29 September 2025

(10.29 am)

Opening Remarks by the Chair

Lady Hallett: Good morning.

Today we begin the public hearings into Module 8, investigating the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on children and young people across the United Kingdom.

The impact was severe, and for many, long lasting. Children and young people lost educational opportunities, they lost social interaction, they lost the protection from abuse they needed, they lost loved ones. Some suffered and are still suffering the debilitating consequences of Long Covid. Mental health issues in children and young people have increased significantly. This module will examine those issues and more.

I know a number of people were concerned about the timing of this module, knowing the effect that the passage of time can have on young memories. I understood that concern and so, in setting the Inquiry’s timetable, I sought assurance that we could obtain the evidence we needed for Module 8 and that many memories would not have faded. And so it has proved.

We’ve gathered the evidence in a number of ways, from witnesses who can speak directly of the impact to children and young people in their care or for whom they were responsible, from the Children and Young People’s Voices research project that the Inquiry commissioned, and from our listening project, Every Story Matters.

Ms Clair Dobbin, King’s Counsel, will explain more in a moment, but essentially we shall be hearing from children and young people themselves, albeit not directly. Their voices will be heard.

We shall start, as we always do, with an impact film. This is different from previous films, in that it includes the anonymous comments of children and young people taken from the research project. It is voiced by adults in order to protect the identities of those young people. I’m very grateful to all those who contributed to the project and to the making of the film.

There may be some who find parts of the film distressing. If you’re one of those, and following online, may I suggest you pause the live stream and return after about 22 minutes. If you are here at Dorland House and you would find the film distressing, please leave the hearing room in a moment.

The Inquiry’s website provides links to organisations which may be able to help, and at the hearing centre we have the Hestia counselling team ready to assist.

After the film has been played we shall reassemble and Ms Dobbin, Counsel to the Inquiry, will begin her opening submissions. She will set the scene, provide some background, and explain the issues we shall be examining in the module in more detail.

I will now pause for anyone who wishes to leave the hearing room or press pause on their device at home to do so.

Play the film, please.

(Impact film was played)

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Ms Dobbin.

Opening Statement by Lead Counsel to the Inquiry for Module 8

Ms Dobbin: Thank you.

My Lady, in Module 8 the Inquiry turns its lens to children and young people. Childhood is short. It’s the crucible within which all humans are forged, shaping the adults we become and the lives we lead. Five years on from the onset of the pandemic, and with the distance of time, it’s possible to forget quite how profoundly the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted the childhood of almost all children in the UK.

Not least, it demonstrated to a generation that there are existential threats and frightening events beyond those caused by adults, and beyond the control of any adult. For some children, that threat materialised into the loss of parents, grandparents, and people who they loved. Some children died from Covid-19 across the UK. Other children continue to live with the direct, long-term consequences of it, and their lives have been greatly changed too.

Across the UK, school closures and lockdowns brought an abrupt halt to most aspects of a child’s daily life. This went well beyond not being able to go to school. For younger children, it involved the curtailment of play, and of those services which support families in bringing them up.

For school-age children, the pandemic meant that they missed many of the important events and rights of passage that mark out their development, like the transition to primary school or to secondary school, and leaving school. It deprived children of much of the fun that makes a childhood: birthday parties, playing sport, proms, school trips, holidays; all everyday aspects of what it means to be a child but which comprised the very fabric of childhood.

Critically, it interfered with the ability of children to make and sustain friendships. Unable to see each other, children had to find new ways to communicate and of being with each other. And Module 8 will consider the rapid way in which children’s lives went online. And, of course, the pandemic also meant that wider families couldn’t see each other, and that children missed out on the sheer joy of physical contact with grandparents and other relatives. As one child told the Inquiry’s research project:

“When Boris said grandparents can go and see people, my gran [came to stay and] jumped into the bed, me and my sister started crying with happiness and she also slept with us like one or two nights.”

My Lady, that research project is the Inquiry’s Children and Young People’s Voices research, which you mentioned. It culminated in a report which was published on 15 September of this year and, with your permission, it will be adduced in evidence.

It was commissioned in response to the frequently made criticism that during the pandemic, children’s voices were not heard or their experiences not understood, and that decision making about them suffered as a consequence.

Of course, that’s a matter which will be investigated over the next four weeks, but it was vitally important to this Inquiry that Module 8’s work was guided and informed by what children said, not mediated through what adults said.

It was also recognised that calling children to speak about painful experiences in the public forum of an Inquiry would risk harming them. For that reason too, the Inquiry commissioned the children and young people’s research.

It was research which was trauma informed and participant led, and it meant that children and young people could share their experiences in a way that was safe and meaningful.

For the purposes of the report, 600 interviews were conducted with children and young people who were between the ages of 5 and 18 during the pandemic. 300 of those interviews were with a general sample of participants who were broadly reflective of the UK population.

300 were with a targeted sample of specific groups of children who evidence suggested were particularly impacted by the pandemic; and of course, some children fell into multiple groups of disadvantage.

And what those children said in the interviews has proved extremely important to the Inquiry in terms of allowing it to see into the reality of children’s lives, and also to understand more about what was helpful and what supported children during the pandemic too.

Another important source of information about children’s experiences is the Every Story Matters record for Module 8, drawn from the Inquiry’s Every Story Matters project. This comprises the personal accounts of parents, carers and professionals who worked with or cared for children across the UK, and it also included young people who are now 18-25 but who fell within the Inquiry’s definition of a child or a young person during the pandemic.

The Every Story Matters record for Module 8 draws upon almost 18,000 stories, and 429 targeted interviews, specifically documenting impact on children and young people.

And again, my Lady, with your permission, it will be adduced in evidence and published online today. And it will stand as a lasting account of the cost of the pandemic to children.

It wouldn’t be possible for me to do justice to that record and the multiplicity of experiences that people shared, or the accounts that children gave to the research project, in this opening, but what I will try to do in the course of it is to refer to extracts where they particularly illuminate the reality of children’s lives. But both documents form an important evidence base for this module.

And what they demonstrate is the willingness of children and the strength children showed during the pandemic in making sacrifices for the benefit of all of society as well as for their own families.

You’re going to hear evidence over the next few weeks about those children who had serious chronic illness during the pandemic and who were really scared about catching Covid-19. You’ll also hear about those children and families to whom Covid-19 posed a real risk, and the hardships they endured.

As one young person in Wales explained to Every Story Matters:

“We stuck to it all straight away. As soon as lockdown was announced, I was in. I didn’t see my friends for close to three months. We were having to walk almost an hour each way to our local town just to get the shopping in at that point. We were really scared. You don’t want to catch it yourself, never mind the fact that we had someone vulnerable living with us.”

Or in terms of the more general cost perhaps borne by children, another from Scotland explained:

“My younger sibling, who pre Covid attended a plethora of extra curricular activities and thrived in social situations, was reduced to a near-silent young person who no longer practised any of his Covid-19 activities, such as music, sport or scouting.”

The Children and Young People’s Voices report and Every Story Matters also demonstrate the real difference that some teachers and school staff made to children, and you’ll hear more about the role that they played not just in keeping schools open to some children but in supporting children and their families who were at home during periods of school closure and in need. In doing so, those who came into school or who went out to visit families put themselves and their own families at risk. So, too, did other professionals who continued to see families and children in person. And it’s important at the outset of Module 8 to acknowledge the dedication of these professionals to children, and the contribution that they made to keeping children safe and supported during the pandemic in what were often very difficult circumstances.

My Lady, Module 8 will be hard to listen to at some points, and of course much of its focus is on the difficulties that children faced, and the concerns that endure about how hard hit certain groups of children have been. But, my Lady, the Children and Young People’s Voices report is a reminder that even in the face of the most difficult of experiences, children have great capacity for endurance, and that love and support can make a critical difference to a child’s life.

A principal aim of this Inquiry is to make recommendations so that children might be better protected in a future pandemic, and on behalf of the Inquiry I’d like to express gratitude to everyone who participated in the Children and Young People’s Voices research and in Every Story Matters for contributing to that effort.

My Lady, may I turn, then, to the structure of this submission. In this opening, I’ll set out first what was known about the United Kingdom’s children on the eve of the pandemic. Second, the pandemic’s impacts on them. Third, some factual issues. And fourth, Module 8’s approach to the evidence.

Turning first, then, to the children of the United Kingdom. The evidence gathered by Module 8 demonstrates that prior to the advent of Covid-19, there were concerns about trends and children’s lives across the UK, and about the fragility of many of the services that care for, support and safeguard children.

That starting point is of particular consequence in Module 8, given evidence of how limited plans were prior to the first set of school closures, as announced on 18 March 2020, and the subsequent lockdown, to deal with the consequences and the risks to which children will be exposed by this abrupt end to their normal day-to-day life. Put shortly, the implications were huge, the announcement on 18 March to herald a period spanning two school years during which schools would be closed or subject to serious disruption.

By focusing on impacts, I am not, of course, inviting you to assess decision making through the perfect lens of hindsight. You may wish, however, to consider over the following weeks what was foreseeable about what might happen to children if they could not go to school, the sorts of infrastructure that might be required to educate most children in the UK in their homes, what might be needed to keep at-risk children safe, or to protect children subject to existing disadvantage from having their positions made even worse.

A specific example is disabled children, to whom the evidence will return. Many received specialist support and therapies in school and some families may receive support in the home to help them cope. You will hear evidence that special schools remained open, but you’ll also hear evidence that disabled children faced very distinct barriers in being able to physically attend school. And, as I’ll explain in the course of this opening, the pandemic brought into stark focus the differences in the lives of the poorest children in society as compared to those who live in relative comfort.

The Child Poverty Action Group from whom you will hear oral evidence explains, using the Households Below Average Income data, that in the year 2019 to 2020, 4.3 million children in the UK were living in relative poverty after housing costs; the equivalent of 30% of all children in the UK.

Citing the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Child Poverty Action Group states that 1.8 million children were living in the deepest level of poverty.

That thread of socioeconomic disadvantage, and its relationship to so many of the other disadvantages children are subject to, is woven throughout Module 8 and the evidence you will hear.

It is, of course, right to say that there are families for whom the pandemic brought welcome relief from the day-to-day grind of work, travel, and the pressures of the calendar, and which enabled them to spend time together. But children in well-resourced families encountered loneliness and distress too.

The evidence about children’s mental health suggests that its impacts have been felt across all children in society. Declines in mental health were a concern before the pandemic, but Dr Elaine Lockhart, chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, explains in her evidence to the Inquiry how rates of probable mental health disorder increased from 2020 to 2022.

But what is of particular concern is her evidence that the most recent data indicates concerning rates of prevalence persisting. In 2023, one in five children and young people between the ages of 8 and 25 had a probable mental disorder (including 20.3% of those aged 8 to 16), 23.3% of those 17-19 years of age, and 21.7% for 20-25-year olds.

And my Lady, we have that represented on a graph which is at INQ000588191.

Which, my Lady, I think gives some idea as to what has changed from 2017.

Thank you.

My Lady, in relation to that statistic, that almost one in four 17-19-year olds in 2023 had a probable mental health disorder, the expert to Module 8, Professor Newlove-Delgado, from whom you’ll hear evidence, notes the age of this cohort during the pandemic, and that they are group that will have experienced major transitions and milestones during the period of restrictions.

Her evidence also points to how some very specific groups of children were particularly vulnerable to developing mental health conditions too. So, for example, she points to evidence that young carers experienced higher levels of psychological distress and lower levels of wellbeing during the pandemic compared to those who were not young carers.

In terms of those working with children, one contributor to Every Story Matters who worked in child and adolescent mental health, said:

“When I first worked in CAMHS, I had maybe a couple of young people on my caseload who were displaying risk, whether self-harming or suicidal. When I left in 2024, it was probably more than half my caseload who were either self-harming or suicidal.”

The extent to which the pandemic caused or contributed to these declines in mental health will be explored in evidence. But it obviously raises the important question of whether there were children at particularly sensitive points in their development that rendered them more vulnerable to developing mental health conditions and whether that’s something that should be taken into account in planning for any future pandemic or national emergency.

The Children and Young People’s Voices research also makes clear just how important supportive relationships within the family were in terms of equipping children to cope and conversely, how hard it was for children to live in families where there was tensions and conflict. The Young Minds Charity, in its evidence to the Inquiry, makes the point that parents and carers are significant drivers of positive or negative mental health in young people, and they say that providing them with the skills to recognise and engage with the signs of mental health challenges in children is something which could be done to help equip families to deal better in any future national emergencies or pandemic.

My Lady, turning to younger children, play is of course an important part of their development and maintaining their wellbeing. In terms of the curtailment of play, children, like all members of society, were prohibited from leaving their homes, unless they had reasonable excuse, which included exercise.

The position of children wasn’t distinguished. In its evidence to the Inquiry, Save the Children emphasises the equal importance of play and socialisation to a child’s development as education. It notes that parks and playgrounds were policed and often closed.

One parent explained in Every Story Matters how the restrictions had a cumulative effect:

“My first son had just turned three and there was no nursery for him, no playgrounds to let him burn off energy, no walks longer than 30 minutes, no libraries, no play dates, no shopping, no trampoline park.”

For some parents and children, the difficulties were more acute. A voluntary and community groups professional from England explained that the mothers they supported were usually confined to a hotel or a hostel room. Being able to go out to parks or come to our project, all of these things help with their health, but being in a confined space where some of the young people don’t even have space to crawl or move about, I think this affected their walking because if they can get on the floor, that’s when they can walk, so delayed walking or crawling, because they’re sat in a chair or a cot for long periods.

Babies and young children were a source of particular concern during the pandemic because of their distinct vulnerability to deliberate harm within the home and of course, in the pandemic, this was in the context of reduced informal support, but also in the context of reduced health visiting capacity, certainly in parts of the United Kingdom, and the use of remote assessments by health visitors as well, which evidence suggests some were concerned might impede their safeguarding abilities.

And my Lady, you’ll hear about a consensus of opinion that now exists that in a future pandemic, ways must be found to maintain health visiting. You’ll also hear evidence about the registration of births being suspended in England and Scotland until it was realised that this was putting infants at risk.

The position of children under 5 and the particular implications of the pandemic for them and their development will be considered in further detail with the evidence of Professor Catherine Davies, the expert to Module 8.

My Lady, turning, then, to education. The defining universal consequence of the pandemic for school-aged children was the closure of schools to most of them. This is a principal and obvious focus of Module 8. School is the central structure, aside family, in most school-aged children’s lives. It’s not simply a place of education, critical though that might be to a child’s life chances. It provides routine; it’s where most children find their main friendship groups. It’s where they developed important skills and receive support to help them develop.

For others, and I will return to this, it serves a far more basic function: it’s a place of safety and where basic needs are met. The Children and Young People’s Voices report exemplifies why it is so important to listen to children in this regard. You’re going to hear evidence about the efforts that the governments of the UK and the devolved nations went to, to provide remote forms of education and devices to children who needed them. But it’s children who provide a realistic assessment of what barriers they faced when it came to keeping up with schoolwork. These range from the very basic, like having somewhere to work. A child explains:

“Especially because we only had one table, like a good table, so it was very hard balancing who could have a table and who could go on to the floor and work.”

Other children who did have access to devices were candid about what they were doing. One child explained:

“I was sitting there with no school playing Animal Crossing for, like, six months. I literally had no work for six months and no teacher ever called me. I just got to do what I wanted.”

Or the child who explained:

“I was mostly playing video games, just like Roblox, just like 24/7. Because of the fact we didn’t have much help during the online school, pretty much myself and a couple of friends, we would just play Roblox 24/7. I remember looking at my screen time and it was 17 hours. Like 17 hours daily, every single day. I think I ended up getting over that into 19 hours per day. I thought it was fine.”

Or the child who said:

“People would answer the remote lesson call in bed. People would be in science third lesson and would literally have the camera off and would be posting on their Instagram stories or their Snapchat stories, literally them watching The Only Way Is Essex or something like that. Like, no one was doing anything. I think it’s really hard to be motivated when you’re at home.”

Or the child who said:

“It was just all online and no one would … have their cameras or mics on and it was just really weird, so weird. It was just not motivating, like what’s the point? So I didn’t do much there”.

My Lady, of course that’s not representative of every child’s experience, but it is a compelling illustration of how hard it was for some children to stay engaged at home.

So in other words, it’s the child’s voice which demonstrates what the problems were beyond the provision of devices or children theoretically logging on to join a class, and it shows what really needs to be tackled if online forms of education are to be effective in any future pandemic.

For children subject to socioeconomic disadvantage, there was already a gap in their educational outcomes prior to the pandemic. This gap refers to the difference in attainment achieved by socioeconomically disadvantaged pupils and their peers.

In its evidence to the Inquiry, the Education Endowment Fund explains findings that it made in 2018. These included, importantly, that the disadvantage gap was not a problem found only in schools assessed by Ofsted as performing poorly. The gap was as large in schools rated outstanding as those rated inadequate. And although the attainment gap had reduced over the previous decade, the fund explained in 2018 it remained significant and, as a result of slow progress to close it, it would persist for decades.

My Lady, you’re going to hear further evidence about this from both Ofsted and the Sutton Trust about this disadvantage gap but, by way of example, in 2018 to 2019, based upon Department for Education statistics, at the end of primary school, pupils who were eligible for free school meals accounted for 42% of pupils with low prior attainment. And if you follow this through to secondary school, prior to the pandemic, disadvantaged children were twice as likely to leave formal education without GCSEs in English and maths than their better-off classmates.

And if I may, in terms – I touch briefly upon other children subject to existing disadvantage, again based upon Department for Education statistics. At the end of primary school, pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities also accounted for 42% of all pupils with low prior attainment, and I use that term to encompass additional support needs in Scotland and additional learning needs in Wales.

My Lady, to provide you with an idea of the scale of special educational needs, at the outset of the pandemic, in England, there were 1.3 million children with such needs, 295,000 of whom had an education, health and care plan indicating a higher level of need. There were 216,000 children in Scotland with additional needs, 104,000 in Wales, and 79,000 in Northern Ireland.

My Lady, I should say that the expert to Module 8 has concerns about the statistics in Northern Ireland, but I think that nonetheless gives you an idea of scale.

And my Lady, I’ll address you further about those children who were entitled to go to school, but for children with special educational needs who were at home, evidence suggests that they faced barriers to accessing remote education too.

