The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
What Climate Change, Air Pollution, Plastic Pollution and COVID19 tell us is this - they carry the same message - the only reliable way to protect our shared environment, all our people and our economies is to co-operate across all sectors, openly, honestly and transparently.
We must work with all the available reliably tested evidence before us to solve problems and develop healthier behaviours that repair the damage and prevent further harms.
The apparent short-term costs of taking corrective action fade into insignificance compared to the medium and long term costs of failing to do so, on every meaningful measure.
We must do what can be done, without fear or favour, for all our children's futures, and we must do it diligently, every day.
Education Secretary Gavin Williamson cites 'harms' for which he does present any reliable evidence, in order to argue for reopening schools before Easter, even as community transmission levels are above the levels they were on March 23rd 2020.
The reason for this is simple enough. He knows exactly what harms his atrocious governance and policy has caused, and he cannot cite those harms without incriminating himself, as outlined in a recent National Audit Report.Once again we see the tactic of citing the harms caused by bad management of the epidemic to argue the case for worse management rather than best management - zerocovid.uk
Bylinetimes described it well :
“This report confirms what parents and teachers have known for a year: that a whole generation of children and young people have been let down by an Education Secretary who lurched from one crisis to the next, wreaking havoc on their lives,” Daisy Cooper, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Education, said.
“From the free school meal U-turns, the ‘A’ Level grading fiasco, the shamefully slow roll-out of laptops, the botched schools re-opening plans, and the failure to take decisive action on this year’s exams, Gavin Williamson is the worst Education Secretary in England in a generation. He’s made such a hash of it, it is quite frankly beyond comprehension that he’s still in post.”
Meanwhile, Meg Hillier, Labour chair of the Commons Public accounts Committee, said that, with no contingency plan, the Department for Education’s reaction was slower and less effective than it could have been.
“DfE’s failure to do its homework has come at the expense of children – and has hit those who were already disadvantaged the hardest,” she said. “DfE must now ensure its support is properly targeted to prevent the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers from widening even further.”
Mr. Williamson claims that 'children are falling behind due to being out of school' even though we know that remote learning has been operating efficiently and for many, many primaryschools and secondary schools it has been effective, given the circumstances. he cites no numbers, no qualitative or quantitative survey data to prop up his case.
"Although based on self-reported views, the findings from our YouGov survey show that three-fifths of the teachers responding were quite confident that they were providing a high-quality education through their school’s remote education solution when this was needed.
In addition, just over half were confident their solution was sustainable for the future. On this basis, it is likely that a large proportion of schools in England providing a remote solution are doing well at mitigating the amount of learning loss that children experience"
What we do know is that where there are difficulties it is most often due to a lack of resources and funding, localised poverty and deprivation. The Government promise to provide laptops to all families experiencing poverty never materialised, as did the promise to provide free broadband to the poorest families to assist with remote learning. The fact that £22 billion can be set aside as a budget for an inadequate contact tracing system and a testing system equally inadequate suggests Government inertia and disdain rather than technical difficulty as the underlying reasons for these failures to provide for remote learning.
The reason families in poverty are having difficulty with remote learning then is beyond mere attendance at school and this speaks to the Conservative Governments historical and generalised approach to the children of poorer families - they can do with minimal support, they can endure using foodbanks, they don't 'deserve' free school meals and as a demographic their parents are to be dehumanised in media as work-shy scroungers, and a burden on the tax payer - thus Williamson cites harms caused by Conservative policy which the Government has refused to address. Gaslighting again, Mr. Williamson!
We know most schools are open for vulnerable and at-risk children and for the children of key workers, all of whom are benefiting from smaller class sizes and the extra attention they gain as a result. Teachers are doing superb work in this regard.
We also know that teaching staff are working flat out to provide remote tuition, and the vast majority of children and parents at home are succeeding in meeting the curriculum time tables.
We know that teaching staff in schools are feeding, counselling, clothing and nurturing vulnerable children at every turn and doing a very fine job under very difficult circumstances not of their own making, when all other social services are hampered by the repeated shut down cycles.
