Contribution
My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 207 to create a duty to keep schools open for attendance. The speeches that have been made excellently explained why.
I arrived in this House during lockdown, and I was shocked—genuinely, to the core—by the ease with which people in this House on all sides clamoured to close down schools. It was an extraordinary thing to witness. I could not justify it at the time and argued against it. That argument—which was a minority argument, not just put forward by me—was treated as though somehow those of us who were worried about schools closing were the irresponsible ones; whereas I think it was the other way round. I genuinely think that many of the issues that the Bill is trying to tackle—many of the real problems and challenges that we face with young people today—were created, exacerbated and turbocharged as problems during that period. Schools were closed down, which meant that adults broke the social contract with children—not for their sake but ours—and it was against all the evidence. I am very keen to hear the Minister’s response to this, even if it is not tested in a Division of the House, as I think that this will be a huge, important lesson for us to learn.
I will note a few of the problems that have already been raised. We have a mental health crisis, which we talk about regularly—as we will later and have been throughout the Bill—as though it came out of nowhere, but there is serious reason to imagine that young people’s mental health suffered during that period. But we are also talking about behaviour. A lot of teachers will tell you that once that social contract was breached, it created discipline problems because pupils were no longer in class. We have increasing numbers of parents withdrawing their children from mainstream schools. The habit of going to school was broken. We have spent a huge amount of time in this Bill talking about home-schooling, which is going up, and that is partly because schools were no longer considered necessary. I said then that if you tell pupils that truancy is okay in certain circumstances, it will be hard to get back to normal. If you say, “You shouldn’t come into school”, it will be hard to say, “You must come into school”.
Certainly, as a teacher, I lectured young people—many a time—saying, “There is nothing more important than going to school. There is nothing, nothing, nothing more important than your education”, and then suddenly as a society we said, “Oh, there are lots of things that are more important than going to school or your education”, so they learned a very bad lesson.
We will come on to talk about the problems with smartphones. What did we do when we sent all those young people home? First of all, we told them to look at screens to get lessons—a lot of the time we did not bother even supplying the lessons on the screens—and what they did was spend a lot of time on their phones. They were not out socialising. They became desocialised —anti-social.
The final reason why we have to remember that this is so important is that a cohort of young citizens was told, “If there is a problem, you stay at home, you withdraw”. I think that if we say to young people, “If you feel ill, you aren’t up to coping with going out and being part of society”, we are creating a medicalised fragility and an acceptance of illness as a reason to withdraw that have led to massive social problems. We are now paying for that with a huge welfare bill. Many young adults now lack the resilience to become economically active.
The cost of what we did was enormous and we are yet to come to terms with it. The Bill is trying to deal with a lot of the problems created by that period, and this amendment is therefore important in raising the possibility that we should not, as a default, close schools. The default should be that we do not, that we owe it to children to have their education and that schools are kept open for attendance. There has to be an extremely good reason why schools are closed, and that should be thought through deeply. As someone who was here when we were deciding, let me assure noble Lords that it was not.