Ghost children: the strange death of social reform in Britain
This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.
In 1891 a parliamentary bill received Royal Assent, abolishing fees for primary education. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, had suggested to the cabinet that the best way to encourage labourers to send their children to school was to pay parents ten shillings if their youngsters attended class 300 times. This early attempt at creating, in effect, a voucher system was not taken up by the rest of the cabinet. Nonetheless, the Education Act did extend access to schooling.
The Salisbury education policy wasn’t entirely altruistic. There were political considerations, of course, and a general election was in prospect. As Andrew Roberts recounts in his biography of Salisbury – Victorian Titan – the Prime Minister was concerned about the burden placed on the Treasury and taxpayers by providing free education. He introduced the reform on the basis that Gladstone, if given the chance, would introduce, in Salisbury’s terms, something much worse.
British history in the 19th century is peppered with these debates and disputes about education, working conditions and prisons. Social reform, along with improvement in the arts and sciences, was a central feature of parliamentary life and a fixation for eminent Victorians and millions more readers of magazines, newspapers and novels.
Anyone who read the new report from the Centre for Social Justice this week can surely see Britain could do with some of that reforming Victorian spirit now.
In Lost and Not Found: How severe absence became endemic in England’s schools the CSJ team uncovers how an astonishing number of children have simply disappeared from the schooling system. Post-pandemic the situation got worse, fast.
“The number of severely absent children has continued to climb,” the report’s authors say. “New Centre for Social Justice analysis reveals that in the latest term we have data for, Summer 2022, 140,000 children were severely absent. This represents a rise of 134 per cent since before the pandemic – or the equivalent of 137 entire schools where the children are mostly missing education.”
In the latest edition of The Spectator, the author Harriet Sergeant who has chronicled teenage gangs, picks up on the report and describes the plight of the pupils who never came back after the schools shut for lockdown.
“There was this guy in my year who never came back to school after lockdown,” a 14-year-old girl at a comprehensive in the Midlands tells Sergeant.
“Then one day my friends and I saw him by the shopping centre. He was, like, sitting on a piece of cardboard by the side of the road, looking a bit homeless. Other kids recognised him and bought him food and clothes. He’d always been popular. Then someone told a teacher and a couple of days later he came back to class. But he was so far behind, he grew frustrated and angry, and then one day he just upped and left for good.”
As Sergeant says: “That boy is a ghost child – a victim of the disastrous policy of school closures during the Covid pandemic.”
The Centre for Social Justice proposes measures to start rescuing these children. A national programme of 2,000 attendance monitors is suggested, and support for schools and struggling parents.
It urges ministers to step up: “The Government should follow through on its 2019 manifesto commitment to invest £500 million in new youth clubs and services, where there remains considerable underspend. This should be scaled up through a new match fund scheme designed to inspire major businesses, charities and third sector organisations to support a national mission of returning our young people to school.”
The government and the opposition are preoccupied, of course. The electoral cycle turns and there is a general election coming, again. The Brexit wars took up political bandwidth, dominating Westminster and Whitehall discourse for much of the last seven years. Before that David Cameron’s interest in social reform and charity – his Big Society was a great idea badly marketed – ran into the need for public spending restraint. The pandemic hit and was followed by a European war.
Even so, it is remarkable that social reform receives so little attention at Westminster. The contemporary Labour party seems to have very little to say about it. This is odd. Isn’t social reform supposed to be one of the main points of the party’s existence?
Perhaps on the question of “ghost children” there is embarrassment across the parties. In the pandemic, parliament allowed itself to be shut down and in doing so failed to meet its responsibilities to scrutinise an over-mighty government. This has had terrible consequences. Schools should not have been shut and the damage done to attendance, learning and child mental health is becoming clearer by the week.
In Scotland, Jason Leitch, the National Clinical Director for the Scottish Government, admitted this week that shutting down schools may have been a mistake. This frankness was refreshing, although let’s not forget how any dissent on these matters at the time was squashed. In the next such public health emergency, it would be useful if ministers and officials mid-emergency eschew excessive certainty about what is unknown.