My Lady, I turn then to children at risk and school as a place of safety.

In terms of the framework for safeguarding children, school are the constant eyes on children. It’s teachers and other staff in schools who know the children who are hungry or dirty, or who show other signs of neglect or injury, or who know the parents who raise concerns or suspicions. To borrow from what the British Association of Social Workers says in its evidence: schools are the early warning system.

And you’ll hear evidence about declines in the number of children who were referred to social services during periods of school closure.

As explained by Professor Driscoll, Professor of Children’s Rights at King’s College London:

“The pandemic forced the question of the role of schools in local safeguarding arrangements to the fore. Closure of schools starkly highlighted the importance of schools as the agency which knows children and families best, and the significance of school attendance as a protective factor.”

School is not, of course, the entire picture, and there are other parts of the state which bear important responsibilities for children, because the reality is there are carers who can’t cope or provide their children with inadequate care, or who actively pose a risk to them. The numbers of children who were cared for in 2020 speaks to this.

It’s important to acknowledge that for those children who had been removed from their families, one hardship caused by the pandemic was the interference with their ability to see their relatives. A particular instance of this described in the Children and Young People’s Voices report is powerful because of its understatement. A boy who was cared for by a local authority explains:

“They didn’t really let [me and my brother] have contact that much. I think we did anyway. We did sort of just on the Xbox and stuff … But I think during the end of the pandemic they started arranging, like, ten-minute phone calls and stuff … I guess it helps, but we grew up together so I think we still need more than that.”

Or the child who explains how the pandemic put her placement in foster care under pressure. She says:

“I think we were already heading that way but I think if we weren’t stuck in the house together all of the time it … might have ended differently if Covid wasn’t a thing … It was a long process [moving out] … like, when I think about it, two months living with people where … you’re not like, they are your family but you’re not family anymore is quite sad and traumatic … I have, like, talked to social services about going to therapy not because I’m sad but because I feel like when you’ve been through so many traumatic things your brain locks them away and I’d really like to unlock those things.”

A community worker from Scotland explained about an 11-year-old girl who she was involved with and cared for, that she’d been involved with her foster carer since she was 4. One of her foster carers had a respiratory problem and they asked the girl to leave, and the community worker goes on to explain:

“It was a very stable foster care placement that just totally disintegrated within couple of hours. So, her whole life changed from one day to the next because of these reactions by the adults around her. And it was heartbreaking.”

In March 2020, across the United Kingdom, there were children on a Child Protection Plan in England or on the Child Protection Register in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. These were the children identified as being at risk of significant harm. But in addition to that, there is a broader cohort of children in each part of the UK who meet the threshold of being children in need, and who are also provided or may be provided with statutory services.

My Lady, you’ll hear evidence that, for example in England, domestic abuse was the most commonly identified concern after local authority assessment as to whether a child was in need, which you’ll recall from Module 2 was anticipated to increase during lockdowns, based upon what was known about patterns, for example, during Christmas holidays.

The numbers of children in need must also be considered in the context of services which were struggling to meet their statutory objectives. For example, in August 2019, half of all local authority children’s services in England were deemed by Ofsted to be neither inadequate or requiring improvement. There were problems in Northern Ireland too. For example, there was evidence of the high numbers of cases which hadn’t been allocated to a social worker. And the Department of Health explains that, despite the funding that was provided to meet this concern, at the end of November 2024, the number of unallocated cases was more than double that there had been in 2019.

Whilst there are children who meet the statutory threshold for the provision of social care services, there was a much wider pool of children whose circumstances put them at risk. The vulnerable children and young people’s programme, one of the Cabinet Office’s priority programmes during the pandemic, prepared slides for a presentation on 17 April 2020 which referred to 1.9 million children, in the words of the slide, on a narrow measure, living in “high risk households”.

That contrasts with the Children’s Commissioner for England figures for 2019, which estimated that 2.3 million children were living with risk because of a vulnerable family background.

My Lady will ask more about these measurements and seek to clarify how vulnerability was being accessed, but it seems accepted on all hands that at the outset of the pandemic, there was a very large population of children in each part of the UK whose circumstances put them at risk but who were unknown to social care services, and who could become invisible in the context of school closures and lockdowns.

And, my Lady, the reality is that there were children who suffered grievous harm at the hands of their carers during the pandemic. The carers of those children bear responsibility for the violence and neglect inflicted on children and these children stand as the starkest examples of what adults are capable of doing to children behind closed doors. And these children are a salient reminder of the different ways in which children are vulnerable too, and of course we’ll touch on that in the course of the evidence.

And it’s important to say now that these cases are distressing to hear details of.

They include the death of Kaylea Titford, my Lady, just after her 16th birthday and whose parents were convicted of her manslaughter. Kaylea had spina bifida, used a wheelchair, and died in horrendous conditions. She was identified as a vulnerable child but she stopped attended school in March 2020 because she was shielding. She wasn’t subject to a care and support plan. She was due to return to school in October 2020 but she died before that could happen.

Mr Justice Griffiths, sentencing her parents, described it as a horrifying case, a case of sustained neglect leading to the death of a completely dependent, bedridden, vulnerable, disabled child at the hands of her own parents.

Whilst Kaylea’s death encapsulates the very worst of what can happen by a child going unseen or their conditions going unseen, or their needs unmet by their carers, there are important broader lessons to be considered about the nature of childhood vulnerability, about disability, and how children like Kaylea could be better protected in a future national emergency.

In her evidence to the Inquiry, Professor Driscoll explains that serious incident notifications to the Child Safeguarding Practice Review reached a peak in the year to 31 March 2021, the largest increase in the total number occurred between April and September 2020. Professor Driscoll notes that interpreting this data is complicated, and that the Department for Education position is that it’s not possible to say whether this peak was linked to the pandemic, but in its annual report, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review panel found that the Covid-19 outbreak continued to present a situational risk for vulnerable children and families.

And on the question of the reduced – the combined reduction in oversight, Professor Peter Green of the National Network of Designated Healthcare Leads, in his evidence to the Inquiry about safeguarding, points to the lack of external oversight by teachers, general practitioners, health visitors and social workers and refers to reports that sales of alcohol went up when hospitality venues shut down. He states it wasn’t hard to predict harm to children on an exceptional scale.

For all children at risk of not having their needs met at home or risk of abuse, the critical issue was their lack of visibility. And it leads to one of the first thematic issues which arises in Module 8: the question of whether, in the context of increased risk, standards of care afforded to children diminished.

In Module 8 this will be examined in some of these following ways: by considering the relaxation of laws across the UK intended to confer protection on children; the processes by which these relaxations were introduced, for example including criticisms about lack of consultation, and that includes, in England, in relation to the Adoption and Children (Coronavirus) Regulations, which were held to be unlawful by reason of failure to consult the Children’s Commissioner for England.

In Wales it encompasses the failure to conduct a child’s rights assessment for the first set of school closures. In both Scotland and Wales it encompasses criticisms and concerns that rights assessments were not undertaken with sufficient rigour.

In Northern Ireland, it includes evidence that there were failures to consult the Children’s Commissioner there on a myriad of issues.

And in terms of diminutions in standards for children, you’ll be asked to consider changes that were made to the duties to provide for the requirements set out in the plans for children with heightened special educational needs or disabilities. So, for example, in England, education, health and care plans, whereby the duty went from an absolute one in England and Northern Ireland to one of reasonable endeavour to provide, or best endeavours in Northern Ireland, and it’s understood that in Scotland these duties were suspended too, but that this didn’t happen in Wales.

It also includes how changes were made to how social work was provided to children, enabling social workers to see children remotely, which the British Association of Social Workers describes as enabling parents and carers to curate what social workers see.

Equally, parents and carers could use Covid-19 as a pretext to prevent social workers entering the home. Professor Harry Ferguson carried out research on social work during the pandemic and he gives evidence that whilst social workers creatively improvised, coronavirus and social distancing imposed limits to child protection that no amount of innovative practice could overcome in all cases. This undoubtedly meant that some children were left exposed to risks of harm by their parents or other carers.

In some situations, especially during the first lockdown, the children and family were only seen virtually by social workers and never in person. This happened less frequently as the pandemic progressed.

My Lady, that touches upon the risks children faced within the home, but what about external risks? At a meeting with the Security Minister within the UK Government on 24 March 2020, the then police lead on child sexual abuse and exploitation and former Chief Constable, Mr Simon Bailey, referring to China and Italy, said that you can see there will be increases of all forms of abuse, and that he had seen in his own force areas an increase in the level of domestic abuse and an uptick in offenders online.

He explained that there were early signs that more people had viewed indecent imagery in the previous two to three days than had in the previous two to three months.

In its evidence to the Inquiry, the National Crime Agency makes the simple point that school closures and furlough caused more children and child sexual abuse offenders to be online. The increased time that children spent online was identified as a threat. The National Crime Agency attributes boredom, lack of physical peer-to-peer interaction and increases in unsupervised access to an increase in children’s self-generated images being circulated.

Its conclusion, that is the NCA’s conclusion, that the restrictions imposed because of Covid triggered both temporary and accelerated ongoing changes to child sexual abuse offending, for several interrelated factors which contributed to this trend. But it includes issues like a surge in online exposure to harmful content. So for example, lockdowns leading to increased screen time for children, exposing them to inappropriate and harmful online content, including exposure to violent pornography, a rise in peer-perpetrated sexual abuse and the erosion of protected environments.

And the Children’s Commissioner in Northern Ireland gives a Northern Ireland-specific example of children being exploited and coerced to become involved in drug dealing and rioting in Northern Ireland, in 2021. But he points, in particular, to a huge amount of social media surrounding these riots, and he regards lockdown to have been a factor in this. He describes the pandemic as having “turbocharged” children’s online lives and having ushered in a normality whereby children spend large amounts of time online, including babies and toddlers.

My Lady, that evidence about how the pandemic changed or accelerated the way children use this technology, coupled with what appears to have been a weak and ineffectual regulatory framework – although Ofcom will be asked questions about this – clearly poses questions as to what children were being exposed to.

My Lady, I’ve touched upon children who were invisible or hidden at home, but there were other children who were largely invisible, as well, for different reasons and you’re going to hear evidence about this over the following few weeks, but they include children who were detained in the Children and Young People Secure Estate, a relatively small group of children, but the evidence about their treatment gives real cause for concern. It includes the length of time children were being locked up for and the extremely restrictive regimes applied to them.

There’s also evidence about the regimes, or the conditions within which children detained in hospital were subject to, and children who arrived in the UK as unaccompanied migrants. These were all children at risk of suffering from more heightened forms of isolation and thematic questions arise as to whether decision makers took sufficient account of the very distinct characteristics of children, and gave anxious consideration to whether children needed to be treated in the same way as adults.

My Lady, I’m going to turn, if I may briefly, then, to the facts and the decision to close schools across the UK.

The decision to close schools in each part of the UK, as announced on 18 March, had ramifications which are difficult to overstate. At the least, it gave rise to an immediate need to provide education to almost every schoolchild in the UK in their own home. In England, evidence that the Department for Education didn’t start planning for this closure of schools until after 16 March 2020 is a cause for alarm. Mr Jonathan Slater, the former Permanent Secretary to the Department for Education has provided evidence to the Inquiry that between January 2020 to 16 March 2020, the Department for Education’s contingency plans were premised on the assumption that schools and other education settings would remain open and that according to him that was in keeping with the government’s overall approach to pandemic preparedness at the time.

Sir Gavin Williamson’s written evidence is to the same effect. He explains, in his words, that there was a discombobulating 24-hour sea change from keeping schools open, on 16 March, to discussions about closing schools on 17 March. He explains that his focus from February to mid-March was on keeping schools, colleges and other settings open. He did not ask Department for Education officials to prepare an assessment on the impact of school closures, because school closures had not been recommended and Number 10 officials had not commissioned this advice from the Department for Education either.

According to Mr Slater, it would clearly have been much better if the Department for Education had been invited to start developing contingency arrangements for closing education settings at an earlier stage in the pandemic, because no contingency plan had been prepared beforehand. Similarly, Sir Gavin Williamson suggests that a reason why the Department for Education did not plan for the closure of schools was that Downing Street had not asked it to.

In his statement, the former Prime Minister, Mr Boris Johnson, takes issue with Sir Gavin Williamson’s characterisation of a 24-hour change in approach, and suggests that the Department for Education was aware of the possibility of closing schools. His evidence suggests, but it is a matter to be explored with him, that he thought that planning for school closures had been ongoing.

My Lady, this gives rise to the first of what appear to be some important differences in the evidence of these witnesses. You will hear evidence from Mr Johnson focused on these apparent disputed facts, and you will also hear evidence from Professor Sir Chris Whitty as well, as to his perspective on the advice that was given, as well, about the prospect of school closures.

Five years on, why does this matter? My Lady, it is my respectful submission that it is significant that there should be any dispute about whether planning for so seismic an event existed or any lack of understanding on the part of the Prime Minister as to the state of planning for school closures, given that it was he who ultimately made the decision to close schools to most children.

And perhaps alarming is the suggestion that it was not for the Department for Education to instigate its own planning for school closures, but to wait for it to be commissioned.

And again, I repeat, it’s critical because of the implications of closing schools to most children absent a robust plan as to how the consequences and risks of that decision would start to be mitigated; but, of course, it’s also important for the future and to potential recommendations about how scientific advice about school closures is provided and interpreted.

My Lady, that means that Module 8 will ask witnesses about the advice that was being provided by SAGE for from 4 February 2020 onwards about the role that mass school closures might play in limiting transmission, and why, from this point, advice appears not to have prompted the preparation of realistic, detailed plans as to how the consequences of possible mass school closures would be addressed, and that will be considered more in the detail of the hearings.

But a draft three-page note from the Department for Education of 15 March, which the Inquiry understands was finalised and provided it to the Cabinet Office, set out the stark headline implications of universal school closures in England which now needed to be confronted. They included that almost 9 million pupils could not be guaranteed to receive an education for the time their school closed, that remote learning would not work for all because schools’ ability to provide it would be hugely variable and many children didn’t have access to the relevant kit, and many didn’t live in adequate home environments, that the most vulnerable children were much safer in school than out of school, that parents and siblings of children with special needs or disabilities would face a higher burden of care.

My Lady, I think we’ve reached a point, in fact we may have overrun, and if I have, I apologise –

Lady Hallett: No –

Ms Dobbin: – but I think it might be time for a break.

Lady Hallett: Of course.

As those who haven’t been involved in the Inquiry hearings before will understand, we take a 15-minute break every so often, for the sake of the stenographer primarily, but everybody else as well. So I shall return at midday.

(11.45 am)

(A short break)

(12.00 pm)

Lady Hallett: Ms Dobbin.

Ms Dobbin: Thank you.

My Lady, before the adjournment, we had reached 15 March. Module 8 will consider in further detail the events which took place between 16 and 18 March, leading to the announcement that schools would close in each part of the UK, including whether any of the other parts of the United Kingdom were any further advanced in their preparations. But indications are that they were not.

The Welsh Government acknowledges in its opening submissions that there was inadequate planning to close schools for most children in March 2020. The Scottish Ministers identify in their opening submissions that there was limited preparedness at all levels of the system and that contingency planning had not anticipated long-term school closures for most children and young people.

The evidence submitted on behalf of the Department for Education in Northern Ireland explains that because there was no agreed Executive Committee position prior to 18 March on whether or not schools should close, officials maintained the basic position that all schools should remain open unless advised to do otherwise.

And the department was not involved in the discussions and not aware of what discussions took place at a higher level prior to the announcement to shut all schools as made by the First and deputy First Ministers.

Although it is suggested by the Director-General of Education and Justice within the Scottish Government that preparations for closures were a key focus of joint discussions between officials in the sector from February onwards, advice to the Deputy First Minister of 17 March 2020 suggested that a communication had been issued to local authorities only the week before, asking that they consider their arrangements for maintaining protections and support for vulnerable children in the event of localised school closures.

The email chain expressed the view that it must be for local authorities to make arrangements that were most suited to their local circumstances.

My Lady, I turn then to a different subject: that of mitigating the impacts of school closures. As stated at the outset of this opening, there was, at the eve of the pandemic, good reason to be concerned about the precariousness of many children’s lives, the level of disadvantage they faced, and the fragility of services to children across the UK. Two of the principal actions taken to mitigate the effect of school closures were the policy of allowing vulnerable children to attend school, and provision of remote forms of education to children in their homes.

In terms of the Vulnerable Children Policy, each part of the United Kingdom arrived at its own definition of a vulnerable child for the purposes of enabling them to attend school. Each part of the UK included those children who had a social worker, so in other words, those children at the highest index of risk, and they also provided for a discretion for schools and local authorities to deem a child as vulnerable as well, and they included other children too.

But, my Lady, witnesses raise concern about the approach that was taken. There is an obvious question of importance for the future as to how any government can get or persuade one section of carers or families to send their children to school when everyone else is being told of the grave risks of a disease or of the risks of overwhelming the health service.

Issues are raised about how some of the messaging was put, so for example, in an early iteration of guidance in England, the preamble stated:

“If children can stay safely at home, they should …”

Or in Scotland:

“… but we need to keep the number of children taking up these places – whether … in schools – or other settings – to an absolute minimum. The priority must be for children of the most critical key workers and the most vulnerable children in our society.”

These examples raise obvious questions as to what families will self-identify as incapable of keeping their children safe at home or identifying their own children as vulnerable.

Equally, the families who pose the most risk to children might be the least motivated to send their children to school. And how are schools and social workers to differentiate between families at genuine risk from a child getting Covid-19 and those for whom closures present an opportunistic way of avoiding school attendance?

Another criticism is that, at least in England, the guidance omitted children with special educational needs. There may be an issue as to the large number of children with such needs, but some witnesses question whether a more nuanced approach could have been taken.

In Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the plans did not envisage that individual schools would remain open. Rather that hubs or clusters would operate. And there’s a question as to whether this specific form of provision was less attractive.

But the point is this, my Lady: during the first set of school closures, children attended school in very low numbers indeed, and perhaps if I can have on screen INQ000588179. This a table prepared by Professor McCluskey, the education expert to Module 8, and my Lady, what it demonstrates is that children who physically attended school in England represented about 1.7% of the wider pupil population on average. The share of pupils attending school in Scotland and Wales during the first period of school closures was estimated to be about 1% of all pupils, and in Northern Ireland it was estimated to be 4.1 – sorry, 0.4%.

