Why are the media still asking the wrong question about schools during the pandemic?
- @cv_cev
- Aug 7
- 6 min read
Opinion | 7 August 2026
By Lara Wong, Founder and CEO, Clinically Vulnerable Families
Reflecting last week on his years covering Covid for the BBC, Lewis Goodall told listeners of The News Agents that he was "not sure that, even in the first lockdown, that school closures of any length of time were a price worth paying" - pointing to the academic literature on the damage done to children, particularly those from the least well-off backgrounds. Whilst Baroness Hallett considers her findings for the Covid Inquiry's 'Children and Young People' module, Professor Christina Pagel has responded, challenging the premise that schools could simply have stayed open with everything else - severe infections, deaths (particularly among parents and staff), staff absence, long Covid, PIMS-TS - unchanged.
We have additional, different concerns. It is not even that Lewis reached the wrong answer. It is that he asked the wrong question. There is an embedded assumption that there were only ever two possibilities: close all schools, or reopen them for all children. The Inquiry has heard sworn evidence that there was in fact a third option - and that the families who needed it were excluded from the calculation entirely.
Clinically Vulnerable Families (CVF) holds Core Participant status in the 'Children and young people' module of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, and I gave oral evidence to it last October.
Let's start by reviewing some of what the Inquiry heard...
Admissions made under oath
One of the most striking admissions came from the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education, Susan Acland-Hood, who told the Inquiry that for a decision-maker taking decisions about school closures in a pandemic, "there are some things where the impact is so great that it genuinely should be weighed up against the risk of mass fatality."
Boris Johnson went further. Questioned by our counsel, Adam Wagner KC, about whether it was safe for Clinically Vulnerable children - or children who might carry Covid home to a Clinically Vulnerable parent - to return, the former prime minister accepted that reopening would expose vulnerable parents to virus "picked up by kids in schools", and said: "that was the argument for closing schools, sure. But in the end, we had to decide whether that argument trumped the interests of the kids or not."
The government knew there was a price, and knew who would pay it. And here is what should trouble anyone, whatever they think of lockdowns: it did not merely prioritise the majority's interests over a minority's, which governments do all the time. It required one group of children to bear a disproportionate share of the costs of reopening - while denying them any accommodation whatsoever. Surprisingly, that price has never been picked by most in the broader media.
What reopening actually meant
We agree that some children were seriously impacted educationally - but those who carry by far the deepest scars from lost-learning were those locked out of schools in the longer term, well beyond lockdowns. Ironically, the period when our children had the best access to education was the period when every school was closed. Because remote education was (in theory) available to everyone, nobody - as I told the Inquiry - "had to make any difficult choices" between education and a risk to lives. The moment schools reopened, that flexibility disappeared.
Often forgotten is the fact that from September 2020 - before any vaccines - attendance was mandatory for every child in England, including those at high clinical risk and those living with someone for whom a single infection could prove fatal. Remote learning was only offered to children who tested positive for Covid - and, as I said in my evidence, "it was actively denied to children who were Clinically Vulnerable or in a Clinically Vulnerable household because it was not within the guidance." Families who kept children home to protect lives faced fines, prosecutions and inappropriate safeguarding referrals. Others were quietly removed from school rolls, told they were "better off taking your child out of school". The Inquiry's own 'Children and Young People's Voices' report records a 19-year-old with a heart condition whose school first agreed to online learning, then reversed under the guidance and threatened fines of over £120 per person per day until the family left the state system altogether. These parents were, as I described them to the Inquiry, unwilling homeschoolers. Nobody chose this, and there were serious psychological impacts on children living with higher risks.
Then came the exams, exposing a further inequity. Some children in Clinically Vulnerable families missed critical qualifications altogether because they had been denied access to teaching, while others were expected to sit them regardless. As I told the Inquiry, some "were unable to get the grades that they need, or in some cases were unable to get any grades at all" – a consequence for their futures that I cannot overstate. One of our members, Lana, was refused online learning and encouraged by her school to withdraw from education during her GCSE year, taught herself instead. She missed a pass in GCSE Maths by just one or two marks. No support was offered; the National Tutoring Programme never even identified children like her.
The Inquiry's independent expert on attendance, Professor Emerita Gillean McCluskey, confirmed how abnormal England's approach was: "only England was continuing with… penalties and fines and… that punitive approach", while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland "were talking about the need for understanding, support, flexibility". She told the Inquiry there are "really good grounds" for clinical vulnerability to be explicitly mentioned in attendance policy, "in connection with a supportive and proactively supportive approach on the part of schools".
The third option
Perhaps the most striking evidence came not from anyone arguing for school closures, but from someone arguing the opposite.
Sir Hamid Patel, chief executive of Star Academies and chair of the Confederation of School Trusts, also gave evidence. His message was that schools must be protected as "national critical assets" and kept open. But look at how his trust - serving some of England's most disadvantaged communities - treated families like ours. Asked about balancing attendance against the concerns of Clinically Vulnerable households, he said: "Absolutely… that's why we decided that we needed to take a compassionate approach." Where parents were not reassured by infection control measures, "we took a risk assessment, we offered them online lessons, and we carried on doing home visits".
This demolishes the central assumption behind the current debate: that there were only two choices - keep schools closed, or force everyone back. Star Academies demonstrated a third option. Schools could stay open while accommodating families facing health risks. Much of today's debate is therefore answering a question policymakers did not actually face.
And Sir Hamid's prescriptions for the future are, almost word for word, ours: "a national ventilation standard for schools, linked to health and learning outcomes", with retrofitting for the old, poorly ventilated buildings concentrated in disadvantaged areas - because poor air disadvantages children, as he put it, "even before they step into an exam hall" - and "a national entitlement for remote teaching". Clean air and a remote backstop are not lockdown measures. They are how you keep schools open - through the next pandemic, and through every ordinary winter of 'flu, RSV and Covid that empties classrooms now. A school with unsafe air is no more accessible to a Clinically Vulnerable child or family than a school with a stepped entrance is to a wheelchair user.
The question that matters
Lewis is entitled to conclude that school closures were the wrong decision. But before journalists declare the lessons of the pandemic settled, they should consider the subtleties in the evidence the Inquiry has now heard - including from the families at highest risk who were subjected to fines and threats of prosecution as they chose between a child's education and a credible risk to life.
The evidence suggests the debate was never simply about whether schools should be open or closed. It was about whether they could be kept open safely, flexibly and fairly - to provide education and support for every child. That is a completely different question, and it matters just as much now, before the next pandemic, as it did during the peaks of the last one.
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