This was the title of a recent Times leader article which was rapidly taken up in letters by many heads in both the state and independent sectors. The term “Lost Generation” is extreme but not wholly misleading.
While the immediate task facing us is to crank up real learning in our schools and return to some sort of normality the much larger tasks are to factor in long-term structural changes to our schools system to usher them into the second quartile of the C21 and most importantly to counter the learning deficit so many children will have suffered, frequently the least privileged and most disadvantaged.
A few days ago I was talking with a fourteen year old boy whose drug addicted parents had abandoned him to the care of reluctant grandparents. Excluded from his state comprehensive (“exclusion” just as bad as “expulsion”, both negative and uncaring?) he is now in a special school (PRU – Pupil Referral Unit) where a brilliant PE teacher coaching his football team was his only lifeline, but the school is now closed and virtual learning is not a possibility. No more football so just wandering the streets.
Home learning is a huge burden for many families, but most are managing and with the coming of vaccinations there is now light at the end of the tunnel. But that is the short term. In the long term the most vulnerable sections in the community have children whose education and mental health will be damaged for years to come. The Lost Generation should not be the Lost Opportunity, it should spur us to a fundamental re-set of education akin to the Butler Report of 1944.
We now need the best minds in the schools world to unite in a non-partisan campaign to define the true objectives of education in the post COVID world based on fairness and enrichment through knowledge and wisdom.
