the tarmacked playground to kettle the children in their bubbles during break and lunchtime. The field was off limits. Some of the students went berserk in their containment and invented a new playground trend: attacking children with crocodile clips. My then 13-old nephew was stabbed in the neck. Fun times from the ‘Stay Safe’ brigade.

When the Guardian revealed this week that NHS referrals for anxiety in children are more than double pre-Covid levels to 500 a day, I remembered the thundering injustice of lockdown policies on children and felt that white-hot rage all over again. Lockdown, now three to four years ago, can’t take all the flack for what’s happening to the mental health of our children but it bears the lion’s share of responsibility, for the simple reason that it presented other people and the outside as dangerous. For the anxious, this mindset is a catastrophe.

I know this to be true because I work with school refusers and those who have been expelled, with a view to encouraging them back into educational settings. We focus on simply getting outside, ordering food in cafes, learning how to cross the road, understanding that the world is not to be feared, before attempting academic work. The stories these wonderful children tell are familiar: primary school went well but lockdown happened and when they returned to secondary school, they couldn’t cope: “I hated the crowds”, “I threw chairs around”, “I thought I was going to get sick”.

When two of my children returned to their state secondary after lockdown it was like a zoo. The teachers had lost control of the children and the children were not keen on reverting to compulsory rather than optional education. And when stabbings with crocodile clips, unruly behaviour and dystopian queues for nasal swabbing and face mask wearing were thrown into the mix, it’s no wonder that some children marched straight back home to the safety of their bedrooms.

We keep forgetting about the fact that there is a ‘persistent absence’ rate of 20% from schools; before lockdown it was 13%. It’s easy to remain unmoved by statistics, but not when the individual cases are known.

I asked my sons for a quick rundown of their most badly affected friends:

• The girl who wore her black face mask right up to the bridge of her nose, grew her black fringe below her nose so her face was entirely covered. She changed her name to Keith and when eventually she took off the mask, a tic had developed.
• The girl who developed agoraphobia and has just ‘disappeared.’
• The girl who made herself tutor-hand-sanitiser-monitor and whenever someone, usually a boy, splashed it around, she’d run screaming and hide under her desk shouting “Germs!” Her tears of fear were genuine.
• The boy who spent lockdown gaming, attempted to return to school where everyone noticed he’d got enormously fat, retreated to his house and has rarely been seen since.

When I hear Dominic Cummings on the Chris Williamson podcast talking so insouciantly and confidently about lockdown policy and how his actions saved thousands of lives, I am stunned. Surely he must now know this is not true. Computer models are not real life. I wish he could meet some of the children I work with. I wish he could sit in on these NHS referrals for anxiety and understand the downstream effects of his rotten decisions. Now that Mark Zuckerburg has apologised for enforcing White House demanded Covid censorship, maybe people like Cummings will apologise for contributing to the deep and ongoing damage to children.

Incidentally, my crocodile-clip-stabbed nephew received nine grade 9s in his GCSEs this summer.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.