A BRIEFING by Ofsted’s Chief Inspector, Amanda Spielman, on a yet to be published report on ‘the impact of the pandemic on children’s development’, unsurprisingly commanded headlines across media outlets on Monday. It found that children had regressed. ‘Limited vocabulary’, babies struggling ‘to respond to basic facial expressions’ and some unable even to crawl, lacking basic social skills, were all amongst the observations made by ‘early years’ providers on infants return to nurseries and daycare.
‘The pandemic’, the Chief Inspector concluded from this, ‘has delayed social skills of young children.’
But it is not the ‘pandemic’ which has had this disastrous effect on child development and well being, it was the government’s response – its decision to lock children out of schools and into their homes while depriving mothers of access to the most basic support such as baby weighing clinic or breastfeeding support or leaving them struggling to work, teach and childmind. It was the government’s decision to mask adults so babies could not see their mothers’ faces, their parents’ smiles, or follow their lips learning to talk.
Let’s be clear about this Amanda. Children were not impacted by the virus, they were not even at risk from it – their natural immunity to Covid-19 was apparent right from the start. What they have been impacted by was a heartless and ignorant Lockdown policy. For anyone who still needs proof read this freedom-of-information answer here. No child death is to be minimised but in the very, very few Covid deaths of under 19-year-olds it’s the underlying comorbidities that were the main risk factor. We made the point over a year ago that Lockdown was not just cruel but without scientific justification – witness Sweden who never locked down their schools.
Here children were locked out of schools and imprisoned (often alone) in their homes, however small and inadequate those might have been; they were stopped from seeing any friends for months on end, their isolated mothers were prevented from seeking help and support from family and friends. This was not to protect the children from disease but to act as a human shield for adults. An idea as unscientific as it was immoral. The extent of damage inflicted by isolating them, including in their bedrooms after force testing the government even decreed, treating them as a disease vector who might kill their sibs or parents, we may not come to know for years. Many of us desperately tried to communicate how wrong and abusive this interference in natural family life and intercourse was. To us the awful Ofsted findings come as no surprise. The Naked Emperor summed up the iniquity on Monday.
‘Children were abysmally let down by cowardly bureaucrats who spent two years focusing on their own mortality rather than the well-being of the children they were meant to protect’.
Cruelty was the point that was missed then– and that is what looks still to be missing from the Ofsted report – as I pointed out in discussion on it on Mark Steyn’s Monday evening programme. The segment follows one of Mark’s most powerful introductory monologues to date – a devastating inculpation of the Government’s disastrous Covid response – ‘the biggest policy failure of the last hundred years’. My thanks go to him for this and for giving me the opportunity to express an outrage that so many people feel.
You can watch the programme here