Parents are doing superbly, for the most part. For everyone these are indeed trying times, made more trying be the deliberate inadequacies of this Conservative and Unionist Government, behaving as an elective dictatorship.
It bears repeating - the evidenced harms the Education Minister does not cite in his gaslighting approach to the welfare of students, teachers and parents are many. These unmentioned harms are indeed caused by the proven bad management of the epidemic for which he and his Cabinet colleagues are wholly responsible and thus his current proposition is to argue for worse management rather than argue for better management of the epidemic.
He is not arguing for approaching a zero community transmission status. In fact he and his colleagues have dismissed any discussion of attempting to approach a zero community transmission status, in spite of advice and expertise from the global science, virology, epidemiology and public health community and World Health Organisation and partners. They dismissed zero covid in parliament because to discuss it is to reveal the central weakness in their stance since January 2020. They are not following science or evidence at all. Their position is ideological, seeking political gains, enhancing their powers over duty of care for the lives and well being of the citizens.
1. Gavin Williamson is demanding that all children return to schools, and that schools be run fully open. He is demanding that all remote tuition be ceased in order to coerce this move. He is demanding that Schools fine and penalise parents who refuse to bring their children to schools that we all know are unsafe. That is bullying.
He is using the institutional power of the Office of Education Secretary to impose these conditions.
He claims the power to enforce attendance lies with Local Authorities and Heads, not with the Government, exploiting the sanction based legislation governing school rolls and attendance which government has imposed - which the government set aside during the shutdowns. Cake and eat it, he likes.
2. He is demanding they do this when community transmission is above the levels recorded in March 23rd 2020 when the first Lock-down was imposed, a lock down that was made necessary by the Governments failure to limit community transmission of the virus. That guarantees future spread. That is profoundly irresponsible and dangerous.
3. He is demanding that children, who are proven spreaders of the virus, (through no fault of their own) be exposed to the virus, which will carry the virus to their families, to teachers and to other students, some of whom will develop symptoms, 20% of whom will be asymptomatic and thus unaware of their status as transmitters of the virus. This is assured to lead to surges within 4 to six weeks, with the attendant illnesses, fatalities and another shut down to prevent uncontrolled transmission surging through the affected communities..
4. He is claiming a majority of children are falling behind, but he cannot cite the evidence to support that claim as it incriminates him and his policies this past year. Thus he is misleading in public to push a bad policy.
5. Mike Ryan in the WHO Live Q&A broadcast on March 3rd was unequivocal that we must look to countries where the levels of community transmission are low, where they are on top of the virus, where deaths and illness are kept very low as exemplars of the correct strategy in managing and suppressing the virus and bringing local epidemics and the global pandemic under control.
6. Boris Johnson and his entire Cabinet are deliberately ignoring the evidence. They are individually and collectively responsible for the excess fatalities and all other costs that their policy choices have caused.
7. Is it not the case that in order to protect children, adults, elders and the vulnerable, the NHS frontline workers and ancillary staff and shop staff and all others that we therefore need to stop this government from implementing it's current inhumane policy which is causing so much harm?
8. Is it not the case that we need to bring in a government of national unity to implement an efficient, humane zero community transmission policy so that we can end these cycles of shutdown, open up, shutdown, open up and bring our economy and social system back to a more balance state as Vietnam and New Zealand and the Governments of 1.8 billion people across East Asia have ably demonstrated this past 12 months?
9. The coercion being deployed against parents, students is carefully laid out by a barrister, Mark McDonald. This is a hugely important matter. The stress imposed upon hundreds of thousands of parents is one thing. The combination of existing legislated school registration sanction regimes with Government intransigence is really unjust. Using those sanction regimes to coerce parents whose genuine wish is to protect their children and relatives, especially CV and CEV cases is inhumane.
There are examples of clear cut cases of bullying tactics being deployed against genuinely concerned parents.
