At a university reunion recently, my friends and I cornered the dean of pastoral care and tried to get him to tell us how much cooler we were than the students these days. We had heard that they didn’t have sex, didn’t do drugs, never went out, spent all day in the library and all night applying for internships at accounting firms. It must have been so hard for us to control ourselves, we said in a smug, smug way. Life must be easier for him now.
“Actually, you were all very cute,” he said crushingly. The real challenge was the new crop of the early years. In fact, they were more difficult to manage than any other group he had come across before; it started with terrible bullying and got worse from there. The trouble was, he said, they were immature: he should have treated them more like 16-year-olds than the 18- and 19-year-olds they were.
And the reason was obvious. They had missed a key stage of development – the burst of maturity that comes in the sixth form. Instead of socializing with their peers, they were often confined at home.
Parents spoke heartbreakingly of having to tell young children to stay away from others and not to hug their friends
Exactly what damage has two years of intermittent blocking done to the youth? We still don’t have the full picture, but increasingly anecdotally (a lecturer friend tells me his third years are less confident and less academically advanced than previous years) we can now add data. Sats results are one of the most reliable indicators of how a group is doing and a startling statistic came out on Tuesday. The proportion of 11-year-olds achieving the expected standards in reading, writing and maths in England has fallen to 59% in 2022, compared to 65% in 2019. This is a big drop.
Then there are many young ones. During the pandemic, parents spoke heartbreakingly of having to tell young children to stay away from others and not to hug their friends. In May, research published by the Education Endowment Foundation claimed that the lockdown had hit the youngest children in England worst of all. Four- and five-year-olds started school far behind, biting and hitting, crowded around large groups of other children and unable to settle and learn.
Maybe it was necessary, but we have to admit it. From 2020 to 2021, we conducted a mass experiment on the young. There is perhaps only one point of comparison in recent history: the evacuation of World War II. But this is the reverse experiment. In 1939, the children were sent away by their parents. For the past two years they have been locked up with them.
Colin Blakemore died last week. The renowned neurobiologist is particularly remembered for his work on the importance of “critical periods” in development. If a child has poor vision during a critical period after birth, he found that the brain will never develop the ability to see properly, even if the eye problems are then corrected. This theme resonates in developmental science. The younger you are, the more important what happens to you.
When former evacuees were 60-70 years old, there was a study on their mental health. Those who were the youngest when they were sent (aged four to six, for example) suffered the worst. Will today’s four- to six-year-olds have problems when they are 70? We need to increase the likelihood that they will.
In the 1990s, scientists at the University of Wisconsin did some interesting experiments on baby monkeys. One group was separated from their mothers at birth and raised for five months in a “nursery” with other baby monkeys. (Perhaps we could call this the “evacuee” group.) The other group had to stay with their mothers, but each mother-baby pair was isolated. This “blocked” group saw no other monkeys for five months.
At the end of the period, the researchers found something interesting (although the study was perhaps too small to be conclusive). The evacuated motherless baby monkeys fared no worse than the caged ones who only had access to their mothers. They had similar behavioral problems. Evacuated monkeys were hyperactive, but caged monkeys were extremely clingy and had delayed social development.
The lockdown had all the aesthetics of the fictional dystopias of big nations—empty town squares, mass testing centers, bureaucracy on park benches
Strangely, the national conversation seems to have largely shifted away from concern about the effects of lockdown on the young. Maybe we don’t want to think about it. At the height of the pandemic, it was a national talking point.
It is rarely mentioned now, despite the apparent lack of government action on the matter. Last month, England’s education recovery commissioner resigned due to a lack of “reliable” catch-up funding. The think tank has calculated that the government’s latest budget commitment means we will spend £310 on each child in school, compared to £1,600 in America and £2,500 in the Netherlands.
Or maybe we forgot. Lockdown Britain had all the aesthetics of fictional big-nation dystopias – the empty town squares, the mass testing centres, the tapes around park benches, the twitching curtains of neighbors who would relish the chance to report you to the police. It was easy to see then that something bad and lasting could happen to all of us. But the otherworldly, futuristic atmosphere disappeared when the infections cleared up – and life almost returned to normal.
But we must remember what we did. Keeping a generation of children away from their classrooms and friends felt unnatural and harmful because it was unnatural and harmful. We should at least collect a lot more data on the matter than we seem to be doing. We ended up doing the experiment. Now we have to deal with the results.
Martha Gill is a political journalist and former lobbying correspondent
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