And it quickly became apparent after 20 March 2020 that the proportions of vulnerable children who were attending school was very low indeed across the UK, and you’ll hear evidence about what was done to try to address that. But given the centrality of school attendance for vulnerable children as a means of protecting them, it is, my Lady, important that you consider why, in the first set of school lockdowns, they attended in so few numbers, the extent to which this improved during the second set of national school closures and what can be learnt from this.

And of course, this evidence raises the stark question of what was happening to vulnerable children who were not attending school, and what was compensating for any increased risks to which they were exposed.

For those children with an education, health and care plan in England, guidance from 22 March 2020 advised that a risk assessment for each child and young person be carried out before they could attend. Criticism has been made of widespread variation and whether and how this policy was implemented and you’ll hear evidence of families not being offered risk assessment at all.

But my Lady, in the first set of school closures, the reality is that most children stayed at home, regardless of background, regardless of risk, regardless of disadvantage, and the only education they were able to receive was that which was provided to them in their home.

I turn, then, to remote education. You’re going to hear evidence about the sorts of education that was being provided. It might include children being set tasks to do, or for some children it might have involved live, online teaching or the provision of a recorded lesson. The Sutton Trust in its evidence suggest that in the initial stages of the pandemic in deprived areas, schools were more likely to set work with physical sheets or work books, and you’ll hear about – you’ll hear evidence about provision in the state sector being very mixed, whereas private schools had a more – had more mature systems and ability to pivot to the provision of live lessons.

There was no requirement in England to provide any form of remote education until 22 October 2020. And consistent with the evidence that the Department for Education hadn’t planned for mass school closures prior to 18 March, prior focus on remote education was limited. This was confirmed by Mr Slater who says that prior to 18 March 2020, the government’s focus was on keeping schools open and plans for remote education were not being developed at a systemic level.

The scale of the challenge involved in providing education to children in their homes was huge, not least because of the numbers of children who didn’t have inadequate access to a device. A draft business case prepared for the Department for Education in June 2020 makes this clear. It estimated that there were 1.3 million children aged under 19 who lacked access to an appropriate device that they could use for their continued education or social care support.

In Wales, there was an existing online learning platform which had been launched as long ago as 2012, but it’s acknowledged on behalf of the Welsh Government that although this gave Wales a head start in the provision of remote learning prior to 18 March, only outline work had been completed on the practical details of how remote learning would be provided.

My Lady, you’ll hear evidence that there was existing and mature online platforms in Northern Ireland and Scotland too, but Module 8’s expert will be asked in her evidence about the extent to which this existing provision actually translated into an advantage for children in those parts of the UK. But it seems clear that across the UK, children lacked access to devices.

And my Lady, as I’ve touched upon, the evidence from the Children and Young People’s Voices research also speaks to those other barriers that children faced too. In its report, the National Foundation for Educational Research, which was published in July 2020 but which set out research on education that had been provided in April, and which covered all four nations of the UK, set out some stark findings about what was being provided by way of remote education.

It found that almost all pupils received some remote learning tasks, almost half of all children in exam years 11 and 13 were not provided with work, and my Lady, that’s likely connected to the fact that exams had been cancelled. Just over half of children receiving remote education did not usually have online lessons, that is live lessons; getting work sheets or recorded video was more common. Most people spent less than three hours a day on remote learning.

That was consistent with Ofcom’s report, Report from Revealing Reality, so Ofcom Children’s Media Lives – Life in Lockdown report dated August 2020. My Lady, this provided analysis of the findings from a Covid-19-specific wave of the longitudinal Children’s Media Lives, and although – and the report explains this – it was a relatively small sample, but the participants had been chosen to reflect a broad cross-section of children across the UK in terms of age, location, ethnicity, social circumstances and access to technology.

And in its summary of key findings, Ofcom concluded that children learning remotely were not doing as much schoolwork as they would in regular time and that this meant most children were lacking structure and routine and were instead spending a large amount of time online, and alone in their rooms, although some developed a more structured routine.

Ofcom states:

“TikTok was hugely popular, rivalling other media activities. Most were using the TikTok app for several hours each day and reported that it was a good way to ‘kill time’. This study found that most of the children in the sample, not in school, were completing around one or 2 hours of schoolwork a day.”

And my Lady, you’ll hear evidence either commissioned by the Department for Education or that it was aware of, and that includes, for example, Ofsted’s report published in July 2020, which were also consistent about the variability of education that children were receiving whilst schools were closed.

My Lady, you’ll hear evidence from the Department for Education in England about how the provision of remote education improved, particularly during the second set of school closures and as I’ve said, about the greater numbers of vulnerable children who attended. But my Lady, you’ll wish to test and ask questions in relation to the proportion of vulnerable children who continued not to attend school.

My Lady, I’m going to touch very briefly on some of the facts in relation to January 2021. The short point is that it was clear, both during the first set of school closures and after, that they had been seriously detrimental to children. And from September 2020 onwards, across the UK, each nation strove to keep schools open and despite rising rates of transmission, but of course by 4 January 2021, that policy had failed because, once again, schools had to close to most children.

The reasons why, and specifically the epidemiological rationale for these closures is all the more important, given Sir Gavin Williamson’s evidence to the Inquiry. In summary, he states that the decision to close schools in January 2021 was not required, and that, in his words, it was a panicked decision made without having children’s interests front and centre.

My Lady, Mr Johnson rejects that characterisation of the decision, and both will be asked questions about what appears again to be a significant difference in their evidence.

Sir Gavin Williamson suggests in his evidence that he considered plans for mass testing in schools to be adequate, to meet the challenges that the Alpha, or Kent, variant posed, but that’s an issue which requires scrutiny, particularly, for example in light of evidence that – revealed by a paper of 15 December 2020, that there would be a need to identify, train and mobilise 49,000 people by 4 January 2021 in order to implement testing, and it was suggested that this would require the deployment of military personnel across the country.

So, my Lady, those issues and where the plans for testing actually stood will be considered, and you’ll also hear a bit about the position that had been reached, as well, in each of the other parts of the United Kingdom also in that regard.

But as you know from Module 2, in England, many primary schools both opened and closed on 4 January, and the issue, putting to one side Sir Gavin Williamson’s view that this was a decision that this was a mistake, is the apparent chaos of the situation in the days leading up to that, despite the experience of March 2020. And you’ll hear evidence from the senior education leader Sir Jon Coles, about this. He reflects in his written evidence to the Inquiry that:

“The events prior to the second closure period were worse. In the space of a week immediately before the Christmas break – when leaders (particularly in London) were already managing local concerns resulting from rising infection rates – the government announced that schools could designate 18 December … as an additional INSET day, that all secondary schools would be expected to arrange for mass asymptomatic testing of staff and students at the start of term, and that secondary schools should have a staggered start to term …”

And he goes on to say that it was initially unclear that the secondary staggered start was an instruction rather than a permissive piece of guidance, and he gives evidence that he sent a message expressing his serious concern about the lack of coordination and clarity in government messaging.

So again, my Lady, in January 2021, the ordinary day-to-day life of most children came to an end and for a considerable period of time.

My Lady, this opening has been an attempt to synthesise just some of the issues of fact and the thematic issues about which you will hear evidence. Time doesn’t permit me to presage them all, but to return overall to the impacts that the pandemic has had for children, the evidence suggests that these are interlinked to pre-existing problems than to specific aspects of the pandemic and to each other, as well.

In terms of the longer-term impact of the pandemic on educational outcomes, you will hear expert evidence about the gaps which have closed since the pandemic, and those which endure. In this regard, the Education Endowment Foundation points to findings in October 2024 that the disadvantage attainment gap remains wider than pre-pandemic, that longer-term challenges from the pandemic persist. The longer-term fallout of the pandemic is evident in challenges reported by schools. The most common challenges reported were absences, difficulties obtaining external support for pupils, and increased staff workload relating to pupil behaviour and wellbeing.

The Education Endowment Fund concludes that whilst there had been several years of progress in closing the attainment gap up to 2017, the gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers is significantly wider than it was before the pandemic.

My Lady, one of the gravest impacts that you’re going to hear evidence about is the extent to which rates of absence from school have deteriorated since the pandemic. Ofsted describes it as having had long-term impacts on attendance which are stubborn and persistent. The picture in England is, in its words, “stark and alarming”. The headline figures reveal why: persistent and severe absentees in state secondary schools have risen from 13.7% in 2018 to 25.6% in 2023 to 2024.

A separate and very worrying trend is the number of children who have been taken out of school entirely, ostensibly to be home educated. But you’ll hear evidence about who some of these children are and why it’s such a cause for alarm.

In Wales, the Chief Inspector of Education and Training has provided evidence that secondary school pupils are missing on average nearly 11 days of education more per year than before the pandemic. Year 11 children have the lowest attendance: in 2023 and 2024 missing nearly one out of six days in their schooling.

And of course, my Lady, you’ll notice again that these are children who were transitioning to secondary school during the pandemic.

There’s also a significant gap at secondary school between children eligible for free school meals and those who aren’t. On average, secondary school students eligible for free school meals in Wales are losing one day a week of their education.

And the position is also true in Wales that children electively home educated is becoming significantly higher. It’s more than doubled from 2019 to 2022.

In Scotland in the year 2023 to 2024, school attendance was at a ten-year low. The rate of persistent absence was 31.4% of all pupils, as compared to a pre-Covid level of around 20%.

And the picture is similar in Northern Ireland. The number of pupils with an absent rate of 10% or more increased by 123% from 2017/18 to 2023/24, and it’s reported that 4.9 million school days were missed, 2023/24.

And in its evidence to the Inquiry, Barnardo’s highlights that youth unemployment reached 642,000 in December 2024. The number and the increase in the number of young people not working because of their mental health has been rising since the pandemic, according to Barnardo’s.

And this is evidence echoed by the Youth Futures Foundation. They state that analysis of data up to January to March 2025 shows that 12.5% of those aged 16-24 in the United Kingdom are not in education, employment, or training, and that this has risen since the pandemic.

And again, my Lady, you may wish to reflect on the ages that these young people, too, would have been during the pandemic.

In 2025, nearly half of all young people who are not in education, employment or training, reported having a disability. The Youth Futures Foundation thinks that the pandemic has compounded the problem because the proportion of young people with a disability citing mental health as their main health problem has risen to 67.9%.

My Lady, I was going to move on, if I may, then, to Module 8’s approach.

So before I finish this submission and pass the baton on to Core Participants, it’s important that I explain the approach which Module 8 has taken to the evidence and to clarify an important preliminary point.

Of course much of the focus in this module will be on the harms caused to children by the steps taken to limit transmission of Covid-19. That focus does not imply, on the part of the Inquiry, any conclusion that the decisions to close schools or to lock down were wrong or not justifiable, having regard to what was known or indeed not known at the time.

The broad statement which emerged during the pandemic, and the concerns which informed it, that schools should be the last to close and the first to open during a pandemic appears now to be accepted by many as the right approach. But that approach might have to yield in the face of a virus more transmissible than Covid-19, or with a higher mortality rate than Covid-19, or which is more lethal to younger people.

It’s acknowledged by the Inquiry that the fact that Covid-19 did not pose a risk of death or of very severe illness to most children should not be a cause for complacency. It appears that these are questions that will be put to Professor Chris Whitty, but no scientist can say that a future pandemic is unlikely to pose a greater risk to children’s lives than did Covid-19.

It need only be contemplated for a moment what it would have been like had Covid-19 posed the same risk to children as it did to older people, or indeed if it had killed more younger parents, to see why it’s important that Module 8 avoids simplistic approaches.

Module 8 will call evidence from witnesses about how schools might be made more resilient to future pandemics. This has sometimes been described in this module as the “safer schools” point. My Lady, you’re aware from previous modules that it’s open to significant question whether rigorous use of ventilation, air-cleaning technology and other infection prevention and control measures can make an environment safe against a virus, dependent, amongst other factors, on its mode of transmission. There are features about schools that make them distinct in relation to infection control measures, having regard, for example, to the way that children in secondary schools move around for classes, to the age and condition of parts of the school estate, to the ways in which young children behave in school.

Infection prevention and control measures in schools will be explained with witnesses, but it seems unlikely that any witness will be able to evaluate the extent to which such measures could afford protection against a future unknown disease.

So Module 8 will therefore seek to investigate in all directions, recognising that school closures and lockdowns, whilst enormously damaging, might nonetheless be needed in the future, and that therefore it’s critical to assess the sorts of actions which are effective in mitigating the impacts of school closures and lockdowns, and that whilst ventilations and other infection prevention and control measures might be of assistance in a future pandemic, it can’t be said that they would obviate the need for future school closures.

My Lady, the Core Participants before you include organisations which represent children who have Long Covid, children who are clinically vulnerable, or who have family members who are, and also those who represent disabled children.

The children in these groups faced very specific hardships because of the pandemic. For these children, the risks and consequences of them catching Covid-19 were and still are life changing, either for them directly or for their families.

In respect of clinically vulnerable children or those with a clinically vulnerable family member, the Children and Young People’s Voices report conveys very clearly the anxiety and distress experienced by children because they were worried about getting Covid-19 or worried and frightened about passing it on to people in their families and about losing their parents. Their fear is hardly surprising, given the sheer number of people who were dying from Covid-19.

This is captured in the Every Story Matters report in an account from a therapist who stated:

“That was a big thing actually, a lot of people blaming themselves for Covid deaths in the family. There was a lot of talk and a lot of things on the news about children spreading it and not protecting our elderly. You’d get kids with all this guilt and shame because grandma died and [they’re] blaming themselves and that was really common.”

One child recounted in the Children and Young People’s Voices report that her little brother had complications from chemotherapy. She explained:

“It was quite hard and it was quite sad because obviously he was so young … We would just be upstairs while he would be downstairs and he will just be screaming because he hates injections, so it was quite hard; it’s not that we could go on walks and not hear that, so we would have to hear it.”

My Lady, that’s a reminder that beyond definitions of clinical vulnerability will sit experiences of parents and children dealing with the fears and sadness of chronic and serious illness, but in the heightened, uncertain and frightening context of a pandemic.

And as regards children with Long Covid, you’ll hear evidence, for example, of what it was like to experience the denial of or the reluctance to accept its existence.

In relation to both of these groups of children, many of the issues which Module 8 will investigate will also encompass issues which are just of as much importance to them as other children. For example, digital inequalities, the provision of remote forms of education, and the quality of that provision.

In relation to disabled children, I’ve sought to highlight throughout this submission how the pandemic compounded the disadvantages they already faced in many different ways, but, my Lady, I won’t say more about this because you’ll hear important and illuminating evidence from Ms Toman on behalf of the Disabled People’s Organisations about this.

My Lady, it’s the intention of Module 8 over the next four weeks to explore how some of the most significant decisions which affected children were made, the challenges in implementing those decisions, and the impacts of those decisions. This is all with an eye, of course, to the making of recommendations, to help ensure that children are better protected in any future pandemic or national emergency.

Almost 300 statements have been disclosed to Core Participants on Module 8. Module 8 is extremely grateful for the obvious care, attention, and work that went into providing these very detailed statements. These form a valuable and comprehensive evidence base.

From these witnesses, 49 individuals will be called to give oral evidence. These witnesses have been carefully selected based upon your general approach to hearings in this Inquiry. A number have been called because there are issues of fact which need to be put to them for reasons of accountability or because they personally might be subject to criticism, and it’s important to allow them the opportunity to develop their written evidence.

Other witnesses have been asked to give evidence in order to assist understanding about their firsthand experiences of working with children and young people during the pandemic.

The Inquiry obtained more than 30 statements from schools across the UK. In the course of the hearings, evidence will be given by a school leader from a school in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, and from three multi-academy trusts in England. Their evidence is not intended to be representative of schools across the United Kingdom, but rather, to serve as examples of individual experiences of what their schools or the schools in their trust faced during the pandemic, and what those schools did to support children.

The Inquiry issued surveys to all local authorities in England, Wales and Scotland, to better understand the impact that Covid-19 had on local authority responsibilities for children. The Local Government Association provided an extremely detailed and helpful report to the Inquiry which synthesised the responses to the survey. Based upon that, a smaller number of local authorities were selected to provide detailed evidence in the form of witness statements. Arising out of those statements, two directors of children’s services at a local authority in England and Wales have been asked to provide oral evidence. They are from Powys County Council and Kent County Council.

But again it’s important to reiterate that their evidence is not intended to be representative of all local authorities. These witnesses were asked to give evidence because of specific issues that arose in their areas. A witness from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities will give evidence about the impact of the pandemic on children’s services in Scotland, but because local authorities don’t have the same role in Northern Ireland, as their counterparts in the rest of the UK, there isn’t an equivalent Northern Ireland witness.

The point has been made a number of times in Module 8 but it bears repeating, my Lady, that the written evidence and contemporaneous documentary evidence is just as important as the oral evidence.

It was said by me at a preliminary hearing that Module 8 would not seek to replicate evidence across each of the devolved administrations. It’s not the purpose of Module 8 to set out a chronological narrative about decision making across the United Kingdom. Nor is that necessary. The principal policies which affected children across the UK – school closures, cancellation of exams, lockdowns, and the main government actions to mitigate the effect of these decisions – were largely the same throughout the United Kingdom.

There are some differences, but they do not appear to Module 8 to be so significant so as to warrant exactly the same evidence being called across the UK.

There are some exceptions that are more substantial, for example the differing approaches that were taken to the rule of six across the UK, and that difference will be considered. But differences of this nature are the exception rather than the rule.

In addition, you will hear evidence from some UK-wide organisations who will give evidence about impacts across the UK. It’s accepted that there are regional disparities across the UK, for example having regard to educational attainment, but that appears to be the position in each part of the UK. In other words, the broad picture of the impacts of the pandemic and which children were disadvantaged appears consistent across each part of the UK.

In addition, my Lady, you heard evidence about the decision to close schools in Modules 2, 2A, B and C, from witnesses including Mr John Swinney, Mr Mark Drakeford, Ms Eluned Morgan, Mr Vaughan Gething, Lord Weir, and also from Baroness Foster, and Ms O’Neill, who was the then deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland about how decisions to close schools were made.