Be less Matt Hancock. Be more Victorian. They demonstrated it is possible to be engaged in great questions of foreign policy (Salisbury combined being Foreign Secretary with the premiership) while still caring about the condition of the country and introducing improvements.
Scotland, normal part of the UK
On Friday, Ed Miliband put out a picture on his Twitter feed of himself, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar striding out down a street all dressed in hi-viz jackets, looking like a group of dads trying to recreate that famous scene with Bruce Willis and a group of renegade astronauts setting off to save the world.
The Labour trio were on their way to visit a wind farm project. Miliband said Labour would make the UK a “clean energy superpower” – whatever that is.
The image and tweet elicited some sarcastic responses from users of Twitter: “Don’t think much of the remake of Armageddon”. There were references to hot air powering wind turbines.
What was most interesting about the picture is where it was taken, in Wick, in the North East of Scotland.
In the New Labour era it was perfectly common, unremarkable, to see Tony Blair, or Gordon Brown, snapped in Scotland with the party’s Scottish leaders, touring an energy facility, or a factory, or meeting voters. It wasn’t presented as an incursion. They were simply leaders touring about another part of the United Kingdom.
Labour’s defeat in 2010 and most of all the 2014 independence referendum changed everything. The referendum campaign experience was deeply traumatic for Labour. When the party’s MPs visited en-masse from England and Wales to campaign for the Union they were treated by a crowd of Nationalist activists in Glasgow, on Buchanan Street, as interlopers. The following year Labour was all but wiped out north of the border in the 2015 general election. A ruined Labour party became scared of Scotland.
This disaster was Labour’s own fault, in part. The techniques it used against the Conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s – the othering, presenting Tory ministers and their reforms as illegitimate, imperialistic, immoral – were copied later by the SNP.
The SNP used those same techniques after 2014 to “other” Labour, to cast it as alien and anti-Scottish (mad when one considers Labour’s deep Scottish roots).
As we say adieu to Nicola Sturgeon – so long, farewell – it is interesting to see Labour leaders gaining the confidence to visit in numbers and take an interest in the Scottish economy and Scottish questions, even if there is cause to be sceptical about the proposed policies. Rishi Sunak should be visiting Scotland more too, as the process of normalisation post-Sturgeon gets underway.
As the calamitous, chippy, failed First Minister departs, and we await the result of the SNP leadership race next week, Scotland is starting, tentatively, to become again a normal part of the UK. What a cheering thought.
What I’m reading
Christopher Clark’s new book (Revolutionary Spring) on 1848, that spectacular year of revolutions, appropriately enough given the incendiary situation in France. Bordeaux town hall was set on fire this week and trash-filled Parisian streets are alight. There have been hundreds of injuries as protesters oppose President Macron’s sensible pension reforms to increase the retirement age to just 64. On a Whatsapp group I’m on there was general astonishment and bafflement today among journalists that the unrest is not getting more attention in the British media. The cancellation of the King’s visit to France led the radio bulletins, but beyond that readers had to hunt out more analysis on podcasts, columns and newsletters. Imagine if the situation was reversed, if Manchester town hall was on fire and the Prime Minister was tottering in London. It would be presented across the media as being emblematic of Brexit Britain’s inherent dysfunctionality. As it is, in one of Europe’s great powers the governing system and the presidency itself are being stress-tested.
What I’m watching
A lot. The Cruel Sea, that war classic featuring pink gins and endless cigarettes, charting the horrors and privations endured by a group of officers and naval ratings as they try to survive being stalked by U-boats. This week we also watched Tár, starring Cate Blanchett as a renowned conductor and bit of a monster. I must admit I ended up feeling sorry for Lydia Tár.
And today I’ve been watching football. Scotland v Cyprus (3-0) in the Euro qualifiers, with my son who is home from university. That’s why this is a somewhat shorter newsletter than normal. I want to take him for a pint and have a day of rest from organising the London Defence Conference. The LDC – the new, annual, geopolitical gathering – takes place in partnership with King’s College London School of Security Studies on 23-24 May. Our small team is doing a tremendous job pulling it all together and we’ll announce more of what’s planned soon. It is invitation-only and I’ve kept a batch of spaces for subscribers to Reaction. If you would like the chance to join email me on info@londondefenceconference.com
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