Who speaks up for our children? By Andy Maciver

The absence of school was accompanied, at various times and to various degrees, by a series of other restrictions which impacted children in the most severe way. Sports and leisure activities were stopped or relegated to Zoom; soft-play and other children’s centres were closed; no playdates or sleepovers, no holidays, no days out to the museum, the cinema or the beach.

Some of these out-of-school restrictions, nearly 18 months later, have only very recently been lifted. In school, when the academic year ended in June, children remained in isolation bubbles, unable to interact with friends in the playground at school, despite by then being able to have playdates in their homes.

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Children, these days, are forced to grow up early. Governments and schools, in the name of children’s rights, are insistent in involving them in decision-making processes, largely to be able to claim in the final analysis that they are ‘rights-respecting’ or ‘child-centred’ or some other meaningless term of cuddly inclusivity.

Parents, however, have a pretty keen understanding that it is the job of adults to make decisions for children. The decision to put their lives on hold for the last 18 months is, in all probability, the biggest decision that will ever be taken on behalf of today’s generation of Scottish children.

How will they, in the years to come, reflect on the decisions we took?

That is a question which should, and I suspect will, increasingly keep this generation of policymakers awake at night. I have, on these pages and during broadcast commentary, been sympathetic to our leaders, who found themselves in a no-win position and who, I believe, made the best decisions they could at the time. I continue to be of this view.

In a sense, however, many of the decisions were obvious, if not easy. Policymakers saved the lives which were at risk before their very eyes – those of the elderly and the sick, who have constituted the overwhelming majority of Covid hospitalisations and deaths.

This was a zero-sum game; saving the lives of the sick and the old means risking the lives and livelihoods, in unquantifiable ways and in unknown timescales, of a wide range of other people, including children.

As a father of four primary-school age children, I have reflected frequently on this during the last 17 months. How different are Scotland’s children now than they would otherwise have been? How many of Scotland’s children have suffered a level of educational loss at a critical time which can never be fully replenished? What scale of mental ill-health have we seeded in our children, when will it manifest itself and to what effect?

My primary reflection, though, is that throughout the last 18 months nobody seemed to be on their side. Of course, I don’t mean individually – children had their families in their corner.

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But in a wider sense, as a collective, who spoke for children and carried sufficient influence over the decision-making process? Indeed, were children the worst represented group in the process which made the decisions which time may deem to have affected children more than any other cohort of society?

In theory, there are a number of organisations who could have played this role, and indeed tried to. The Children’s Commissioner, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the 50:50 campaign and Place2Be, the mental health charity which I advise on a voluntary basis, spoke variously of the damage being caused by school closures, and the lack of clinical evidence for many of the measures being taken.

The Scottish Parent Teacher Council (known as Connect) and the UsForThem appeared to lack, respectively, the will and the temperament to make a constructive impression.

They should all reflect on why their influence appeared to be less than the lay person might have expected it to be. On why they were so easily ignored. On why their collective voices were muffled by the clunking might of the EIS union, which took full advantage of the opportunity to leverage political advantage, making the opening of schools an unnecessarily tortuous experience (and damaging the reputation of teachers in the process).

Because, in this, the most important decision the adults have ever made on behalf of the children, we may have comprehensively and devastatingly failed them.

The past is the past. It is done and we cannot go back and change it, much as we may wish we could. But we can learn from it.

We can think more, study more, seek out and take more evidence about the long-term impact of school closures and other children’s activity stoppages on our children’s educational, physical and mental health.

And with that information, we should be prepared to say that, come what may, we will make decisions for the long-term rather than for the short-term. We should be prepared to say that we will treat education as an emergency service which must remain open in any and all circumstances, just like the NHS, the police service, the fire service, prisons, grocery shops, banks, waste collection and a whole host of other services remained open throughout the last 17 months.

In the years and decades to come, we will know whether we served our children well; whether what we did to them was merely a childhood blip that they will barely remember, or whether it was the trigger for something more malevolent.

We may be faced with these decisions again someday. If we are, let’s make sure those affected the most – those who can’t make the decision for themselves – have a louder voice in their corner.

Andy Maciver is Director of Message Matters

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