You will hear evidence from some devolved administration witnesses again, and it may be that their evidence overlaps with evidence that they gave in Module 2, but Module 8 is going to endeavour not to repeat questions that have already been asked, and my Lady, it’s obviously important that no one loses sight of the fact that this is the eighth module of a single inquiry which has already heard a vast amount of evidence, some of which is important to Module 8.

But conversely in Module 2, you didn’t hear evidence from important witnesses like Sir Gavin Williamson or Ms Vicky Ford, the former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Education who had responsibility for children’s social care.

And, my Lady, the witness timetable has been structured so that witnesses are grouped together by topic or theme where it’s been possible, and with your permission, the Inquiry will ensure that on any given day, other statements relevant to the issue or statements from the – relevant to the issue or statements from the devolved administrations touching on the same issues are published.

My Lady, evidence of the ongoing impacts of the pandemic on children show how consequential it has been for children and that it’s had a long reach. These consequences reveal much to future decision makers about how critical it is to understand children’s lives, and the potential for decisions that are disruptive of childhood to have powerful aftershocks.

The pandemic may also reveal deeper truths about how we as a society treat children, and what we expose them to.

On behalf of all of those who are contributed to Module 8, including Core Participants, I hope that we may, in a way that is collegiate and respectful, assist you in throwing light on that.

My Lady, that’s the conclusion of the opening submission. I think it’s important, though, that I say that we are all only in this room and this opening can only be given and the witnesses called because of a huge amount of work and industry that has been done by junior counsel, the solicitor’s team, and the paralegal team as well. And it’s important that I make that clear, and of course, it goes without saying that there will be people that sit behind all of the Core Participants too, who have contributed to that effort.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Ms Dobbin.

Looking at the time, Mr Broach, you could go now if you wanted to, or I know you were expecting to go this afternoon. It’s up to you.

Mr Broach: I’m in your hands, my Lady. I’m ready if it would assist or we can take the adjournment.

Lady Hallett: Go now.

Mr Broach: Very good, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Submissions on Behalf of Children’s Rights Organisations by Mr Broach KC

Mr Broach: My Lady, I appear for the Children’s Rights Organisations, or CROs, with Ms Twite and Ms Jichi of counsel and as your Ladyship knows, the CROs are five leading organisations working in the field of children’s rights: Save the Children UK, Just for Kids Law, the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, the Centre for Young Lives and the Child Poverty Action Group. The CROs are committed to championing children’s rights in addressing inequalities and structural discrimination as well as working directly with children and young people.

My Lady, with the formal opening of this module the Inquiry reaches what in our submission is one of the most significant and frequently the most overlooked aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic: the impact of Covid and the governmental response to it on children and young people, and at the outset, the CROs wish to recognise and acknowledge the devastating impact the pandemic has had on children and young people and their families, including those who lost their lives, who lost people they loved, those now suffering from Long Covid and those whose childhoods and adolescence were harmed in a way which has either not yet been realised or remedied.

My Lady, all the CROs have filed witness statements seeking to assist the Inquiry with their evidence as to the experiences of children during the pandemic. A core theme of that evidence is the need to take a holistic view of the impact of the pandemic on children and the full range of their rights, extending beyond the most obvious issues such as school closures.

All the CRO witnesses emphasise how devastating the pandemic and the government reaction to it was, for a wide range of children and young people, and how important it is that lessons are learned so that the best interests and rights of children are incorporated into the day-to-day functioning of government, ensuring that the response to the next civil emergency can seamlessly prioritise the rights and interests of children rather than treating them as an afterthought at best.

The CROs remain grateful for the grant of Core Participant status in this key module for children. We welcome the range of other Core Participants who have interest and expertise in children’s rights, noting in particular the expertise of our fellow NGOs Article 39 and CORAM.

We are grateful for the open and inclusive approach taken by the full Module 8 team in working with Core Participants, including in relation to both the preliminary hearings for this module.

My Lady, we filed some written submissions for today, and those can be summarised in three headline points. First of all, we say that the rights and interests of children and young people were routinely overlooked or deprioritised throughout the pandemic, and, indeed, were actively undermined at times when statutory entitlements were taken away or diluted.

Our second point is that this lack of focus on the rights and interests of children was systemic. It wasn’t an unfortunate oversight; it resulted from a failure to embed the rights and interests of children in the centre of the machinery of government.

Third, we would emphasise that the impact of the pandemic on children and young people was not uniform, in part due to the reduction in public funding over many years in both children’s education, health and social services, leading to certain groups suffering significantly more than children generally, a matter acknowledged, and in a way we welcomed, by Counsel to the Inquiry in opening. Babies and infants, children and young people from black and racialised communities, looked-after children and those with special educational needs and disabilities, children living in poverty, including those from the lowest income families, children in the criminal justice system and children detained in prison or psychiatric care, the full gamut of the experiences of those groups of children we say needs to be carefully considered in this module.

In particular, we submit that the key evidence the Inquiry needs is not whether children were routinely overlooked throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. We submit that’s overwhelmingly clear on the evidence that your Ladyship has already received. What the Inquiry needs to understand, in our submission, is why this happened, and what needs to be put in place now to ensure that the rights and interests of children are at the centre of the response to the next civil emergency.

The written evidence before the Inquiry for this module puts beyond doubt that many children suffered significant and long-term harm during the pandemic, and we submit that much of this harm was unnecessary, and we invite the Inquiry to take stock of the fact that it’s clear, we say beyond doubt, that many children suffered unnecessary harm from the governmental response to this civil emergency, and we reiterate that the central focus should therefore be on understanding how this could have happened and what can be done differently next time.

Our theme that that harm resulted directly from the structural deprioritisation of children and their rights by the UK Government over many years leading up to 2020 is something that we will reiterate in our closing submissions, and we will refer the Inquiry to the extensive evidence of swingeing cuts to children’s services and youth services in the years leading up to the pandemic and the very significant negative impact these had on the wellbeing of children and young people, the theme of fragility of services to which Counsel to the Inquiry referred in opening, and we agree with the submission from Counsel to the Inquiry that the impact of the pandemic was interlinked with pre-existing problems.

We say the pandemic applied rocket fuel to the structural disadvantages that children faced in a context where key decisions were taken without any or any sufficient regard to what the impact on them would be.

In that regard, we adopt the evidence of Helen MacNamara, the Deputy Cabinet Secretary during the pandemic, who, during evidence for Module 2, described her concern about the invisibility of children in pandemic decision making. The Inquiry has evidence for this module of multiple failures to consult even the relevant children’s commissioner adequately or at all when key decisions were taken.

We welcome the approach that the Inquiry is clearly taking that children will not be treated as a homogeneous group in this module. The Voices report demonstrates the experiences of the pandemic and the government response to it varied widely among children, and we say the pandemic both exacerbated pre-existing inequalities and structural discrimination, such as widening the attainment gap between children living in poverty and their peers, and impacted vulnerable children the hardest, and it’s essential that the module prioritises the experience of those who were hardest hit.

We picked out, for example, disadvantaged children whose physical and mental health suffered most from lack of clarity as to lockdown messaging, as they did not have the private outdoor space that their more affluent peers might have benefited from.

In our submission, both the disproportionality of the lockdown rules on children and the lack of clarity as to their application lead to far greater harms than were necessary. It appears to the CROs from the written evidence for this module that the detriment to children which would inevitably accrue from interventions such as the rule of six was simply not considered adequately or at all by relevant decision makers at the time.

And equally, decisions about what services to close or open often prioritised adults or the economy over children’s wellbeing, with playgrounds closed in some areas while pubs were open.

We ask the Inquiry to ensure that this module adopts a children’s rights framework and takes a holistic view of childhood which goes well beyond the most obvious and important impacts, such as school closures and exam chaos, and we support what our colleagues from Article 39 say in this regard: that each of the issues should be considered through the lens of the UK’s UNCRC obligations.

And we do urge the Inquiry to continue to maintain a focus on rights that are particularly important to children and young people themselves, such as the right to play. We reiterate that play is as important to children as education and, although obviously important, whether schools were open or closed was not the sole determining factor, or even necessarily the most important factor, in relation to outcomes for children during the pandemic. Many of the most vulnerable children were not in school or able to access school at the start of the pandemic.

But we agree with Counsel to the Inquiry that schools can be places of safety and places where basic needs are met, and we say the implications of this were not properly thought through by decision makers.

We would emphasise issues outside the school context, including the brutal conditions for children in prison during the pandemic, the treatment of children in police custody, increased criminalisation of children during lockdown, particularly those from black and other racialised groups and/or living in economically disadvantaged communities, and the impact on children and young people who had other contacts with the police during the pandemic.

We remain keen to ensure that issues of poverty and inequality are addressed and interwoven across the list of issues for the module. As Counsel to the Inquiry highlighted, a thread of socioeconomic disadvantage runs through the impact of the pandemic.

The poverty experienced by many children meant that they and their families were less resilient to the economic shock bought by the crisis, as well as less able to mitigate some of the impacts, and maintaining poverty such as the two-child limit and the overall benefit cap, which decouple need from the level of support in a way which the CRO say is unjustified at all times, became even less justifiable in a pandemic, as families rarely had the opportunity to increase their earnings from work and were less in control of their overall income.

My Lady, in writing, the CROs have set out our preliminary position on the key recommendations needed, including the focus on ensuring children’s rights impact assessments are completed and published before all relevant decisions are taken, the incorporation of children’s rights in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into domestic law across the UK as mandatory obligations not just matters to which decision makers must have regard, and the setting of clear child poverty reduction targets as part of a cross-government child poverty strategy, which the CROs understand is forthcoming and provides an opportunity for the government to start to make lives better for children now.

These legislative changes need to be accompanied by investment of resources that children and young people desperately need to ensure the negative impacts of the pandemic are properly ameliorated.

And we further ask the Inquiry to recommend that the UK Government acknowledges the sacrifices made by children and apologise to the children for the mistakes the government made and the negative impacts on them.

My Lady, the CROs look forward to continuing to assist your Ladyship and the Module 8 team to ensure that the module is as effective as possible in achieving our common purpose. I’m grateful for the opportunity to address you this morning.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Mr Broach. Very well, we shall break now and I shall return at 1.50.

(12.51 pm)

(The Short Adjournment)

(1.50 pm)

Lady Hallett: Right. Mr Twomey.

Submissions on Behalf of Article 39 by Mr Twomey KC

Mr Twomey: My Lady, on behalf of Article 39, together with Mary-Rachel McCabe, the focus of submissions and any questions will be on the most vulnerable children and young people in society, those in care, relying on the state for parenting and protection, and those living in state and privately-run institutions.

Children in detention, whether through the mental health or criminal justice systems, or in state care, are not one homogeneous group but there are factors they routinely share: abuse or threat of abuse from carers, separation from parents and other family, including siblings, the uncertainty and instability of being parented by a local authority, with ever-changing homes, carers, and professionals, often sent far from home, challenges to identity and self-worth.

For children in prison, a disproportionately high number of them were looked after prior to incarceration, their vulnerability is all too obvious.

As Counsel to the Inquiry highlighted, prior to the pandemic, nearly a third of UK children were living in relative poverty, a quarter were in absolute poverty, and half of local authority children’s services in England were judged by Ofsted to be less than good. The picture for a typical child in need was pretty bleak.

That was the reality for the especially vulnerable children whom Article 39 serves. It’s all the more important, therefore, that these children should be regard, as the Scottish Children’s Commissioner says, as rights holders rather than passive objects of education, care or charity.

As the pandemic hit, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child called on governments to protect children whose vulnerability would be further increased, including children deprived of their liberty or confined, and children living in institutions.

We submit that the government’s core error in response to the pandemic was failing to consider the impact of policies on children, failing to listen to, consult, or act upon, the advice of professionals working with children, or to hear from children themselves on the impact of policy decisions. The Scottish Children’s Commissioner quotes one of their young advisers in July 2020:

[As read] “Life changing decisions being made during coronavirus have felt like playing a game. Every time it should be our turn, someone skips over us and we end up being left behind and forgotten.”

Article 39 continues to regret that this Inquiry will not hear directly from children but respectfully suggests that this highlights the imperative to consider carefully evidence from the children’s commissioners and other children’s rights organisations.

The introduction of the Adoption and Children (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations in April 2020 is a good example of government failings. We have a carefully crafted statutory scheme for children in care and, importantly for those first coming into care, often frightened, always extremely vulnerable, laws and established practices in place to ensure their rights and wellbeing.

The Amendment Regulations made changes to ten statutory instruments, including reducing and removing legal duties relating to social worker visits, reviews of children’s welfare, and checks on children’s homes. These unquestionably substantial and wide-ranging changes were described at the time by the DfE to the Children’s Commissioner for England as “minor burdens”. Both the High Court and the Court of Appeal rejected this characterisation of the changes, the latter describing them as having the potential to have a significant impact on children in care.

The Court of Appeal also found that there had been a selective, one-sided consultation, and that the then Education Secretary Sir Gavin Williamson’s failure to consult with the Children’s Commissioner and children’s rights organisations was unlawful.

It remains wholly unclear today why the government found time to consult with select others, but not the Children’s Commissioner for England. What does this unexplained failure to consult with the statutory body charged with promoting and protecting the rights of children, in particular those living away from home, say about the status and importance of children’s rights in policy making at the time? What does it say about the culture within government to thoroughly mischaracterise the nature of the changes to children’s law?

The profound errors behind the introduction of the amendment regulations yield the obvious submission that they could have been avoided had there been incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and a statutory obligation to consult with the Children’s Commissioner.

But there are other examples of how things went very wrong for vulnerable children during the pandemic, most obviously children in prison. Changes to an already impoverished and harmful regime were subject to no child rights impact assessments or consultation with the Children’s Commissioner for England.

Children in young offender institutions and secure training centres had severely restricted time out of their cells – we say cells, not rooms – with some receiving only an hour-and-a-half a day and at weekends only 45 minutes. These changes meant that, in breach of the Mandela Rules, children were routinely subject to solitary confinement for long periods with inevitable debilitating consequences on their mental and physical health.

Whilst vulnerable children in the community were encouraged to go to school, opportunities for learning and social interaction, and for physical exercise, children in prison had those significantly curtailed. A worksheet pushed under a cell door does not fulfil a child’s right to education.

Article 39 will seek to draw attention to the evidence that children living in secure children’s homes received much better protection due, surely, to the child-focused approach.

The starting point to avoid such mistakes in the future – in any future pandemic or national emergency, must be to recognise that children are individuals with clearly defined rights and entitlements which carry the force of law. That’s also why Article 39, together with other Core Participants, invites the Inquiry to approach this module and its conclusions through the prism of children’s rights and the UNCRC.

Article 39 will submit that throughout the pandemic there was no dedicated plan within government on how to protect the rights and interests of children generally, and vulnerable children and young people in particular. And this failure was due to the absence of a children’s rights strategy, including the incorporation of UNCRC into domestic law, the absence of a statutory duty on government to consult with respective children’s commissioners, and the absence of a Cabinet Minister for children with a children’s rights portfolio, one of IICSA’s closing recommendations in October 2022.

Article 39 respectfully suggests that in the event of another pandemic, the key to ensuring that children’s rights are respected and their wellbeing safeguarded is in two core recommendations: firstly, that the UNCRC is incorporated into domestic law, in the same way that the Human Rights Act gives effect to certain provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. Nobody sensibly suggested a suspension of the Human Rights Act during the pandemic. Indeed, it is a strong pointer towards a rights-based approach, that in times of national emergency, governments need to have robust structures, robust guidelines in place to ensure decisions afford appropriate weight to the rights of all citizens, including children.

In other words, it is precisely when government is under pressure to make quick decisions that effective tools and guidance are necessary, and incorporation of the UNCRC provides those tools.

Secondly, Article 39 respectfully suggests that there should be a statutory duty to consult with and give due weight to the advice of the children’s commissioners. These statutory bodies possess not just theoretical understanding of children’s rights but are required by law to be directly connected to the lived experience of children with critical channels for eliciting the perspectives of children and young people both in ordinary times and in emergencies.

The Children’s Commissioner for England is required by law to use the UNCRC as her basis for determining children’s rights, yet without incorporation into law, this duty lacks a proper foundation.

If we do not have the structures and systems to uphold rights, to elicit, understand, and act upon the views, perspectives, and feelings of children, then that is when things go wrong. And if they go wrong for vulnerable children, the consequences can be disastrous.

The amendment regulations and the treatment of children in prison provide two standout examples of how things were prone to and did go wrong, and how the two recommendations would have prevented these errors.

In the event of a future pandemic it will be essential for all children but, most particularly, vulnerable children in care or custody, that decisions affecting them are taken according to a rights-based approach. Each Children’s Commissioner of each of the four nations of the United Kingdom identifies failures by their effective governments to heed children’s rights. Article 39 submits that this follows from each nation’s failure during the pandemic to have fully incorporated UNCRC, or to have a statutory obligation to consult with their Children’s Commissioner.

And so we endorse the recommendations made this morning on behalf of the CROs.

Scotland directly incorporated the UNCRC into domestic law in 2024. It is surely intolerable that only children in one part of the United Kingdom have this protection in the event of a future pandemic or national emergency, there should be consistency of rights protection.

My Lady, I referred earlier to the Mandela Rules. When launching his children’s fund 30 years ago Nelson Mandela said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children.”

What a telling observation when one looks, as this Inquiry will, into how, during the pandemic, our society treated its most vulnerable children.

My Lady, we’re very grateful for the opportunity to address you this morning and those are our opening submissions.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed. Very helpful.

Ms King.

Submissions on Behalf of Coram by Ms King KC

Ms King: My Lady, Coram remains grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the work of the Inquiry. Coram has provided a comprehensive response to the request for a Rule 9 statement for this module, and Dr Carol Homden CBE, chief executive officer of the Coram group of charities, will be appearing to give evidence at the Inquiry tomorrow morning.

I appear together with Ms Logan Green and instructed by Jenner & Block, some of whose team attend today.

As the Inquiry knows, Coram is the UK’s oldest children’s charities. Working as the Coram group of specialist organisations, it holds a unique perspective on how the lives of children were affected by the Covid pandemic.

The Coram Group considers that, because of its constituent parts and underpinning ethos, it occupies a unique role amongst the Core Participants in being able to provide a particularly broad perspective on the impact that the pandemic had on children and young people. This is due to the breadth and diversity of the work that it conducts across different sectors.

