At a university reunion recently, my friends and I cornered the dean in charge of pastoral care and tried to make him tell us how much cooler we had been than students these days.
We had heard they had no sex, did no drugs, never went out, spent all day in the library and all night applying for internships with accountancy firms. We must have been so difficult to control, we said, in a smug, self-satisfied way. Life must be easier for him now.
“Actually, you were all quite sweet,” he said crushingly. It was the new crop of first years that were the real challenge. In fact, they were tougher to manage than any group he had come across before; it started with horrendous bullying and got worse from there. The trouble was, he said, they were immature: he was having to treat them more like 16-year-olds than the 18- and 19-year-olds they were.
Key stage of development
And the reason was obvious. They had missed a key stage of development – the spurt of maturity that comes in sixth form. Instead of socialising with their peers, they had been often shut up at home.
Parents spoke heartbreakingly of having to tell toddlers to stay away from others and not to hug their friends
What damage, exactly, have two years of intermittent lockdown done to the young? We don’t yet have the full picture, but increasingly to anecdote (a lecturer friend tells me his third years are less confident and less academically advanced than former years) we can now add data. Sats results are one of the more reliable indicators of how a group is doing and on Tuesday came a striking statistic. The proportion of 11-year-olds hitting expected standards in reading, writing and maths in England had slumped to 59% in 2022, compared with 65% in 2019. That’s a big dip.
Views
Then there are the very young. During the pandemic, parents spoke heartbreakingly of having to tell toddlers to stay away from others and not to hug their friends. In May, research published by the Education Endowment Foundation claimed that lockdown had affected England’s youngest children worst of all. Four- and five-year-olds were starting school far behind, biting and hitting, overwhelmed around large groups of other children and unable to settle and learn.
Mass experiment
It came of necessity, perhaps, but we need to admit it. From 2020 to 2021, we conducted a mass experiment on the young. In recent history, there is perhaps just one comparison point: evacuation during the Second World War. Only it’s the opposite experiment. In 1939, children were sent away from their parents. In the past two years, they have been shut up with them.
Colin Blakemore died last week. The feted neurobiologist is remembered in particular for his work on the importance of “critical periods” in development. If a child has faulty vision during a critical period after birth, he found, the brain will never develop the ability to see properly, even if eye problems are then fixed. That theme echoes through developmental science. The younger you are, the more it matters what happens to you.
Study on your mental health
When former evacuees were in their 60s and 70s, there was a study on their mental health.
Those who had been the youngest when they were sent away (aged four to six, for example) suffered the worst effects. Will today’s four- to six-year-olds still have problems when they are 70? We need to raise the possibility that they will.
In the 1990s, scientists at the University of Wisconsin did some interesting experiments on baby monkeys. One group was separated from their mothers at birth and raised for five months in a “nursery” of other baby monkeys. (We could perhaps call this the “evacuee” group.)
-guardian.co.uk