Aftershock: Education

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2021

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Aftershock is an occasional podcast series by award-winning journalist Isabel Hardman. In every episode she asks how we can fix the damage caused by the pandemic to a different part of British society.

In this episode, Isabel looks at how schoolchildren have been affected by 18 months of lockdowns and remote schooling. Some have been hit harder than others: in fact, there are now more children missing from school rolls than at the start of the pandemic. Where have these ‘ghost children’ gone? And does the government’s response come anywhere close to being enough to stop Covid from being a blight on the rest of their lives, rather than an episode most can easily recover from?

Featuring: James Scales, head of the Education Policy Unit at the Centre for Social Justice; two young people from the Leicestershire Cares charity; Jan Appleton, who is the director of the Eagle’s Nest Project; Lord Blunkett who was education secretary in the Blair government, Rachel de Souza, the children's commissioner for England, and Robert Halfon, the chair of the education select committee.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Aftershock, a new series of podcasts from The Spectator on Life After the Pandemic, with me, Isabel Hardman.
0:08.3	In each episode, we will look at a different issue, from the NHS to schools, mental health, and how our towns are changing now more people are working remotely.
0:17.6	I'm going to speak to experts, people on the front line and those most affected by the issues covered.
0:24.0	And we'll try to come up with some solutions to the damage wrought by COVID.
0:28.3	I do hope you enjoy listening. The school's back, and there's a new English education secretary settling into the job.
1:01.1	And now it's my turn, my turn, to make sure that the opportunities that transform my life
1:07.9	are available to every child in every corner of our great country.
1:11.6	He's got plenty to grapple with.
1:13.6	British school children have had 18 months of disruption to their education,
1:17.6	with classrooms only just starting to return to normal now.
1:21.6	No exams, little contact with friends, and fewer chances for teachers to spot pastoral problems.
1:28.9	This pandemic has had a profound effect on many children.
1:33.5	I'm Isabel Hardman and in this podcast I'll be asking how children have been affected by months of homeschooling,
1:40.4	bubbles and repeated self-isolation. And what happens now?
1:46.9	It's been a strange few months for young people.
1:49.9	Hello, good morning.
1:51.7	My name is Darya Branescu.
1:53.3	I am a year-tun student.
1:55.1	I'm Kane Gent. I'm in year 11.
1:57.4	It was hard when we didn't have our teachers with us, we didn't have online lessons,
2:03.6	nothing was really planned. To be honest I actually preferred it, not being in the class,
2:08.6	because I can just concentrate on myself. I think it's good that it happened because
	...

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