Coram sees the Inquiry as an opportunity to explore the legacy of the pandemic and address some of the shortcomings of the governmental response. Coram considers that engagement with third sector organisations is critical. The various organisations which make up the Coram Group are ready to play an active and ongoing role in future planning. Coram considers itself able to bridge the wide chasm between statutory and charitable organisations. It hopes that the government will build on the foundations already laid and ensure that future contingency planning involves the members of the Coram Group.

Coram has a wide understanding of the complexities and difficulties that children and young people faced during the pandemic, it seeks to ensure, through its participation in this Inquiry, that children’s voices and perspectives are heard both now, in reflecting upon the response to the pandemic, and in the future, in planning pandemic responses.

It would be an opportunity missed if, in curating a response to another future pandemic, the interests of children were consigned to the margins or left as an afterthought, as so often seemed to be the case in respect of Covid-19, as Coram and others have noted.

These oral submissions are to be considered in conjunction with Coram’s opening written submissions and the evidence it has provided to the Inquiry.

On the basis of its own research and experiences during the pandemic, and having considered the evidence provided to the Inquiry, Coram has come to the view that if and when the next pandemic strikes, there is a need to put children at the heart of decision making and implementation. To that end, as a pre-emptive step, Coram supports its colleagues in Article 39 and the CRO group’s call for the incorporation of the UNCRC across the UK.

However, incorporation without good implementation is hollow. And the evidence before the Inquiry shows the importance of putting in place good practice and risk planning now, so that children’s needs will be considered and protected in future crises. Coram proposes that a dedicated cabinet minister for children be introduced. Coram believes this would assist in ensuring resources are properly allocated to future planning.

A statutory child impact assessment obligation as part of crisis planning, particularly in relation to predictive planning, will better ensure that children are at the centre of decision making. There needs to be a systemic approach to recognising key bodies within the third sector as essential partners. Future planning should include structured collaboration with previously identified core partners and with the relevant infrastructure, information-sharing networks and expertise to work in partnership with government. This could act as a shadow taskforce ensuring readiness for future challenges.

Coram also recommendations that regulations and national directives should not be published without clear accompanying guidance to support their implementation. It is considered that once that architecture is in place, this will enable mobilisation plans to be implemented, for example to pre-plan to mobilise retired essential workers in children’s social care.

Coram considers that in future there will be a heightened need to use trusted channels and deploy open communication. This will be even more important in any subsequent emergency, otherwise there is a real prospect, with the ascent of AI, that the nation’s response will be written by the likes of ChatGPT, with all its errors and delusions, rather than by experts, with the institutional memory and expert experience to make a difference.

The evidence from Coram demonstrates that local authorities and others did work hard to secure ongoing support for children in care. However, those working in children’s social care would be better able to meet the challenges of any future pandemic if there was clearer guidance which would immediately fall into place and which was already known to them in advance.

Children in potentially dangerous edge-of-care situations did not fare as well, and did not receive the support of the sort to which they were entitled. This group should be given the top priority in any future planning, with specific steps to ensure they are always able to access places of physical safety beyond the home, for example schools and foster care.

Young people whose lives are subject to the civil courts all experienced delay, and any delay is inimical to their welfare. Indeed, the court process itself is unacceptably over-extended even in normal times. For those who are subject to immigration and asylum controls, this is effectively a sentence to a life on hold.

Children and young people in the immigration system who are fleeing abuse or persecution are particularly in need of our protection and social generosity. They are uniquely ill-equipped and unprepared to navigate the challenges which a pandemic brings. They should not be placed in unregulated accommodation which can leave them vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation by criminal gangs.

The Inquiry has and will receive evidence in respect of how children with medical concerns fared during the pandemic, but there is much of which the NHS can be proud. Those working to address children with health needs should be commended. For its own part, Coram was pleased to see the government respond to calls to make reasonable adjustment to lockdown protocols, for example for children and young people with autism. However, in any future lockdown, children as a much broader group should be subject to different rules. There needs to be child-specific lockdown guidance.

Again, children cannot, in future, be treated, as they were all too often during the Covid-19 crisis, as an afterthought or as little adults. Coram suggests that all children should be subject to specific guidelines dependent upon age, special educational needs, medical need, and the nature of the pandemic infection. The government cannot wait for the next pandemic. The guidelines could and should be written now. This can form part of a longer-term overall consideration at cross-party level of the requirement for an intergenerational settlement.

It must recognise that children should not suffer the collateral damage as a result of the concerns which differently impact on adults. In addition, it is important to engage proactively with the needs of that subgroup of children whose families are homeless and who rely upon the state for adequate housing and space to play and study. The number of children experiencing homelessness and inappropriate accommodation and experiencing poverty has increased with predictable effects on their health and other outcomes. In this context, Coram published a Charter for Children which calls upon our nation to make a triple key commitment and reset our relationship with children. In doing so, we must avoid pitting one generation against any other.

However, it’s important to recognise and redress the fact that there has been an erosion of the collective will to share resources with children. This has long-term effect – impacts. It will take more than one Parliament and more than one generation to address the deficit so that this too must start now.

Finally, during any pandemic, there will be children who are experiencing some level of support from the state who are about to turn 18 and need a smooth transition to adult support services. What the pandemic did was to weave its fingers into every crack in our system, as shown, for example, by the transition from children to adult services as seen in Coram’s disability, disparity and demand report regarding special educational needs published in October 2024.

There is an evident disparity between what local authorities consider to be the needs of their care population and their true needs. This may be a key area for improved data collection together with support for migrant children to support future planning. There needs to be attention to this issue to prevent there being marked variations in expectation and provision. Coram recognises that the Covid-19 pandemic brought unprecedented, if not unique, challenges. It was a dynamic situation. Any future crisis will be a dynamic situation.

Coram commends frontline workers and, in many ways, the government is to be commended for their services to children, which were a lifeline to many. It hopes to work with government as a third-party sector partner in preparation for any future pandemic.

My Lady, I’m grateful.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Ms King.

Ms Beattie.

Submissions on Behalf of Disability Rights UK, Disability Wales, and Disability Action Northern Ireland by Ms Beattie

Ms Beattie: My Lady, we act for three national Disabled People’s Organisations or DPO. They are Disability Rights UK, Disability Wales, and Disability Action Northern Ireland.

At the outset, DPO want to address you on three matters. First, using vulnerability as a basis for policy making. Second, needs beyond learning and educational attainment. And third, accessibility.

First, vulnerability. My Lady has heard the DPO repeatedly caution against reliance on the concept of vulnerability in place of the social model, which recognises that many of the hardships which disabled children and young people face are determined by social, economic, and political choices and circumstances.

In this module on children and young people, the DPO do so again with added emphasis. Because in this module, reliance on the superficially appealing concept of vulnerability in place of proper and informed planning and public policy, respecting rights and meeting needs, reaches its nadir.

Like protecting the NHS or throwing a ring of steel around care homes, keeping schools open for vulnerable children sounds like something the government should have done. But it begs the question: vulnerable to what?

In the statutes and guidance setting out disabled children and young people’s entitlement to have their social care and education needs met, we do not find vulnerability used as a test or threshold. As recognised by the education experts instructed by the Inquiry, Professor Gillian McCluskey and her colleagues, defining and measuring vulnerability is complex, messy, highly selective, and influenced by local and national context.

Yet it was to this problematic concept that the government turned in March 2020 when making the momentous decision to close schools. Both the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Education said that schools would not be closed for children who were most vulnerable. They did so notwithstanding that no approach to determining the vulnerability of the millions of children and young people, attending schools, early years, and further education had been agreed, and a systematic and effective approach to assessing vulnerability was, in fact, never achieved.

What followed was not that schools looked after the most vulnerable children, including disabled children and young people, but the very opposite. A tiny proportion of eligible children continued to attend school. Many were not looked after in the real sense of having their ongoing and newly-arising needs met, and those left at home were looked after less still.

The alarm was raised about low attendance by vulnerable children almost immediately. And by mid-April 2020, the SAGE subgroup was prompted to ask: where are these children? What are they doing? How are they being supported? Why are children with special educational needs and disabilities or education, health and care plans not attending?

My Lady, this was mid-April 2020 when children should have been shortly to return to school after Easter, and when what was described by the UK chief medical officers four months later in August 2020 as a “certainty of long-term harm to many children and young people from not attending school” had yet to come to pass and could yet have been avoided.

Next, needs. What was needed was not a makeshift reaching for the emotive concept of vulnerability, but practical focus on meeting the needs of disabled children and young people not only for education, but also for care and support, needs which arose from impairments, but also from poverty, from the digital divide, from family and other circumstances, and from the pandemic itself.

For disabled children and young people the law required that local authorities promote their welfare and safeguard them from harm. To this end, many disabled children and young people received social care services such as personal care and assistance, care and support within the home and within the community, respite care and travel support, including importantly, under section 17 of the Children Act 1989 and section 2 of the archaically named Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970.

For children with education, health and care plans, the law required that provision was made as specified in those plans. Very often this included provision delivered by allied health professionals such as speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, and physiotherapists, to children and young people at crucial stages of development.

Children and young people without plans also received special educational needs support from school and accessed allied healthcare professionals through the NHS. Yet previously available formal and informal support stopped, and education, health and care needs provision, assessment and review work was withdrawn.

The DPO stress these aspects of social care and health provision for disabled children and young people, not only because they are fundamental to meeting needs, but because they go beyond the lost learning focus of some of the government evidence to the Inquiry, and beyond social or socialisation services in the nature of after-school clubs and the like.

This is where the DPO think the focus on schools was too narrow. Disabled children and young people were having other identifiable and necessary services cut with eyes wide open to the adverse effects. It did not need nuanced social work assessment of hidden harms to identify the obvious, profound, and in some cases, immediate consequences for disabled children and young people from failing to meet needs that were already known about.

The predictable consequences included children left in pain, children who lost the ability to walk or to mobilise independently, to eat independently or to communicate. Children who lost around two years of therapeutic support which reduced their progress and in some cases meant they went backwards.

And for those close to the point of leaving school at a time of transition to adult life, their changing needs were not assessed. These were not unexpected ripple effects of school closures but involved choices by government: choices to downgrade pre-existing and longstanding statutory duties to disabled children and young people, including the duty in section 42 of the Children and Families Act 2014, to secure provisions specified in a child or young person’s education, health and care plan; choices to redeploy health and allied health personnel away from providing services to children; choices not to prioritise the delivery of social care services relied on by disabled children and young people and their families; choices to remove the requirement to assess young carers’ needs for support; choices to disapply duties which are designed to ensure a smooth transition for young people entering the adult social care system.

My Lady, in all that the Inquiry is about to hear about the impact on learning, the DPO urge that disabled children and young people’s holistic needs and their everyday needs for care and support are borne in mind.

Finally, accessibility. All children and young people were affected by educational closures and the move to remote learning, but not all experienced it equally.

The duty to make reasonable adjustments is enshrined in equality law, and yet when it came to remote learning, disabled children and young people encountered basic barriers to access which compounded the digital divide they already faced. Some examples: disabled children and young people with visual needs found that worksheets were not in large enough font to read; e-learning options were incompatible with assistive technology; children and young people with hearing impairments struggled to follow online lessons; some were unable to find interpreters.

For some disabled children and young people, online learning was not learning at all.

My Lady, the DPO do not underestimate the challenge to all nations of the UK of providing effective remote learning on the scale required. But as with other aspects of the pandemic response, such as access to vaccines and therapeutics, and access to information, basic barriers of access prevented disabled children and young people from continuing their education on an equal basis with others.

Remote learning, like lockdown, was not imagined for disabled children and young people. It was imagined for the non-disabled student and their non-disabled family. This failure of imagination and incapacity for inclusive policy making is recurrent, but it is not inevitable. We could have policy-based on needs, rights, and co-production.

The tale of how school closures were planned from scratch and how disabled children and young people fared during the pandemic has at least the value of showing how much the UK still has to learn on this front, and that the system is vulnerable, not its children and young people.

Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Ms Beattie. Very grateful.

Mr Wagner, King’s Counsel.

Submissions on Behalf of Clinically Vulnerable Families by Mr Wagner KC

Mr Wagner: Thank you and good afternoon, my Lady.

As you know, I appear for Clinically Vulnerable Families, which I’ll refer to as CVF, and I appear with Hayley Douglas and Lameesa Iqbal, and I’m instructed by Kim Harrison and Shane Smith of Slater & Gordon.

I’ll begin with the voice of a 13-year-old, let’s call him David, quoted in a landmark CVF report coming this Wednesday:

[As read] “I don’t go to school any more. I want to keep going to my school but they won’t keep me safe. If I catch a virus, I will be sick for a very long time. I tried to go back to my school in September 2020 but my school did not look after me like they’d promised my mum. They made me use hand gel all day long, even though I was allergic to it. They didn’t wear masks. Within a few weeks I’d caught a nasty virus and I was in bed for several weeks trying to get better. They did not give me much schoolwork to do, because they said they did not want to encourage me to stay at home.”

Then there is Lana. She said this:

[As read] “My mum said ‘Do you want to go to school? Do you want to go to secondary school and risk taking this home?’ So, as a 14-year old, I had to make the decision to either get an education and risk my mother dying, or not get an education and try to teach myself as best I could.”

Lana stayed in virtual isolation for two years, including teaching herself GCSEs, rather than risk her mother’s life. Her school refused to continue remote teaching, threatening fines for non-attendance. Lana’s story is reported in this morning’s Guardian and she’s a Clinically Vulnerable Families member and she is sitting in the hearing room here today.

CVF will speak for two groups of children in this module. First, the children who are themselves clinically vulnerable to Covid-19, like David. And it’s a myth, of course, that children were basically unaffected by Covid-19; thousands of them were, and remain clinically vulnerable.

Between February 2020 and March 2022, 88 children died from Covid-19. In the first year of the pandemic alone there were over 6,000 paediatric Covid-19 admissions, 4% of which, over 600 – sorry, 250 – needed paediatric intensive care.

Then there are the many thousands of children who have been impacted by Long Covid and other serious conditions.

The second group CVF speaks for is the children who lived in households with clinically vulnerable family members, like Lana, and that’s a much larger group, involving millions of people, and they face Lana’s terrible dilemma: stay at home and miss education, or go to school and put relatives at serious risk.

On behalf of there was two groups, I make three submissions:

First, schools must be made safe.

Second, where schools cannot be made safe enough, children must be given appropriate support.

And third, we cannot offer safety and support unless we recognise the impact Covid-19 has had and continues to have on clinically vulnerable children and families.

So what CVF are asking for is safety, support, and recognition.

Safety. It’s obvious from the expert and other evidence to this module that it’s better for a child if they’re educated in school and are able to socialise with other children. But behind this is a dilemma. During a pandemic or epidemic it’s inevitable that some children will need to stay at home, either because, like David, infection will have a serious impact on their own health, or because, like, Lana, it will have a serious impact on somebody else in their house.

Some clinically vulnerable children will need to stay at home unless the buildings they need to access are safe, and in a sense – and by that, I mean that measures are put in place to protect against the transmission of airborne viruses or however a pathogen spreads.

Professor Catherine Noakes says in her Inquiry evidence that there’s a growing body of evidence that enabling better ventilation and indoor air quality in school environments will have a positive effect on the health of children in general. The solutions are right there in front of us: ventilation, air quality checks, masks.

But there still needs to be a paradigm shift away from the way we think about safety at schools. Keeping children safe from pathogens must be seen as just as important as keeping them safe from other hazards, like unsafe playground equipment or fire.

The Inquiry can play an important role in changing perceptions. It’s important not to be defeatist about school safety just because it’s difficult, just because the estate is crumbling. Perhaps part of the problem behind some of the pessimism is that many so-called safety features or measures in schools in 2020 and 2021 were focused on the wrong pathogen; hand washing and social distancing in small classrooms, in a way they may have done more harm than good because they were giving people the impression they were being kept safe, but they weren’t.

It is possible to deal with this issue. The IPC experts in the healthcare module made clear recommendations. CVF remains concerned that no expert evidence is available in this module on safety, but we will say more in closing submissions about how the Inquiry can use the totality of the evidence it’s received to make meaningful recommendations on this important topic.

We do say this now to respond to the somewhat pessimistic approach to safety identified so far today. When it comes to child safety we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

My second submission is about support. Even if a pathogen is quickly understood and the right safety measures put in place, it won’t always be possible to make schools safe enough. We certainly agree with Ms Dobbin on that. Some children will need to remain at home some of the time: children like Lana who need to protect her mum and David who needs to protects himself. And those children must be supported. Their right to education must be preserved. And that means government guidance which recognises their position and is sensitive to it, school attendance policies that don’t mandate in-person attendance for children in their position and are flexible, and access to high-quality remote and hybrid education options.

And this, unfortunately, often did not happen for clinically vulnerable families. Either they were forced to attend school or faced fines and even prosecutions or they were refused remote education access.

To summarise, if we can’t keep children safe, we must give them support.

Third and finally, recognition. The impact of clinical vulnerability to Covid-19 on children and their families is poorly evidenced and not well understood. For a brief period, there was increased public understanding and empathy, but once the emergency stage of the pandemic receded, so did that understanding. That emergency phase may have passed, but for many clinically vulnerable people the pandemic is not over. Some still face significant risks from contracting Covid-19, especially because of the removal of almost all measures which were put in place to protect them.

Some clinically vulnerable children and children in clinically vulnerable families continue to shield and lead limited lives. To properly understand the ongoing effect, clinically vulnerable people must be recognised as a distinct group which is included in decision making, data collection, public reporting, and funded research.

Recognition should also include making clinical vulnerability a protected characteristic in the Equality Act. This will ensure that clinically vulnerable people and the challenges they face remain visible and protected when society’s attention moves on.

So, there must be safety when in school, support when not, and in the meantime, recognition. Over the next four weeks the Inquiry has an opportunity to listen to clinically vulnerable people, learn from the past, and plan for the future. We all accept that in-person education is vital but it’s not always possible. Making schools safer, even if that doesn’t mean making them a hundred per cent safe, whilst supporting and recognising the dilemmas that clinically vulnerable people face, is the only way to ensure that children like Lana and David are not let down again. Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Mr Wagner. Ms Iengar. Submissions behalf of Long Covid Kids and Long Covid Kids

Scotland by MS IENGAR

Ms Iengar: My Lady, I appear on behalf of Long Covid Kids and Long Covid Kids Scotland. I am led by Ms Hannett KC who sends apologies for being unable to attend today, and we are instructed by Jane Ryan of Bhatt Murphy Solicitors.

