Cherishing Childhood: how do we help the coronavirus generation make up for lost time?

Good and bad childhoods follow people around forever. 

While some children are experiencing life on lockdown as the sudden permanent presence of graduate parents armed with iPads, limitless data and dining tables for desks, others are seeing their lives derailed by bereavement, domestic abuse or the abrupt disappearance of the support networks that helped their parents manage their disabilities or mental health. The impact of these months will be showing up for years if we don’t start thinking now about the right sort of emergency help.

The number of extremely vulnerable children is rising as a direct result of the crisis but the wider group of children we worry about at Save the Children – the 4.2 million children living in poverty – has just got bigger too. The DWP figures released in March 2020 showed a further 100,000 children had fallen into poverty in 2018-2019, continuing a ten-year trend of childhood poverty climbing back up towards the highs of the mid 1990s. Even before the coronavirus, the Resolution Foundation was predicting child poverty would hit the highest level since records began in the early 1960s. 

We don’t yet know how many of the nearly two million new Universal Credit claimants have children, but we know from our own Save the Children programmes that there is an emerging group of families who are newly in crisis. The ‘newly desperate’ are the mums and dads who could just about keep the family going in normal times but who have seen what they pay for food and electricity going up with everyone at home. The pressure on family finances is enormous and throws pre-existing inequalities into sharp relief. 

Childhoods were already profoundly unequal

Three inequalities in particular stand out. 

Firstly, childhoods were already profoundly shaped by access to space. House of Commons library research points to increases in disturbed sleep, accidents, infectious disease and stress and other mental health conditions as a result of overcrowding, as well as the obvious implications for children not having a quiet place to play or study. Life in cramped accommodation was already tough, but life on lockdown is intolerably claustrophobic. For too long people with secure employment and a home of their own have lived a parallel life to those getting by on gig work or subject to flimsy protection in the private rented sector. Today’s circumstances must surely do something to close that empathy gap: it’s hard to be so oblivious to inequality when some people on a work call are in their home office and the kids are playing in the garden while others are on the one family laptop while the kids are crying to be let out of the flat. 

There are specific coronavirus implications of overcrowding too. The latest research from the New Policy Institute suggests that overcrowding may explain why London and Birmingham have become such hotspots. Likewise we’ve all become familiar with the risks in care homes but temporary accommodation could fast become the next frontline with 62,280 homeless families living in temporary accommodation in England and 5,400 of those in emergency shelters and B&Bs with shared kitchens and bathrooms

The second major inequality is in access to nutritious food. We already knew that poor children are much less likely to have a balanced diet with Dr Steeson of the British Nutrition Foundation noting that ‘a healthy diet can cost almost three-quarters of their disposable income (for families on the lowest incomes)’. Likewise, increasing research into both ‘food deserts’ (where people struggle to access an affordable supply of fruit and vegetables and have to rely on convenience shops) and the concentration of fast food outlets in poor areas shows just what families are up against at the best of times. 

Jamie Oliver’s ‘Biteback 2030’ campaign is already warning coronavirus could prove a ‘double whammy’ for children, with supply chain disruption pushing the cost of healthy food up and the economic hit pushing family incomes down. The Food Foundation reported that as many as three million people in Britain were going hungry, just three weeks into lockdown, while the absence of free school meals has hit the poorest hardest, with the government’s replacement scheme beset by problems.

The third existing inequality this crisis has helped surface is the persistent learning gap. Figures from the Office of National Statistics show how early experiences of poverty show up in the lives of young adults in lower wages and higher unemployment. That divergence starts very young, with an increasingly broad evidence base that children’s brains are particularly sensitive in their earliest years. The Education Endowment Foundation puts the learning gap between children eligible for free school meals and their classmates at 4.3 months at the start of school in England. It grows to 19.3 months at the end of secondary school and by the time they reach 19, half of the children who are eligible for free school meals don’t have a good qualification in English or maths.        

That gap is now set to widen even further with OFSTED’s Amanda Spielman confirming those who were already furthest behind are set to fall even further back the longer coronavirus closures go on. Evidence from the Sutton Trust suggests children in private schools are twice as likely to be receiving online tuition every day and middle class parents have more resources to invest in their children’s learning and greater confidence in stepping in to help

Likewise online learning is out of reach for children trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide with Teach First reporting that only 2% of teachers in the poorest communities believe all their pupils will have the right access to data and devices and the Institute for Public Policy Research estimating that around one million children and families don’t have adequate connectivity. Secretary of State Gavin Williamson confirmed last week that promised laptops and tablets won’t arrive until June.

Without decent access to learning at home, the effects of prolonged periods out of the classroom will likely mirror the pattern of the so-called ‘summer slide’ where all children fall back a bit during holidays but the poorest children fall back further. Finally, it seems likely that in education, just like health, racial inequalities could be exacerbated because children from Black Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities are at risk of being marked down in the teacher assessments that will replace cancelled exams. The intersection between class and race will play out painfully here too. Dr Marie’s Tidball’s essay elsewhere in this collection touches on the implications of school closures for children with disabilities.

