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Find out more at charles-hyphenly.com.uk. Hello and welcome to the edition, the Spectator's weekly podcast discussing some of the most important and intriguing issues within our pages, with the writers behind them. I'm Cindy Yu.

It's now midway through June and schools haven't been open for almost

three months. We take a look in this podcast at the lasting impact on the education gap between

the pupils during this time. We also have a look at whether or not there's more calls for optimism

in the Brexit negotiations. And finally, are the statue toplers that we've seen of recent weeks going about their mission the wrong way?

First up, Lucy Kellerway left the FT to become a teacher a few years ago,

and these days she's doing all her teaching at home via a computer.

She writes this week's cover piece and talks about how worried she is for those in her class who will be falling behind because of lockdown.

She joins me down the line now, together with Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which has been doing the work looking into this educational inequality.

Lucy, to start with, you talk about

this inequality and how even in your class of 25 of economic students manifest itself. Can you

explain how? Yeah, you hear about it a lot in abstract, but as far as my students go, I post my work

up on ghastly Google classrooms, and out of 25, there are eight

who are very, very diligent, they will do it perfectly, they're really learning. There are another

eight who will do it in a very perfunctory way, and the rest don't do it at all. I have not seen any work from them whatsoever since

this began in March and what makes this so worrying is that those eight students are the ones that

I was really worried about all along. I mean we've heard quite a lot about poverty and some of them

don't have laptops and some of them don't have broadband, but it's not just poverty. I mean, some of them have really bad sort of behavioural difficulties or special needs. One way and another, they are doing no work at all. And that is just heartbreaking. And there's no way for you to do anything as it were

from the other side of the screen. No. And within school, I mean, the structure of school is so

powerful, especially in a school like mine that's very strict. So we have real sanctions.

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