Long Covid Kids and Long Covid Kids Scotland are grassroots advocacy organisations made up of parents whose children developed Long Covid after not recovering from a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Their members were forced to become patient advocates for their children. They, and their children, have faced disbelief and inaction by the very government bodies who ought to have protected them. Many of their children have suffered incalculable losses to their physical health, their education, their social and their family lives. Many of the parents have become their children’s full-time carers with the consequential loss of employment and income and damage to their own social and family lives.

My clients ask the Inquiry to treat the devastation caused to children’s lives as a human rights issue and to conclude that the actions of government in respect of the new childhood disease of Long Covid failed to comply with children’s rights to education, health, and family life, and the right not to be discriminated against on the grounds of disability.

Further, my clients ask the Inquiry to conclude that decision makers evidently failed to prioritise the best interests of children in making or, more, often omitting to make decisions about paediatric Long Covid.

To that end, my clients pose four core questions: first, why was the physical impact of the virus on children and young people deprioritised, given that some were harmed?

Paediatric Long Covid was a foreseeable consequence of Covid-19 infection. Indeed, the adverse effects of Long Covid on children were apparent very early on in the pandemic. Despite this, the evidence shows that the government overlooked the physical harm that the virus poses to children. Rather, decision makers approached the pandemic applying three flawed assumptions: that children would not be physically harmed by Covid-19, that they didn’t require protective policy measures, and that they only needed to be considered as conduits of viral transmission to the adult population.

This approach left some children suffering from serious physical illness with disabling symptoms and without government acknowledgement.

The words of Jay, aged 10, encapsulate the experience of many like her. She says:

[As read] “No one at school or in health believed me until I ended up in crisis in hospital with a feeding tube. All the doctors asked about was how I see myself in the mirror”.

Jay was very active and loved to roller skate with her family. Now she needs a wheelchair and can’t walk or attend school.

Turning to the second question, we ask: once it was known about, why was there a deliberate minimisation of the physical harm the virus poses to children and young people?

Even once the physical harm to children was known about by the scientific community and by government, the risks of Long Covid were either minimised or ignored. For example, a consultant paediatrician at Public Health England advised a permanent secretary stakeholder group on education against labelling children and young people as having Long Covid. This both minimises the harm of Long Covid but also overlooked the reality that children and young people who actually had Long Covid were being disbelieved, not excessively diagnosed.

The final words of the impact film were “We shouldn’t sacrifice children.”

In striking contrast, the Cabinet Office in the summer of 2021 referred to the strategic risk of accepting that the bulk of Long Covid cases during the release of restrictions would be younger, unvaccinated individuals.

A for-decision paper produced at the same time by Michael Gove entitled “Planning for Periods of High Prevalence” similarly stated that cases of Long Covid in children would, and I quote, “rise rapidly”.

The Covid-19 public health directorate team in the Scottish Government advised on the removal of all NPIs for under 12s in July 2021, accepting the health risk that some children would suffer from Long Covid as, and again I quote, the “virus ran unchecked amongst children”.

The evidence shows that government policies knowingly allowed children and young people to acquire Covid and develop Long Covid. Even those whose job it was to advocate for children and young people, such as the children’s commissioners and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health for the most part took no inadequate steps to help children with Long Covid, even after its harm had been made clear to them.

E, aged 16, explains how this feels. She says:

[As read] “I’ve also been abandoned by the people who were supposed to help me, the NHS. The government talks about the stretches it has taken to support the NHS and help people, however, I haven’t seen any of this. I’ve been refused chronic fatigue services because I was out of area, so the trust refused funding because, and I quote, ‘it would open the floodgates for other people’, which is appalling. How do you expect us to get help when the people we are forced to turn to act as if we are making it up for the fun of it? This isn’t fun. I’ve spent the last two years ignored, and I need any help I can get to have Long Covid properly recognised as the debilitating illness it is.”

As to the third question, why did the government not promulgate policy aimed at protecting children and young people against the impact of paediatric Long Covid?

The cohort of children and young people affected by Long Covid is significant. The most recent prevalence data published by the ONS in April 2024 for 3 to 17-year-olds in England and Scotland found that over 111,000 children had persistent symptoms of any duration, and more than 65,000 of those children are estimated to have symptoms lasting 12 weeks or more.

This compares with, for example, the 36,000 children and young people across all four nations who are estimated to suffer from childhood diabetes.

SARS-CoV-2 continues to be in circulation, and so the number of children and young people who will develop Long Covid, following infection and reinfections of the virus, is growing.

As Professor Whitty confirms, some children have still not recovered from Covid infection.

In that context, the policy was and remains entirely inadequate. The evidence confirms that Long Covid was not a factor taken into account when considering school closures, when the illness had been identified and understood. Schools have not been instructed to collect data on absences caused by Long Covid. The impact on education is therefore not being monitored, much less responded to.

In the impact film this morning we had one young person ask:

“Why was it my responsibility to make sure school was safe enough for me to attend?”

Patient advocates are still having to fight for clean air in educational settings. There remains no guidance to schools on how to support children with Long Covid to access education safely. Indeed, for the first time in 2025, five years after Covid-19’s onset, the Department for Education’s key research area now includes a question on how best to mitigate against the impact of Long Covid on educational achievement.

The Inquiry is urged to explore why it has taken five years to ask and identify this question and why, in the meantime, have children and young people with Long Covid been left without adequate support?

Further still, healthcare for children and young people with Long Covid remains hopelessly inadequate. There are no dedicated clinics for paediatric Long Covid in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, and many services in England have been closed whilst several more are closing.

The parent of B, aged 6, explains:

[As read] “We had to use the educational support pack from Long Covid Kids with school. We could find no guidance at all from the Department for Education. From the attendance and infection control guidance, it was clear to us that a child like B was not supposed to exist.”

That leads me to the fourth and final question, my Lady, which is: why were the public, parents and carers not informed of the indiscriminate risk of paediatric Long Covid by clear public health messaging?

Even now, there remains no public health messaging on the risk of paediatric Long Covid published by any government department in any of the four nations. Rather, the message was and remains that children are not at high risk from Covid-19, and that the illness would be mild, with no lasting consequences.

That was not true five years ago and it is not true now.

The Inquiry is asked to conclude that the absence of a warning, the lack of acknowledgement and advice by all four governments, constitutes a significant public health failure. It has perpetuated and reinforced the disbelief and isolation of children and young people suffering from Long Covid, and it should be remedied as a matter of urgency.

We conclude with the words of Helen Goss of Long Covid Kids Scotland:

[As read] “We are a family in crisis. Heartbreakingly, we are not alone. Our experience is shared by tens of thousands of families across the UK who are now caring for children and young people suffering from a new, chronic childhood disease and its varying degrees of disabling symptoms.”

My Lady, unless I can assist any further, those are the opening submissions on behalf of Long Covid Kids and Long Covid Kids Scotland.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed for your help.

Ms Anyadike-Danes, there you are. I knew you were here because I saw you arrive. Are you switched on?

Ms Anyadike-Danes: Can you hear me?

Lady Hallett: Yes, I can now.

Submissions on Behalf of the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People by Ms Anyadike-danes

Ms Anyadike-Danes: I act on behalf of the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People, and that’s a statutory office, as my Lady knows, established with the principal aim of safeguarding and promoting the interests of children and young people.

And that’s a group that, as at the last census, represented approximately 21% of the total population, and that includes significant numbers who were disproportionately adversely impacted by the pandemic, such as approximately 330,000 in school, with over a quarter of them from poor households, 22,500 regarded as being in need, and somewhere between 17,500 and 30,000 acting as young carers; and it’s a matter of some concern that we don’t actually know how many of them there are.

Written submissions have been provided that give further details about numbers and impacts, and the need to have the UNCRC incorporated into domestic law, so I’m not going to repeat any of that, but what I do want to do is use the opportunity that my Lady has kindly given us to do two things: firstly, to address what children and young people in Northern Ireland went through, and the continuing impact on them, and second, to highlight what they still don’t know, despite being five years away from the onset of the pandemic.

So, what they went through.

Now, much, as my Lady knows, has already been set out, analysed and explained about the impact on children and young people over the pandemic and the government’s responses to it. What I want to do though, now, is to use their words from a representative sample of what those who were vulnerable went through. And my Lady has already had some examples of them, but sometimes it’s the words of children and young people that speak most eloquently as to the impact on them.

So Elodie, 10 years at the start of the pandemic:

[As read] “Covid impacted so many people. For me, I lost my grandfather, as his cancer treatment was stopped due to hospital pressures, and we cared for him at home until he died in July 2020. I was 10, and I remember reading our favourite book to him just before he passed away, one that he had read to me so many times: Guess How Much I Love You. Well, I loved him to the moon and back.

“I, and many other children, lost access to educational paths that we had hoped for. The post-primary transfer tests were suspended unexpectedly the week before I was due to sit the first exam. I had hoped to go to grammar school and applied for them, but in June 2021 I found out that I was unplaced and I had no school to go to. Following many appeals, I got access to my current school and I started about two or three weeks later than everyone else. I suffered subject for the first year and now, even in Year 12, I still have that doubt in my mind: do I really deserve my place here?”

For some, Covid may seem to be in the rear view mirror, but for others, it’s still in the driving seat, both psychologically and educationally. It may be five years ago, but its continuing impact cannot be forgotten and must be recognised and considered.

And Seren, who speaks on behalf of Molly, who was eight years old:

[As read] “I live in a household with clinically vulnerable family members. My sister Molly and later my dad are both vulnerable to infection due to their health conditions and disabilities. And we don’t fit the typical story that the lockdowns were detrimental as my sister and I really thrived. The lockdown periods when everyone had to stay at home meant that my family was safe. People were more empathetic, particularly around protecting the most vulnerable, and due to her disabilities and clinical vulnerability, Molly was one of the first cohort of children to be prioritised for vaccines. The vaccination clinic had no ventilation, and our mum and Molly were the only two wearing masks. In order to protect Molly from the effects of Covid, we had to put her at risk of being in close contact with unmasked staff to access a vaccine needed to protect her. People often refer to Covid as a period in time. In the past sense. Not the damaging virus that it is. But for families like mine, it continues to be an ongoing risk and has led to inequalities and unnecessary health risks. Families like ours can choose to avoid crowded indoor settings where there is a higher risk, but schools and healthcare settings cannot be avoided and therefore need to be made safer for everyone.”

Seren, who was 13:

[As read] “Lockdowns were when I felt safest, and it seemed like there was better understanding about vulnerable families like mine, but I eventually had to go back to school and mitigations began to be lifted. There was no real understanding. The risk to my family was still there. I continued to wear a mask, to try my best to protect my sister, and I asked for windows to be opened for ventilation. I was eventually the only child wearing a mask and became a target for bullying, not just from other students but staff and even parents. I was coughed at, sworn at, verbally abused, physically abused, had windows slammed shut and experienced targeted abuse on social media and it only got worse over time. I tried explaining the risk to my sister, but people said things like ‘Well, you and your sister should just kill yourselves’, and ‘I don’t care if your sister dies’. School became terrifying. The failure of my school to manage the very real risk from Covid and the behaviour of other people forced me to make the decision to leave school halfway through my A levels. All my teenage years have been impacted by the pandemic. We were told to protect the most vulnerable, but why, (as you’ve heard from the film) was it my responsibility to make sure my school was safe for me to attend?

“My sister is now 13 and still extremely vulnerable. Outside of my family, who is protecting her now?”

Nicky, which is not her real name, 13:

[As read] “Throughout the pandemic, I felt isolated and voiceless at times. Shortly before the pandemic, I began to be unable to attend school due to mental health difficulties and undiagnosed learning difficulties. When school closed, I began to learn at home, and due to experiencing homelessness, I was left in an overcrowded, housing situation with four other relatives, including one of my parents. So not only did I struggle to find a quiet space for learning but also to somehow fill the blanks of months of missed teaching. I never returned to school full time, which led me to leaving school at 16 with no qualifications. I feel as though disabled young people and those with learning disabilities were not considered almost at all during the pandemic, and very little was done to support us. I feel as though young people were constantly being scapegoated throughout the pandemic and being blamed for spreading the virus even though many, like me, followed every single rule and made incredible sacrifices. What made me particularly upset was the revelations around some of those who made the rules breaking them.

“Many young people are struggling with their mental health more than ever, and many are also still struggling educationally. I feel incredibly frustrated by how the decisions made particularly didn’t seem to take into account disabled young people, those living in poverty or those without the technology to complete schoolwork at home.”

And then there’s Sarah, 10 years:

[As read] “During the time of Covid all young people lost their voice. Support systems for SEN and neurodivergent young people drastically declined due to the inability to have meetings in person. For the most part, this group of young people were left practically abandoned. The mental health and wellbeing of children had one of the greatest falls during Covid period. The level of fear the pandemic inflicted onto our generation is startling. Young people now are a lot more introverted, they seem to avoid going out. And this makes perfect sense because when you tell a child that there are germs everywhere and that if you get infected you and your family could die, that will leave a psychological damage. Emotionally-based school avoidance has spiked in recent years and it’s clear to see that Covid played a part in this. Young people felt safer in their homes away from germs.”

So that was the first thing, my Lady, I wanted to do, and the second thing, rather shorter period of time, is to actually pose what they want to know. Or what they hope this module can do for them.

Many children and young people are highly knowledgeable about the ways in which they were let down and they have real insight into what was and is required, and in general, in Northern Ireland, they want to know six things.

One: why were they not made an integral part of any pre-pandemic plan or, once it was appreciated that Covid was likely to become a pandemic, why were they not factored into planning from the outset, especially as they were highly represented in vulnerable groups?

Two: why those who had particular knowledge of their circumstances, or who had direct contact with them, were not properly consulted or involved in planning for the response to Covid, especially as it was known that there had been insufficient or inadequate pre-pandemic planning and that there was an urgent need to respond and absolutely no time for government to play catch-up?

Three: why, when plans began to develop in haste, was no real consideration given to how some of the most dramatic measures, such as lockdown and school closure, would impact on them, nor why those working with them were not consulted to make use of their experience, especially as they were ready to assist?

Four: why the plans and measures introduced failed to include adequate mitigating measures to avoid or at least reduce some of the most harmful impacts on them?

Five: what coordinated work is being done now by the government to identify the full implications of some of the consequences of the pandemic and the measures introduced in response that have particularly affected them, such as Long Covid, lost learning, decreased school attendance, increased economic deprivation, reduced life chances, long-term mental health issues and epigenetic responses, and what is now in place to help them?

And then finally: what is being done now to improve planning, given the well-publicised resource constraints in Northern Ireland, and how will they be involved to improve pre-pandemic planning, pandemic responses, and ensure their rights are properly protected?

To date, my Lady, children and young people in Northern Ireland do not consider that they have received any meaningful answers or explanations, and they truly look to the Inquiry, particularly this module, in the hope that it will help them with that.

Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed for your help.

I think probably we’ll take our break now. I shall return at 3.10.

(2.56 pm)

(A short break)

(3.10 pm)

Lady Hallett: Mr Gardiner. Oh, there you are.

Submissions on Behalf of Children’s Commissioner for Wales by Mr Gardner

Mr Gardner: Good afternoon, my Lady. I appear on behalf of the Children’s Commissioner for Wales. The Children’s Commissioner thanks the Inquiry for allocating her Core Participant status in this important module and considers and hopes that she and her Office can assist in understanding the impact and challenges bought by Covid-19 for children and young people in Wales.

The commissioner anticipates that the Inquiry will also benefit from the learning and experience of the commissioner on some of the practical arrangements, legislation and guidance which Wales has in place to protect the rights of young people, and which may have benefited children and young people across the UK had the same measures been in place.

The commissioner in particular recommends to the Inquiry the Welsh legislation which brings children’s rights to the centre of decision making in the Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) Measure 2011. This requires the Welsh ministers to have due regard to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) when taking decisions.

Other, more discrete legislation, for example section 7 of the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 creates a similar duty for any decision makers, principally local authorities in Wales, when taking decisions under that Act.

The commissioner also recognises, and again recommends to the Inquiry, the approach in Scotland, which has gone further than Wales in directly incorporating the UNCRC into Scottish law, in the UNCRC (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024.

The commissioner highlights at the outset that she considers that the liaison between her office and the Welsh Government during the pandemic, and the willingness of the Welsh Government to learn and adapt, was often productive and positive and good practice.

The commissioner and her office had regular involvement in influencing the development of guidance, and the commissioner commends to the Inquiry the model of the Shadow Social Partnership Council which allowed ministers, officials and the Chief Medical Officer for Wales to explain the rules, the latest evidence, and proposed major decisions, and allowed the stakeholders to issue concerns and raise issues.

Whilst the commissioner does commend the legislative and policy arrangements in Wales and the general willingness on the part of the Welsh Government to learn and listen, the Inquiry is invited to consider the practice around these positive measures. Would such arrangements, had they gone further, or been followed more carefully, have provided greater protections to children and young people? Was there an implementation gap?

The commissioner believes that this is the case and that there are lessons to be learnt.

My Lady, the pandemic had an immediate impact on all children and young people. Inequalities caused by race, poverty and disability in children became more pronounced. Vulnerable children who were at risk in their home lost the protective environment of the school. There was a rise in online offending and abuse. Children lost many activities that we all took for granted in childhood. These activities are an important part of the development of children as recognised in Article 31 of the UNCRC.

We are seeing a longer-term adverse impact on children’s confidence, school attendance and mental health since the pandemic. And whilst the pandemic had an immediate and devastating impact on older generations, the impact on children will be measured for a generation.

The Inquiry will need to consider the impact of the pandemic on children across the UK but it must be recognised that different legal, policy, socioeconomic, geographical and cultural backgrounds will mean different perspectives and impacts in the devolved nations.

The commissioner can and will comment on the general impact on children and young people, but she is also uniquely poised to assist the Inquiry with the specific impact on children and young persons in Wales.

In accordance with Article 12 of the UNCRC, children and young people have a right to be asked and heard on their views about decisions which affect them. This right and all other rights under the UNCRC must be given due regard in all decisions taken by the Welsh Government such as they affect children.

