The Covid Inquiry is Determined to Repeat School Closures

Watching Gavin Williamson and Boris Johnson squirming in front of the Covid Inquiry this week, I couldn’t help but feel an unexpected dose of sympathy. For two gruelling and intensely infuriating days, they were grilled and at times attacked, delinquent school boys summoned back to the headteacher’s office for an exam style interrogation, the outcome of which had already been decided against them.

In what was the key week for Module 8, Williamson was called last Thursday, followed by Chris Whitty on Monday and then Johnson on Tuesday.  As it happened, the hearings were of interest less for the salacious titbits emerging from witness testimony (that Johnson was left in a “homicidal” mood following the exams fiasco, that Williamson, poor chap, felt “completely fucked over by decisions on January 4th that I took the shit and abuse for”), and more for what the hearings said of the mindset of those overseeing the inquiry. 

Whilst we barely needed a three-year long, quarter of a billion pound public inquiry to tell us that lockdown rules were a bit strict (Whitty) or that children paid a disproportionate price for the pandemic (Johnson), this module, like those that came before it, has been eye-opening in revealing an inquiry intent on proving its own predetermined view: that the pandemic response of blanket lockdowns and prolonged school closures was the right one, albeit exercised too little and too late.

I doubt anyone has been a harsher critic of Boris Johnson and Gavin Williamson’s pandemic performance than I have. UsForThem was formed at the very start of the pandemic in response to the first school closures, and for the first six months of its life, the raison d’être of the campaign was to fight for school reopenings. Of the tens – perhaps hundreds – of letters we penned to Sir Gavin (at that point plain old Gav the Education Secretary), I doubt there was a sympathetic word to be found. And you can see why – five years later the litany of harms flowing from what many of us considered to be the most egregious policy of the pandemic is beyond doubt – the fatal safeguarding failures, the apparently permanent degradation of engagement with the school system, the lost learning, the mental health harms, the kick-starting of an institutional shift to device-based learning – the damning list goes on.

Indeed, so profound, so manifest, so desperate have been the many harms visited on our children by school closures that five years on it is well nigh impossible to find anyone who will publicly support the mass school closures policy. That argument, so we thought, had been won, with policymakers and commentators from both the Left and Right largely united in their view that school closures were an unmitigated disaster, to be avoided in all but the most exceptional of circumstances. Hence it came to be that in the same two week period, Conservative peer Lord Young proposed an admirable amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill which would oblige officials to seek recurring Parliamentary approvals for any mass school closure, while the lockdown fanatical Guardian ran a piece headlined ‘Covid school closures in UK damaged “very fabric of childhood”‘.

But then, snatching defeat from the jaws of a bittersweet victory, enter Baroness Hallett and her Covid Inquiry. Not for this Inquiry the heretical view that school closures were a disaster never to be repeated. Instead, both Williamson and Johnson were scolded for what the inquiry plainly considers to be their reckless efforts not, you will understand, to close schools, but to keep them open.

A clue as to the inquiry’s stance had been dropped in the opening remarks to the module a fortnight ago, with the KC for Module 8, Clair Dobbin, keen to stress that school closures and lockdowns, though enormously damaging, “might nonetheless be needed in the future”. And in that vein Module 8 progressed, with both Williamson and Johnson subjected to a sustained barrage for their failure to more thoroughly plan for school closures that almost everyone (save, it seems, the inquiry team) now agrees – and had agreed in all previous pandemic planning manuals – were to be avoided at almost all costs.

First to break under that barrage was Williamson, vacillating between holding the line that the second round of school closures in 2021 was a grave mistake, while also apologising for his single-minded attempts to keep schools open in 2020.  “We made the error of sticking with the pandemic plan… we were probably overly focused on the mission to keep schools open. … Do I wish we had done it differently? Yes, I very much do.” Johnson at least did us all the favour for once of both finding and then sticking to his principles, refusing to grovel for having made a bad decision for which he appeared to show a genuine degree of contrition. The failure to make early plans for closing schools was, in his view, “entirely understandable given the immensity of the decision and the detriments it was likely to have”.

That both men tried to blame each other – Williamson saying he was “clearly steered towards” efforts to keep schools open only for Boris to say that he thought Gav had it in hand – “I assumed the work was being done” – was both predictable and ultimately irrelevant. For the real point here is that a clear picture emerged from the evidence: that both the Prime Minister and his education secretary – the two most senior elected individuals in the land when it came to safeguarding the welfare of the 10 million pupils in the UK education system – realised that school closures would be disastrous and that both had initially, at least, keenly resisted the possibility. “The eventuality of school closures was one we regarded with horror,” rued Johnson.

