"Hello P2, how are you today?"
The phrase that will forever remind me of our lockdown home school experience, especially as my six-year-old daughter has taken to mimicking her teacher while bossing around her three-year-old sister in unrelenting, and frankly rather unrealistic, games of ‘school’.
 
I joke, but that phrase has become emblematic of how fortunate we have been as parents of two girls during a time when, for some, education has been on pause. In all honesty, until I had conversations with colleagues and friends whose children attend other schools - some in the same town - I didn’t quite appreciate how fortunate we are to hear the excited and energetic voice of our daughter’s teacher every day.
 
Since the day I picked her up in March and the school locked its gates behind us, Miss M has been a constant and reassuring (if virtual) presence at our kitchen table, giving us structure and the occasional kind nudge as we inevitably fall behind with the set tasks while juggling work and life. Through almost daily video lessons on a range of subjects, to written feedback to regular personalised voice messages of praise and encouragement, my daughter is one of the lucky few in Scotland that has been afforded the opportunity to experience lockdown learning in this way. It helps that we live in a town known for its good schools, that attract excellent teachers. That’s not to boast, but to point to the lack of equity in our school system which existed before lockdown, but has been exposed more than ever during it.
 
That’s not to say that home-schooling has been a flawless bed of gold stars for us. While my daughter’s educational needs have been met, as well as the continuation of the teacher-pupil bond which is so important to making children fall in love with learning at a young age, there’s no getting around the fact that her mental wellbeing has been adversely affected.
 
As we enter the summer holiday period, I am acutely aware that my children have spent the equivalent of two summer holidays (and counting) with no interaction with other children. No matter how hard we as parents have tried, the weekly Zoom call with her classmates hasn’t been enough to replace the social learning, emotional connection and just old-fashioned play, my daughter would otherwise have benefited from at school. This is also the case for our three-year-old, who is arguably at an even more delicate age, developing her own sense of identity and independence... or at least she should be. Instead we have relied on a weekly story time from her nursery teachers and failed attempts at video calls (it turns out three-year-olds won’t sit still - who would have thought it?).
 
All of this is inevitably coming to a head 13 weeks into lockdown, manifesting itself in emotional outbursts, disrupted sleep patterns and generally pushing the limits of their parents’ patience. Sadly, my daughters are not the only ones. Lockdown has shifted the balance of children’s lives and their sense of control, or lack of it. Research by the Children’s Parliament, which tracks monthly trends in how children are feeling during lockdown, shows that month-on-month children are reporting that they have less energy, increased levels of boredom, heightened anxiety and a significant increase in worries relating to schoolwork.
 
A rising number also say they worry that the pandemic and consequent lockdown is eroding their rights. The counter argument to that might be that in some countries, children don’t start formal education until they are at least seven or eight. Indeed, as someone who didn’t start school until I was nine years old on account of firstly being born in the Balkans and secondly the outbreak of a civil war on the eve of my start at school, I accept that. But the context in which our children see and measure themselves in is not one of their choosing.
 
Perhaps saddest of all, more than 55% of the children aged 8-14 who responded to the Children’s Parliament said they worry about their future.
 
If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that preparedness is paramount and we must not ignore what’s in front of us. The impact of months of social isolation and a delay in development in some cases will come back to bite us in years to come. But it’s not too late to think innovatively about how we can fix it in the months ahead. 
 
It’s the start of the summer holidays, which gives us six weeks to reset, rethink and reimagine our approach. Come August, whether our children are back in classrooms or not, their wellbeing needs to be top of the curriculum.