All decision makers in the UK would do well to adopt the same principle.

Adherence to this right has a practical importance as listening to children and allowing opportunities to express views is identified by young persons themselves as being beneficial for mental wellbeing and has been shown to lead to more effective policy responses.

In the view of the commissioner at the start of the pandemic, it is clear that the voices of children and young people in Wales were not being adequately sought or considered.

As the pandemic progressed, the Commissioner consistently requested and to some extent secured, clearer messaging for children and young people and engagement with children and young people through discussion groups.

My Lady, in order to ensure that the rights and voices of young children are considered, the commissioner recommends to the Inquiry the use of children’s rights impact assessments, or CRIAs. In Wales they are required by law in decisions taken by the Welsh Government, which affect children. That is as a result of the 2011 measure and the children’s rights scheme 2021. They are a tool which may be properly adopted by the UK Government and all public bodies in the UK.

Whilst the commissioner commends the use of CRIAs to the Inquiry, it must be noted that the Inquiry heard concerning evidence to Module 2B relating to failings in their use during the pandemic. These assessments are entirely designed to ensure decision makers have in their mind, whilst taking decisions, the impact of those decisions on some of the most vulnerable in our society.

For some major decisions taken by the Welsh Government during the pandemic, no CRIA was completed at the time. Four examples are the initial decision to close schools; when the Welsh Government was considering support to children with additional learning needs; relating to the use of face masks in schools; and on the impact of self-isolation on children.

Furthermore, when CRIAs were completed, they were often completed late, far removed from the original decisions, and reflecting back. A CRIA should not be about retrofitting children’s rights considerations into decisions that never had this in mind. This defeats the purpose of the CRIA which is to ensure that the rights of children are at the forefront of their minds and may lead them to consider and mitigate the impact of their decisions on children before those decisions are taken and implemented.

The commissioner is concerned that the Welsh Government did not acknowledge the efficacy of CRIAs or their duty to undertake CRIAs to the detriment of children in Wales.

My Lady, when the decision to close schools in Wales was taken by the then education minister for Wales on 18 March 2020, it does not appear that consideration was given to the 2011 measure, the 2021 scheme, or the UNCRC. The commissioner was not consulted in the decision to close schools and so, to be clear, the commissioner, as the statutory advocate of children’s rights in Wales under the Care Standards Act 2000 was not consulted.

Just as worrying, perhaps more worrying, the decision was taken without any legal advice. That is in contrast to the decisions on closing businesses, caravan parks and footpaths in Wales when legal advice was sought.

It is presumably due to this lack of legal advice that the decision to close schools was taken by the Welsh ministers when, in the absence of the Coronavirus Act 2020, at that time, they had no legal power to do so. The lack of legal advice also denied them the opportunity to be reminded of their duties to children under the 2011 measure.

In the light of this host of failures, the commissioner asks how were the educational, developmental and emotional harms which would impact children by being unable to attend school considered? How were the mitigating measures, which could have been put in place to support children, considered?

The failure in process, the commissioner fears, will have been to the detriment of the children of Wales.

My Lady, the commissioner is also concerned that inadequate consideration was given during the pandemic to the use of face masks in schools and to guidance and planning around their use. The commissioner raised concerns over the use of face masks in the classroom, in the foundation phase, during the return to school in February and March 2021, and highlighted the impact on children with speech and language difficulties, those with hearing loss, and those whose first language is not Welsh or English.

The commissioner raised concerns over the inconsistency of approach by schools and unclear messaging and guidance.

The commissioner also raised concerns that the use of face masks for children had, later in the pandemic, fallen out of step with the rights of adults.

When adults in Wales could sit in a pub with friends from six households without wearing a face mask, secondary school pupils were required to wear them in school whilst seated all day and every day. The Inquiry may wish to consider the benefits and detriments of face masks for children in schools as well as how their use was continually assessed with children’s rights in mind.

My Lady, during the pandemic, public-facing guidance was also issued from a number of different sources, including the UK Government, the Welsh Government, and Public Health Wales.

In youth justice settings, there was an increased – this was an increased area where the jagged edge of devolution caused practical difficulties when implementing the new legislation and guidance in Wales. This is one sector in which it became particularly apparent because youth justice is not a devolved matter whereas public health is.

The commissioner considers that there was an impact on young people in the institution – in these institutions in Wales, as there was practical problems relating to the communication of guidance, which led to confusion in youth detention settings in Wales as to which guidance it should follow: should it be health guidance from the Welsh Government or justice guidance from the UK Government?

My Lady, in conclusion, the impact on Covid-19 was sharply felt by children and young people in Wales with high poverty rates, large rural areas, with stretched services and where large numbers who speak Welsh not English as a first language exacerbated the impact.

In times of great adversity and significant pressure on decision makers and their advisers, oversights may be understandable, but that is why systems must be in place to ensure that the rights and protections of children and young people are upheld. Children have a voice only if we help them to use it. Children are amongst those who will be the most impacted by monumental pressures on society. The system must be able to withstand the greatest of pressures or it is an ineffective system.

The commissioner encourages the Inquiry to consider the protection of children’s rights across the UK. At present the UNCRC rights of children are enshrined in law in Wales. This creates a due regard duty which the Welsh Government must observe. This leads to some important follow-on questions, which the Inquiry may wish to consider. Firstly, were the due regard duties properly adhered to in Wales? Secondly, had the due regard principles been properly adhered to in Wales, would the impact on children and young persons in Wales have been mitigated?

Thirdly, had similar due regard duties applied and been adhered to across the UK, would the impact on children and young people across the UK have been mitigated?

And fourthly, had those protections been stronger, such as by direct incorporation of the UNCRC in similar terms to the Human Rights Act 1998, would the impact on children and young people across the UK have been mitigated?

The commissioner takes the preliminary view that the due regard duties were not fully and properly followed in Wales, and that had they been, the impact on the pandemic – of the pandemic on children and young people would very likely have been mitigated. And further, had those protections been stronger, such as by direct incorporation of the UNCRC in similar terms to the Human Rights Act, as it has been in Scotland, the impact on children and young people across the UK may have been mitigated even further.

My Lady, the very final point goes to the invitation of other Core Participants to approach the module and its conclusions through the prism of children’s rights. It is an important observation. Children should be guaranteed these rights and when discussing decision making around children, those discussions should be expressed in the language of rights, and with children at the centre of decision making.

As with any language, learning the language starts with speaking it.

Lady Hallett: I’m afraid I’m going to have to stop you there, Mr Gardner. I do very much have on board the point about human rights but I’m afraid I have to be fair to everybody and you’re a fair bit over.

Mr Gardner: Yes, my Lady, I was simply going to say that once we speak it, we will start to think that way, and then I was to thank the Inquiry for its time. I’m grateful.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much, Mr Gardner, I’m very grateful.

Now, who is next? Oh, Ms Stober.

Submissions on Behalf of the Local Government Association and Welsh Local Government Association by Ms Stober

Ms Stober: My Lady, I represent the interests of the Local Government Association and the Welsh Local Government Association. The two associations very much work together and welcome the opportunity to contribute as Core Participants in this module, as in others.

Together, they represent the collective voice of local government with 100% of Welsh and over 99% of English principal authorities.

Local government played a critical part during the Covid working for children and young persons, both in terms of education and personal support, but in many other ways as well. Both associations played their role also in supporting their members, and both have co-operated with the Inquiry team in undertaking a survey between December 2024 and January 2025 for the purposes of this module.

The survey questions were aimed primarily at the 151 English and 22 Welsh local authorities with statutory responsibilities for children’s social care under the Children and Social Work Act 2017 for England, and the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014, for Wales, and there was 100% return.

So, effectively, all the relevant authorities in both parts of the United Kingdom were respondents to the survey, and we heard this morning form Counsel to the Inquiry that the Inquiry have found the reports of the survey results extremely helpful. The Inquiry will find that it provides a rich overview of preparation for the pandemic, and the capacity and actions of local government to meet the needs of children and young persons during it.

The witness statement of Ms Killian of the LGA and Dr Llewelyn of WLGA set out extensive lessons learnt and makes significant recommendations for the future.

On behalf of both of them, I commend these to the Inquiry as an important contribution to this module.

In this opening, I can only provide only the briefest of summaries of the work that local government undertook on both a statutory and discretionary basis, and leave to the readers of their witness statements to discover how the associations contributed as advocates for their members or as consultees of English and Welsh Government.

At the outset, it is often good to set some good ideas of the range and skill of local government work for children and young people. In England, as in Wales, councils had many special responsibilities for children and young persons. Just how many will be evidenced from the fact that it is estimated that overall in England there were some 200 statutory duties covering education and children’s social services. These duties include: child protection, adoption and fostering, acting as corporate parents and for looked-after children as care leavers, children in need, early education and childcare, ensuring fair access to a diverse supply of good schools, ensuring access to high quality provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities, alternative provision for children outside mainstream education provision, providing suitable home-to-school transport, youth justice and services, children’s health and wellbeing.

The extent of these duties is that councils are responsible for supporting around 12 million children. Proportionately comparable figures apply to Wales.

It is important to remember that just as children and young persons did not, of course, disappear during Covid, neither did a single of these responsibilities. Indeed, in many cases, the necessary work was intensified, though, as the survey shows, there were other areas where this could not have been so.

The following figures provide a different way of looking at the extent of this work. Around 44 per cent of local authority expenditure, about 14 billion, is spent in relation to children and young persons, including social care and education. Some 34,000 children and families social workers are employed by English councils. Well over half a million referrals are made annually. Again, the figures for Wales are proportionately comparable.

The Inquiry will look in detail at how this played out but I can say now that simply heroic work by council staff ensured that vulnerable children, young people and families, as far as possible, continued to be supported. Schools were supported to ensure as many children as possible had access to education, and new processes and systems were also developed to do as much as possible to maintain these obligations.

However, this work was by no means free from problems. There was a lack of national planning as to whether and how social distancing NPIs harmed children and what actions would reduce this effect. Some children were exposed to hidden harm when they were not being seen by professionals regularly, including harm from those in their homes or online.

It is well established that there have been significant child mental health issues arising from Covid, the consequences of which have included lack of school readiness, reduced school attendance, poor in-school class behaviours and other detriments to learning.

Some groups of children were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, including those with special educational needs and disabilities, and those living in disadvantaged households.

So, as it receives oral evidence and absorbs the written contributions, the Inquiry will discover during this module just how much Covid-19 very greatly impacted the daily lives of children, their parents and families, and how the evidence continues to grow that this will continue for a long time in the future.

My Lady, I will finish with a point about the passage of time. This module concerns events that occurred some five years or so ago, which lasted for more than two of them.

At the end of a long life, that may seem a blink of an eye. To those who were children during Covid, five years would be more than a quarter of their lives, and while two will be more than 10%. Seen in that way, it will be appreciated that the significance of these events for them is huge. But it is also huge for all of us. Those who were children and young persons then are the coming generations of workers, entrepreneurs and professionals. The module will discover how well we have protected them and what we could have done better and what we must do if another crisis occurred to ensure that we are better equipped to support our children and young persons.

Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Ms Stober, very grateful.

Mr Jacobs.

Submissions on Behalf of the Trades Union Congress by Mr Jacobs

Mr Jacobs: My Lady, these are the submissions of the Trades Union Congress.

Unions affiliated to the TUC represent many of those who work across all roles and all levels of education: school leaders, teachers, teaching assistants, caterers, cleaners and others. They also represent many in other roles who also have an interest in this module such as educational psychologists, health visitors, school nurses and prison officers. But in these opening submissions our focus will be on education in the pandemic.

The TUC and it’s affiliated unions pay tribute to the monumental efforts of school staff throughout the pandemic. A great many continued to attend places of education, irrespective of the risks and in a context in which protective measures were limited. They adapted to new ways of operating schools to new ways of teaching, to new methods of assessments, to new ways of supporting vulnerable children both in and out of school.

Almost invariably they did so at incredibly short notice and they achieved it by going above and beyond.

My Lady, we all recognise the fundamental point that losing out on face-to-face education harms children and it particularly harms the most vulnerable. A question that follows is what does that mean for the next pandemic? It is a difficult question, and Counsel to the Inquiry was right this morning to identify that it is not an area for simplistic or blunt answers. My Lady, we make some general observations.

First, perspective is important. The Inquiry is just a few weeks off publishing its report from Module 2. The perspectives in that module included how it could be that this country suffered such terrible loss of life; the Inquiry has also had the perspective of health care in Module 3 and of the daily horrors in ICU; of the perspective of social care in Module 6, and the terrible isolation and loss of life experienced by so many. Analysis within this module has to acknowledge and keep those perspectives carefully in mind, and acknowledge that those experiences impact children too, as we have heard on a number of occasions throughout today.

Second, considering the weight of the interests at play across society is important, but it is no spoiler to state the nub of it: the interests are heavy and they can point in different directions.

The real challenge is how best, practically, to chart a course through. This Inquiry, this module, must try and illuminate that: how best, practically, to chart a course through. And we should not be under any illusion that in the next pandemic, by staring really hard at the problem or by really understanding how bad restrictions on school attendance are for children, the answer, the course to chart, will reveal itself. My Lady, it won’t.

Certainly, restrictions on school attendance must be kept to a minimum, but how? Presumptions of closing schools only at the last possible moment and reopening them at the earliest opportunity may actually be dangerous. It mistakenly assumes that the next pandemic will not pose terrible risks of death and injury to children and young people.

But also, in a pandemic, earlier restrictions may mean fewer restrictions and less harm in the long run. If there is opportunity in the next pandemic to act early and effectively, it should be grasped.

We wait to see the Module 2 report but one lesson might be the pitfalls of acting too hesitantly and too late. If that is so, extolling a maxim of “restrict attendance” at the last possible moment may actually be a recipe for repeating mistakes of the last pandemic.

So what can we learn about minimising the harm to children and the course to chart? We can learn about the importance of resilience of our schools, of the importance of resource teachers who are retained and skilled, and of well-equipped schools. We can learn about the importance of reducing inequalities, particularly along lines of socioeconomic disadvantage.

We can learn about the importance of preparedness, both in education and across society. The effectiveness of the broader societal response to a pandemic will likely be the greatest determinant of the impact of the next pandemic on children.

We can learn, my Lady, about the importance of a coherent plan for a pandemic response arrived in partnership with the sector. A plan that confronts and prepares for the realities of a pandemic and addresses them.

A significant error in the context of education was an approach in summer 2020 of no plan B: the schools will open and nothing else will be discussed or planned for. That no plan B approach was arrived at in the context of a precarious R rate and clear scientific advice that further peaks were likely. It resulted in a chaotic lurching from a plan of no restrictions on attendance to prolonged restrictions.

It was a plan for keep schools open and panic when you can’t. We learnt, therefore, of the dangers of blindly setting one’s face against restrictions on school attendance until the point at which it becomes impossible to do otherwise.

My Lady, that fundamentally is why unions were at times voices of caution on unrestricted attendance. It was not through a lens of caring more or caring less about the wellbeing and education of children, or about putting the interests of children above or below the interests of others in society. It was about the wish for a plan, a plan that maximised the safety of staff, of pupils and of community, and of continuity of education in the longer as well as the shorter term.

My Lady, we can learn about the fundamental importance of maximising safety within schools. It is one of the controllables in a pandemic. It can include a sensible mask policy, test and trace, rotated and staggered attendance, and ventilation.

These prosaic but critical measures protect the physical safety of both pupils and staff, limit transmission, and inspire and promote confidence in attendance. We hope that in Counsel to the Inquiry pointing in opening towards some of the challenges and limitations of safety measures in schools, that we did not detect a whiff of fatalism. Safety measures in schools can be a powerful tool, and in confronting a challenge for which there are no simple answers, measures that shift the dial should be grasped.

We can learn, my Lady, of the importance of bold plans for supporting both remote education and means of promoting wellbeing during periods of restriction.

These are important lessons to be explored during this module.

The TUC affiliated education unions are proud of their contribution to the pandemic response. They worked hard for a profession that was worthy of, and in need of, support. They worked to support education staff and their safety and also to support education staff in their teaching and caring for their pupils.

There are a small number of witnesses who are critical of union caution on unrestricted attendance. The Welsh Government suggests that there was a conflict between the interests of education staff and the interests of children, and it seeks conclusions from the Inquiry on how competing rights and consideration should be managed.

My Lady, the idea that the root challenge was the interests of staff versus the interests of pupils is wrong. Pupils and staff share fundamentally the same interests of safe schools in which pupils are present.

It is also wrong because restrictions on attendance had nothing at all to do with the interests of staff. They were introduced because of exponentially increasing deaths in overwhelmed hospitals, and no decision maker says otherwise.

In concluding, we must recognise and record the impact of the pandemic upon children and young people, but also confront the difficult questions about how, practically, to chart a course through. We chart a course, my Lady, by entering the next pandemic with more resilience and less inequality, by determination in producing robust plans, by confronting the hard realities of a pandemic and addressing them with a coherent and realistic response, and by bold and committed plans to maximise safety when in school, and optimising education and wellbeing when out of it.

Those are all features to which the Trades Union Congress and its affiliated unions invite careful attention.

My Lady, thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Mr Jacobs.

Who is next? Ms – I’m sorry, I always have trouble pronouncing, can you help me?

Ms Bicarregui: Bicarregui, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Bicarregui. I’m so sorry, I should have said at the beginning if anybody can help with phonetic pronunciation, I’d be grateful.

Yes.

Submissions on Behalf of the Welsh Government by Ms Bicarregui

Ms Bicarregui: Prynhawn da, my Lady.

I will be brief; you have the Welsh Government’s written opening statement and its detailed witness evidence.

The Welsh Government has a firm and enduring commitment to honour the rights of children and young people. As your Ladyship is aware, the Welsh Government formally adopted the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as the basis for policymaking relating to children and young people as early as 2004, and from 2012 the Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) Measure 2011 placed the duty on Welsh ministers to consider children’s rights in all their actions and decisions.

Your Ladyship will pose the question: so what? Did the legal framework materially change the approach of the Welsh Government to decision making in respect of children and young people? Was there an implementation gap, as my learned friend for the Children’s Commissioner for Wales submits? What concrete evidence is there of a difference in approach in Wales?