Building better childhoods

It seems unarguable, therefore, that some children are paying a much heavier price for coronavirus than others. These inequalities were not created by coronavirus, but they have been both illuminated and exacerbated by it. They demand a targeted response.

Robert Halfon, the Chair of the Education Select Committee, has already suggested retired teachers could provide catch-up help for school children but an even bigger prize could be a national programme of catch-up support for pre-school children. Currently only 4% of the children who would normally be at nursery are there. It is at that level that the educational gap begins and it is the parents of the youngest children who are most likely to be in poverty. Why not have a free summer programme of structured learning and play for pre-school children, with a particular focus on getting the poorest children on to the programme? If there is a strong focus on outdoor activities and access to nature (which international evidence suggests is good for early development) it should be possible to design a programme that combines appropriate social distancing with plenty of fun for children who’ve been cooped up without the chance to play outside. Parents could either drop their children at the programme and get back to work or access skills and parenting support at the same time, knowing their little ones were in safe hands. 

The most effective scheme would be coordinated by government to ensure that qualified early years teachers are driving the programme (and nurseries and other providers with tight margins are being given a cash boost to deliver it) but the charity sector is on standby to do our bit. Save the Children alone has 9,000 volunteers who already contribute their time and their talents to help children and our supporters would like nothing better than to be mobilised for a national effort for our smallest citizens. 

The primary difficulty with getting any of these ideas adopted, however, is that the needs of children (particularly the poorest and the youngest children) just don’t carry much weight politically. Children have been largely missing from the national debate about the crisis (with discussion largely limited to the impact on adults of having to do childcare or home schooling). As Social Market Foundation head James Kirkup lamented when introducing his own recommendation (for permanently shortening summer holidays), all the evidence about childhood inequality adds up to ‘an unspoken truth’

It will take a concerted effort from families, the children’s workforce and child rights champions in the media, parliament and funders if we’re to put that right. Carey Oppenheim at the Nuffield Foundation estimates that 170,000 babies have been born since coronavirus hit the UK. That’s 170,000 families who have just had the life-changing experience of holding their new-born and committing to do everything in their power to protect them for as long as they live. That’s the basis of a powerful constituency right there. 

Our most immediate priority, therefore, is building a broad and diverse families’ movement dedicated to putting children’s futures at the heart of our national recovery. The absence of just such a grouping was made painfully obvious on the 1st of April this year. It was supposed to mark, as Prospect editor Tom Clark reminded us, the date on which child poverty would be abolished, according to the government target set in the year 2000. Twenty years on, child poverty is on the rise and political parties no longer vie to say their plans are the best to defeat it.

The key is not to shout louder, but to reach out further. It’s building an irresistible coalition for change based on three main principles.

The first, at a strategic level, is putting the protection of childhood at the heart of the tough economic choices to come. Children are truly remarkable. Their relentless curiosity about the world and sense that they can do and be anything is what makes them such a joy. Poverty both shrinks and shortens childhoods. No child should know when pay day is or how much is left of the electric meter. Our job is to elongate the period where they live in their imagination and that means relieving as much pressure on mums and dads as possible. No more overheard worries about Universal Credit or how to pay the rent. Our movement, therefore, will have to coalesce around one core political goal: making sure families are as present in the Chancellor’s mind for the recovery as businesses and workers were for the rescue. 

The second, at a narrative level, is replacing a fixation on child poverty with one on good childhoods. A narrow campaign about child poverty will not be enough to galvanise political attention post coronavirus any more than it could make the political weather before it. We need to be relentless in our focus on universal truths that already command public sympathy, focussing on the notion of a good childhood and everybody having a right to one. More specific narratives about childhood deprivation simply ask too much of audiences who didn’t themselves experience life on a low income. Likewise talk of deprivation is too abstract when we could be talking about the tangible things every child needs – a warm coat in the winter, the chance to go on the school trip with the rest of the class, a present on their birthday and enough food in the fridge to have a friend over for tea.  

The third, at a policy level, is to build the case for poverty as primarily an experience of diminished purchasing power and, therefore, exclusion from the collective life of our communities and country. There are undoubtedly specific issues around access to energy or meals or sanitary products and a whole host of other things, but the basic thing that unites fuel poverty, food poverty or period poverty is poverty. We can’t fix poverty without talking about getting more money into the pockets of the poor.   

This coronavirus generation of children may not have been as at risk as our elderly relatives nor sacrificed as much as our heroes in the NHS and social care. They have, however, seen a disruption to their childhoods that will still be showing up in our common life many decades from now. This generation owes it to theirs to limit the damage by building a movement worthy of this moment – one which creates a much more equal future for the young lives currently on pause. 


Kirsty McNeill is Executive Director for Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns at Save the Children and on the boards of the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Coalition for Global Prosperity and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. @kirstyjmcneill