In this context the question that the inquiry might have set itself to answer was how it came to be that these two came to be overruled, especially given their instincts were buttressed by the forthright views not only of the Children’s Commissioner at the time, Anne Longfield, but of the then Chair of the Education Select Committee, Robert Halfon, both of whom were unrelenting in their advocacy that schools reopen, then stay open. How was it that a club of unelected, fear-encrusted scientists came to override the better instincts of our elected office holders? Why did SAGE and its body of ‘experts’ (experts who incidentally didn’t include a single child psychologist until well after schools had been closed) get such a disproportionate say? Most of all, how do we avoid making the same catastrophic mistakes next time around?

Previous testimony to the inquiry from the likes of Lord Gus O’Donnell and Professor Mark Woolhouse have highlighted how the pandemic response was undergirded by a myopic focus on epidemiological factors (in particular transmission) which, however important, were only ever one part of an equation which should have looked to balance the cost of wider societal impacts. So there was a regrettable irony in seeing the inquiry bed in these very same failings, five years after the start of the pandemic, still tunnel-focused on how the immediate near-term threat of viral spread could be mitigated, and the conduct and advice of the scientific experts again lauded as essentially unimpeachable. “So you accept that there’s no issue with the scientific advice that was being given; the issue is how that advice was taken by government ministers like you?” ran one particularly pointed question to Williamson.

As ever with this dismal inquiry, inconvenient facts and narratives are simply disregarded: the fact that it was known to ministers and officials that any school closures would need to be prolonged (and so by necessity hugely damaging) to have any ‘impact’ on transmission; the fact that SAGE’s own papers had concluded by December 2020 that transmission in schools (when open) was no greater than transmission anywhere else in society (so that school closures were doing nothing meaningful to bring down transmission rates); the fact that from the very earliest stages the deeply age-stratified nature of the virus was known to ministers and officials, as was the significant variability of risk in terms of comorbidity factors.

Likewise, we saw no serious effort this week to engage with the the rash of safeguarding flags that appeared from April 2020, including a spike in calls to ChildLine and warnings from child protection charities and MPs of a sudden rise in child neglect and abuse; or the rash of abusive head trauma cases involving children reported by Great Ormond Street Hospital. Williamson’s own department had confirmed in April 2020 that 94% of vulnerable children were no longer being seen in school, at least one of whom (Arthur Labingo-Hughes) was then murdered by his abusive parents in June 2020, but this was not mentioned. Likewise unmentioned was the effective withdrawal of support for most special educational needs and disabled (SEND) pupils when the statutory duties intended to protect their interests were suspended alongside school closures. Williamson was not asked to talk about the November 2020 paper produced jointly by SPi-B (a SAGE subcommittee) and his own department which had recorded a litany of harms flowing from the first closure of schools, including negative educational outcomes (naturally), inequalities, plummeting attainment, health impairments, developmental impacts, routine childhood vaccinations being missed, increased exposure to harmful online content, and on it goes.

This is serious stuff. Not only does the myopia of the inquiry’s focus amount to an Orwellian rewriting, indeed, rewiring of history, but it is a desperately, and desperately expensive, missed opportunity to learn lessons which might prevent a similar array of harm next time around. At one point, Williamson justified his department’s failure to plan for the possibility that schools might close as follows:

The difficulty we were going to have was that if we didn’t have the clarity and the determination that schools were going to go back… there would have been some schools and some actors that would have tried to use that as a reason not to allow schools to go back. Because whilst you would like to think that every single person that was involved in this wanted to see children back in school, that, frankly, just wasn’t the case.

He elaborates, “you did have some actors – you took the NEU, for example, they quite simply opposed teaching in school and they opposed teaching remotely as well”.

This is revealing testimony, which should have fostered discussion about how union views could, in future, be balanced by input from other groups – parents or politicians, say – focused on children’s interests. Yet where there should have been serious interrogation and investigation, the inquiry simply moved on, one example of any number of similar missed opportunities.

School closures amounted to one of the greatest safeguarding failures of modern times, perhaps the greatest failure if one considers the sheer number of children impacted. Instead of asking the dumb logic question of how we could better prepare to shut schools next time around, the exam question many of us hoped the inquiry would strive to answer was summed up rather neatly by Johnson:

Given the loss of life chances that school closures have caused, we have to ask ourselves whether we could have found other ways of reducing the risk of Covid.  Was there a way we could have done it without school closures?

Tragically, it seems we shall never know, at least if this benighted inquiry has anything to do with it.

Molly Kingsley is a founder of children’s rights campaign group UsForThem.

Stop Press: Watch Toby proposing an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to make it more difficult for schools to be closed in future emergencies.