My Lady, you have detailed written evidence, and you’ll be hearing further evidence about that, but the Welsh Government’s position, and this is reflected in the written evidence of others, is that it did matter, and it does matter, that in Wales the UNCRC has routinely been part of decision making for the last 20 years.

My Lady, I do pause there to note that the Welsh Government has listened to the strength of opinion in favour of full incorporation of the UNCRC, which is in the room today.

The Welsh Government would submit that the effect of the legal framework in Wales on decision making in respect of children and young people’s rights during the pandemic can be seen in the following examples – and my Lady, I’m not going to give an exhaustive list of the examples but some of those are, firstly, working in partnership with the Children’s Commissioner for Wales on the Coronavirus and Me surveys. Those surveys took place in May 2020 and in January 2021, and, crucially, incorporating the learning from those surveys into decision making during the course of the pandemic.

Secondly, being the first UK nation to commit to free school meals during school holidays. That happened in April 2020. In attempting to extend the summer term in 2020 and add a week to the October half term so that children and young people could return to school in the summer of 2020. And in not diluting the legal protections of those who had statements of special educational needs during the first months of the pandemic.

But my Lady, to be clear, the Welsh Government acknowledges that it did not get everything right. And perhaps more importantly for the Inquiry’s purposes, it’s open to interrogating its decision making and considering what can be done differently and better in a future pandemic for children and young people.

The Welsh Government acknowledges that there was inadequate planning to close schools for most children in March 2020. The Welsh Government has always accepted that it did not carry out a formal children’s rights impact assessment and that it did not consult the Children’s Commissioner for Wales before the announcement on 18 March that schools would need to close for most pupils.

My Lady, you’ll be hearing evidence on the reasons for that, but children and young people were seriously affect, with disadvantaged and vulnerable children suffering the greatest effects, and the Welsh Government has learnt this lesson.

As to the context for that decision, it’s clear from the contemporaneous documents that on 17 March, and even into the morning of 18 March, it was hoped that the schools would remain open. But, my Lady, on the morning of 18 March, schools across Wales were closing due to staff illness, children were not being sent to school by worried parents, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that the NHS was about to come under unprecedented strain.

My Lady, there’s an uncomfortable trend in public discourse generally to seek to characterise decisions as self-evidently right or wrong, and choices as black or white. The evidence you have received in this module, my Lady, challenges that discourse. Within the written evidence, there are those who argue that the virus posed relatively little harm to, in health terms, to children, and therefore schools should not have been closed. Other Core Participants argue that decision makers did not take the health threat to children and young people sufficiently seriously when seeking to reopen schools or to take decisions, and we’ve heard that very powerfully this afternoon, my Lady.

My Lady, these were complex decisions. Often, they were least-worst decisions, and in the early stages they were taken under considerable pressures of time.

My Lady, the Welsh Government is grateful to you and to your team for the very detailed and careful consideration you’re giving to these complex issues over the next four weeks, and the Welsh Government will help in any way it can.

Lastly, the Welsh Government would like to take this opportunity to thank the children and the young people of Wales, to thank their parents and carers, the teaching profession, including all of the support and the administration staff, and all of the other professionals involved with the care and support of children and young people across Wales, social workers, further education staff, voluntary organisations, for everything they did during the pandemic.

Diolch.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Ms Bicarregui. Very grateful.

Ms Drysdale. Ah, there you are.

Submissions on Behalf of the Scottish Government by Ms Drysdale KC

Ms Drysdale: Good afternoon, my Lady. I appear on behalf of the Scottish Government with Iain Halliday, Kristian Whitaker and Amelia Mah.

The Scottish Government wishes to thank children and young people in Scotland, and those who supported them, for their extraordinary contribution throughout the pandemic to the wider protection of society.

Children and young people in Scotland suffered untold losses, and the lower risk to them from the virus was not known at the outset. As the pandemic progressed, they made sacrifices to benefit and protect older generations.

Children and young people suffered profound changes to their daily life and routine, including disruption to their education. There was a disproportionate impact on children from marginalised and disadvantaged groups. The Scottish Government appreciates the importance of school, early learning, wider childcare, and further entire education for social and personal development, not just for learning.

Although the impact of the pandemic was felt differently by different children, there are many who had suffered and who continue to suffer because of the pandemic. While many suffered directly due to the virus, others suffered losses which were less visible to society at the time. Mental health problems for children and young people increased.

The damage caused by the pandemic is still ongoing and its full extent is unknown. Some continue to face health challenges. There have been lasting impacts on education and socialisation, and many lost loved ones.

In this opening statement, I will address four of the key themes which will be considered by the Inquiry as part of this module: closure of schools, remote learning, ensuring that the voices of children were heard, and the safety of children.

It’s not possible to address everything in detail in the time available, so I would also refer your Ladyship to the Scottish Government’s more detailed written opening statement.

Turning to the first theme, closure of schools. The possibility of widespread school closures was first discussed by Scottish ministers in detail at a Scottish Government Resilience Room meeting on 17 February 2020. At that time, the scientific advice was clear that widespread school closures were not justified but some temporary closures were likely.

Local authorities began putting in place plans for hubs, digital permission of education, and arrangements for free school meals. The Scottish Government was aware of the need to ensure that children were protected in the event of school closures and took steps to maintain child protection systems. Guidance was provided, together with additional funding.

The Scottish Government acknowledges that there was widespread disruption to education which had a significant impact on children and young people. The Scottish Government wished to keep schools and early learning and childcare open for as long as possible. It gradually became more difficult to sustain education provision following advice on self-isolation, social distancing, and declining attendance, with high levels of anxiety and uncertainty amongst parents and education staff.

On 18 March 2020, following discussion at cabinet and a follow-up meeting with the former First Minister, the former Deputy First Minister took the decision to close schools and early learning and childcare settings, to control the spread of the virus and protect the vulnerable, with certain exceptions including for vulnerable children and young people, and the children of key workers.

Turning to the second theme, my Lady, remote learning. Access to digital learning was part of overall contingency planning prior to the pandemic. The Scottish Government funded a robust, high-speed broadband connection to each local authority and funded Glow, Scotland’s nationally available digital learning platform. Glow was launched in 2007. It provides free and secure access to a range of online tools and services to deliver remote learning and teaching.

During the pandemic, Glow played a key role in ensuring that learners and teachers across Scotland were able to continue to learn from home.

In the early stages of the pandemic, Education Scotland developed new materials to support both teachers and parents, including Parent Club and Scotland Learns. The aim was to offer additional resources and advice to teachers and parents.

From March 2020 significant work was carried out to minimise the impact of digital exclusion by providing devices, systems and funding to those in need.

Local authorities collaborated in this and deployed connectivity solutions for disadvantaged children and young people. The Scottish Government provided funding and strategic direction but left decisions to be made locally.

There have been concerns about digital inequality and engagement in education. The Scottish Government sought to minimise the impact of online learning by providing devices, online platforms, and funding to those in need.

It has committed to continued investment in digital learning. It decided that schools were best placed to identify those experiencing digital exclusion.

Turning to the third theme, my Lady, children’s voices. The Inquiry may hear evidence that children and young people’s interests and voices should be represented and respected in all relevant policy, including pandemic planning. The Scottish Government would agree with that recommendation.

This is reflective of the way that the Scottish Government approached policy development and delivery both before and during the pandemic.

Throughout the pandemic, the Scottish Government commissioned the LockdownLowdown surveys which assessed the impact of coronavirus on education, relationships, employment, mental and physical wellbeing, and access to information in relation to children and young people.

Since the pandemic, the interests and voices of children and young people have been given further protection by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Incorporation (Scotland) Act 2024. The Act incorporates the UNCRC into domestic law directly. It is now unlawful for a public authority to act or fail to act in a way that is incompatible with the UNCRC requirements in the Act when carrying out a relevant function.

This includes giving every child the right to express their views freely in all matters affecting them and giving their views due weight in accordance with their age, and maturity.

Turning to the fourth and final theme, safety of children. In Scotland, local authorities have the primary statutory responsibility for delivering social work, social care and education services, and were best placed to make decisions about local service provision. The Scottish Government worked hard to ensure that arrangements were in place for the continued support of vulnerable children and young people whilst respecting the primary role of local authorities in the delivery of that support.

On 31 March 2020, the Scottish Government published guidance on the continued provision of support to vulnerable children and young people. It was for local authorities to determine, based on local knowledge, whether those children and young people needed access to local hubs. The Inquiry may hear evidence that vulnerability was not adequately defined and that there was considerable local variation.

In Scotland, local authorities were given discretion to identify vulnerable children in their area. The Scottish Government considered that it was important for there to be a high-level national definition supported by local flexibility to ensure that vulnerable children were not missed.

Together with education, children’s social work visits also moved to remote visits. There were some initial concerns about the effectiveness of remote visits and the Scottish Government published guidance on these.

Children’s hearings and family cases heard in the Court of Session and the Sheriff Court were also moved to virtual hearings as part of the pandemic response.

My Lady, in conclusion, many members of the public, children, those working in education, and members of the third sector, experienced unimaginable trauma during the pandemic. There was also an extraordinary contribution for the greater good of society from those working in education, early learning practitioners, teachers and support staff, youth workers, social workers, lecturers and staff in college, universities, training providers and key workers and from the voluntary and charity sector.

Some sectors felt a lack of recognition for their efforts, such as early learning and child care workers, and the Scottish Government wishes to pay tribute to them now for their exceptional public service, hard work, and dedication.

The human rights of everyone were restricted to prevent harm from the virus with a significant emotional impact on children and young people. But most importantly the Scottish Government wishes to repeat its thanks to children and young people in Scotland for their extraordinary contribution throughout the pandemic to the wider protection of society.

It is only by acknowledging the harm caused to so many, despite the determined efforts of decision makers and those working with children and young people, that lessons can be learnt and recommendations made to save lives and prevent loss in a future pandemic.

Thank you, my Lady.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much for your help, Ms Drysdale.

Ms Ward, I think you complete the submissions today.

Submissions on Behalf of the Department for Education by Ms Ward KC

Ms Ward: Good afternoon, my Lady.

I appear on behalf of the Department for Education, which I’ll refer to as the DfE. I’m assisted by Mr Thomas, who is here today, and Ms Sullivan and Ms Masood.

The DfE, as you will know, is the central government department with the policy responsibility both for education and for children’s social care and, as such, hopes to play a significant role in this module.

My Lady, unlike many of those who have spoken so far today, this is the first occasion on which I have addressed you orally. That is not because the DfE has not been engaging with the Inquiry to date. I hope it’s evident from both the volume and the detail of the evidence that’s been provided to this module and, indeed, to earlier ones, that the DfE has sought to take a proactive rather than reactive approach, and that it’s considering both the lessons to be learned from the pandemic and indeed how it could best assist this phase of your Inquiry, well before any Rule 9 requests were received.

As we’ve said in our written submissions, the DfE welcomes the focus of this module on children and young people and the scrutiny that this module will therefore bring to almost every aspect of the DfE’s work during the specified period. We look forward to working with the Inquiry and with other Core Participants to ensure that everything possible is learnt, both from what went well, and from the mistakes that were made, in order that children and young people can be protected so far as that is possible from the worst impact of any future pandemic.

My Lady, Counsel to the Inquiry has rightly referred to deficiencies in planning for the first period of lockdown. Those deficiencies have been acknowledged in our written submissions and our evidence. There is obviously a question for the Inquiry to investigate about where responsibility lay for planning for the impacts in particular of school closures between January and March 2020. However, I should make clear at this point that those lessons have been learned. The Department – the DfE has now put significant resources into resilience planning and accepts the need – and this is part of the key learnings we’ve set out in our written submissions – for clarity of responsibility and, critically, for there to be robust but adaptable plans that can be stood up in response to a future pandemic or other emergency.

Even more so than our written submissions, these oral submissions can only be a bare outline of some of the main issues. I hope to use what remains of my ten minutes to set out very briefly the DfE’s role in the two key systems that impact on children’s lives, the education and care systems, and explain how that changed during the pandemic, and then to touch on two of the most critical issues for children: the impact of the pandemic on social work practice and the restrictions on attendance at school, which, in line with the steer my Lady has previously given, we do accept is commonly referred to as closure of schools but of course they did remain open to some children.

Teachers, as well as social workers, continued to work and to work hard throughout.

The structure of the education and children’s social care systems are such that DfE’s role ordinarily is to set the framework, policy and priorities for a number of more or less autonomous bodies who deliver services for children and young people. There are two important points that arise out of that. Firstly, it increases the importance of partnership working and of building relationships.

Secondly, it meant that the increased need for central direction and for organisation engendered by the pandemic required a shift from the DfE’s usual patterns of working with partners across the system. The DfE sought to gather and respond to feedback from those partners throughout the specified period and it seeks continuously to improve the relationships and systems that enable learning and good practice to be shared throughout the sectors for which it has responsibility.

A number of those who have addressed you today have spoken about the importance of ensuring that children’s rights, the impact on them and what is in their best interests, are given proper consideration when decisions affecting them are made. The DfE agrees with the thrust of those submissions.

The Inquiry will of course examine the extent to which a focus on those matters was or was not lacking, or could have been more structured or intense during the specified period, but it is important to be clear that the DfE did seek throughout to ensure that there was a focus on, in particular, the needs of vulnerable children and what was in their best interests.

And it’s also important to be clear, and this echoes some submissions you’ve heard from those who spoke just before me, certainly in relation to most of the decisions that this module will be considering, the needs and interests of children and young people are not properly seen as being in direct conflict with the needs and interests of the adults who worked to care for and to educate them.

Those adults need to be working within a system that enables them to give their best, and so while there may be tension and factors pulling in different directions, it’s necessary to take a holistic rather then a binary view.

There will, of course, be different views on how best to promote those interests but we are all on the same side, working to try to prevent harm to children and to maximise their potential.

So very briefly, then, social care, and a word firstly on a topic that has been raised by a number of others today: the Adoption and Children (Coronavirus) (Amendment) Regulations.

The Inquiry will, of course, hear evidence from DfE and other witnesses about the decision-making process that lay behind those regulations and the judicial review that resulted. As we’ve made clear in the evidence and written submissions, the DfE accepts the result of that judicial review.

There was no deliberate decision taken to exclude the Children’s Commissioner in what was, of necessity, a rushed process at a time of great uncertainty. The DfE will and does ordinarily consult the Children’s Commissioner when it’s appropriate to do so, and indeed did, in relation to the extension of some of those regulations.

But what was and remains clear, as is a finding made in the High Court, was that the intention behind the regulations was to protect looked-after children who were at risk because of the consequences of the pandemic.

And it’s also, in my submission, important to be clear, because there is some elision of different issues in some of the submissions and evidence that you’ll see and hear, that most of the changes to social care during the specified period were not as a result of those regulations. The regulations provided flexibilities, most of which were not widely used, but in particular, the shift to remote contact for social care visits, for visits other than those mandated by the regulations that were amended – and those are the majority of social care visits – the shift there to remote visiting was a consequence of practice being adapted in the light of public health guidance.

And another concerning feature, the drop in referrals into children’s social care, was the result of children who were not previously known to be vulnerable not being seen by services, and therefore not referred.

And that, of course, brings us then to school closures. The DfE, in common with all Core Participants, recognises that closing schools to most children was hugely damaging to many of them, not only educationally and not only to the most vulnerable. We echo what Counsel to the Inquiry said about the importance of school. It’s not just a place of learning and development but it’s a place of safety and a place of respite from difficult home situations.

The DfE is clear that schools should not be closed if that can be avoided. Of course – far from the only, but a great focus of this module will be on the decisions that were taken around the closure of schools.

There is a really difficult balance to be struck between trying to keep them open at all costs or, as Mr Jacobs has suggested, having targeted early closures to avoid longer ones later, but then potentially closing schools at a time when it may become apparent with hindsight that it wasn’t in fact necessary. There simply are no easy answers and we look forward to all of the complexities being fully ventilated in this module.

Schools were, of course, kept open for vulnerable pupils. Attendance was obviously not high enough, although it improved considerably over time. An enormous amount of work was done both by DfE and by professionals on the ground to stand up remote education for those not able to attend.

Again, we don’t say that was perfect, but it is right to say that many lessons have been learned in that regard, and it is definitely one way in which the education system will unquestionably be better prepared and more resilient in any future pandemic or any emergency that might lead to the closure of schools.

There’s a great volume of evidence before the Inquiry, including from the DfE in the corporate witness statement that’s dedicated to the research that’s been done on impacts, that identifies the enormous impacts that there were and continue to be on children and young people as a result of the pandemic.

As we say in the written opening, most of DfE’s current work is shaped by the need to address those impacts and to ensure that policy fits the needs of children and young people as they are now, following the pandemic. The DfE has invested in numerous discrete programmes that are aimed at addressing specific impacts, and some of those are set out in our written opening. I won’t repeat them now.

The significance and severity of the impacts on children and young people are unquestionable. But there is also some positive evidence, and the DfE does caution against the risk of creating perhaps a self-perpetuating narrative resulting in lowered expectations for this cohort. Many children and young people have achieved extraordinary things in the face of enormous challenges, including, but by no means limited to, the evidence that there is a recovery of academic attainment.

The many achievements of children and young people in this period and their efforts, and those of the staff who taught and cared for them, should not be understated.

I want to finish on behalf of DfE with a tribute to children and young people themselves. We’ve all read the Children and Young People’s Voices report and the Every Story Matters, and we’ve heard and seen and been struck by the video shown this morning.

We know that this generation were much less likely than adults to suffer the worst health consequences of Covid-19, although we recognise of course that some did and some are still living with those consequences, but in general, in this pandemic, children and young people did give up their freedom and suffered from a reduction in services that are crucial to their development, and in some cases their safety, in order largely to protect others from harm.

The DfE is committed to working with the Inquiry and other Core Participants to ensure that the extent of that sacrifice is recognised, and that decisions in future are taken on the basis of the best possible evidence and a full understanding of all the many ways in which children and young people can be uniquely impacted by measures that are necessary to contain the pandemic.

My Lady, unless I can assist you further.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed for your help, Ms Ward.

That completes the submissions that we have for today. I’m very grateful to everyone who has made oral submissions today and those who have submitted written submissions. I find them all extremely constructive, focused and helpful. So, again, thank you very much indeed.

I shall return for the start of the evidence at 10.00 tomorrow.

(4.10 pm)

(The hearing adjourned until 10.00 am the following day)