Asking the hard questions about COVID school closures

A student wears a mask on the first day back to in-person classes amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Sao Paulo state government has allowed the schools to resume classes with up to 35 per cent of its students.

For more than two years, the Herald has been a vocal proponent of the need for a sweeping inquiry into how our nation responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal should not be to lay blame but to learn important lessons by asking uncomfortable questions about whether we should make different decisions when the next pandemic strikes.

While a federal government inquiry is examining some national responses to the crisis, key policy measures imposed by states will not be properly scrutinised. Of the many responses to the pandemic, few had a greater impact than the mass closure of schools.

In NSW, more than 1.2 million students either learned remotely or had minimal supervision in the school classroom for more than five months. We are beginning to understand the potential short, medium and long-term impacts.

The Herald remains concerned our political leaders have not adequately studied the lessons of the pandemic and over coming months will probe a range of key decisions that won’t fall directly under the federal inquiry because they were made by state governments.

Today’s piece by Lucy Carroll and Jordan Baker forms the start of a three-part series looking at the impact of COVID-19 on education. The forum discussions with nine expert panellists were broken up into two sessions: one examining wellbeing and behaviour of students, the second on academic and learning disruption. The panel includes Peter Shergold, chair of the state’s education regulator, and National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds.

The Herald will examine pandemic-era decisions relating to health, border closures and lockdowns and policing over coming months.

As Carroll and Baker report today, experts fear that mass school closures that stretched for months during the pandemic were unnecessary and led to a cascade of social and educational problems that threaten a generation of Australian children.

While the panel offered some sympathy and support for the decision to close schools early in the pandemic, it appears a second wave of closures in 2021 could have been avoided.

In Scotland, an inquiry into the pandemic last month heard that the Scottish government had ignored advice from its own experts that there was no need to close schools during the country’s second wave in January 2021. Mark Woolhouse, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, reportedly became emotional as he told the inquiry: “This is one of the aspects of the pandemic I feel strongly about – what we did to the children. It would be bad enough if there was a measurable and detectable public health benefit. But there wasn’t. It wasn’t necessary. And we did it anyway.

“I don’t understand how we went from a position of being quite evidence-based about school closures to suddenly forgetting all that in the early part of 2021. That baffles me.”

As more time passes and pandemic-era decisions are scrutinised, a recurring theme appears to be emerging: that while the blunt public health measures taken during the initial outbreak in Australia may have been warranted given the huge unknowns about the pandemic, there was a total failure to adapt our response once details became clearer into 2021.

Regrettably, our kids may end up bearing the brunt of that inflexibility. That’s a lesson worth remembering for the next pandemic.

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