For Children With Special Needs, Michael Gove’s Plan To Reopen Schools Is Immensely Damaging

Pupils with special educational needs will pay the price.

Get the latest on coronavirus. Sign up to the Daily Brief for news, explainers, how-tos, opinion and more.

Speaking to Andrew Marr yesterday, Michael Gove confidently announced that, if we “really care about [our] children, [we] will want them to be in school”. He also acknowledged that, whilst no environment can be completely safe, schools will apparently be fine so long as children and staff follow adequate social distancing measures. 

Given that the majority of adults are finding it hard to cope without seeing their friends and family, I would love to know how Gove thinks we are going to stop our young children from immediately leaping on their friends, dragging each another around a filthy playground and indulging in all the other normal childhood behaviours they’ve been denied the past two months. 

Perhaps we should take a leaf from the Big Book of Policing and instigate a policy of instant detention for all those five-year-olds ignoring Social Distancing rules. Or photograph wrongdoers and post them on a board labelled “Covidiots”.

Flippancy aside, there is a serious issue here. For all the difficulties which staff in mainstream education will face, there are a hundred more for those in alternative/ special education. 

Prior to the lockdown I was working in a school for children with SEMH (Social, Emotional & Mental Health) issues. Many of our children are on the autism spectrum and, for them. a month without their usual routine will make any return to school potentially traumatic. Such returns will have to be carefully managed and Gove’s idea of simply shoving them back into the classroom at a 2m distance and leaving the teachers to get on with it, is both unworkable and unfair. 

The Conservatives already have our factory workers, care workers and delivery drivers working as usual, now it’s our children who they are happily planning to send back down the pit with the promise that they “are less vulnerable to Covid-19” to keep them safe.

A large number of our children can also exhibit behaviours which require therapeutic physical intervention; it is used as a last resort, but for children in Year One and Six (for whom self-control is still a challenge) it can be a daily occurrence. Under the current guidelines there is no way to safely interact with a child who requires this sort of intervention. 

So what options does this leave us with?

The simplest solution is to say that special schools cannot safely go back on 1 June. 

For our students (who come from some of the most deprived backgrounds in the city) school is more than a chance to see friends and ignore the teachers. It can be a safe-haven from violent households or the only hot meal they get each day. For others it is their opportunity to get one to one attention which is otherwise unavailable.

Naturally, teaching staff have been working tirelessly to provide home-learning opportunities, free school meal vouchers and regular activities for our pupils throughout the lockdown. Our school Facebook group has been a great source of motivation and recognition for both teachers and parents who are able to assist. We all want to see them back in the classroom, but not until it is safe (for both staff and pupils) to do so.

It is incredibly telling that schools such as Eton and our other monuments to The Great Class Divide are remaining closed until September. Their pupils, who will be able to access the internet, libraries of books and the educational benefits of parents who are themselves highly educated, can cope with a few months “off school”. For children whose parents cannot provide them with a bespoke teaching service, or who are not capable of focusing on school-work due to mental health or learning issues, the damage to their education is potentially immense. 

In education, as with the workplace, it would seem that the Conservatives are more than happy to let the working classes bear the brunt of the risk during this pandemic. Our factory workers, care workers and delivery drivers have been working as usual, now it’s our children who they are happily planning to send back down the pit with just the promise that “children are less vulnerable to Covid-19” to keep them safe. Just two months ago, Good Old Boris and chums were advocating DNR instructions for learning-disabled adults who contracted the virus. In two weeks’ time, they will be watching from the safety of their Zoom cabinet meeting as our teachers are struggling to maintain social distancing  whilst simultaneously providing an adequate education and caring for our most vulnerable children. But what more can we expect of a man, whose time as education secretary inspired the book “Everything I Know About Teaching”, featuring 90 blank pages.

If we are sending our children back to school then it needs to be properly discussed and education providers consulted. We cannot use our private schools and high-performers as the norm and we need to ensure that our most vulnerable kids are catered for first and foremost. 

Katherine Denkinson is a freelance writer and investigative journalist.