Our students are trapped in a psychological experiment

Freshers across the country are being subjected to a psychological experiment that would never have been imagined, let alone sanctioned, before Covid-19 plunged the world into restrictive measures. Whether they will do any more than flatten curves or delay peaks is still not known but, either way, we are risking a mental health catastrophe among our young people.

The impact is bad enough in the school where I work – where teachers and pupils keep their distance from each other in well-ventilated classrooms that are rapidly becoming well-chilled. But at least we share the same space as each other. The lurch to online teaching in universities, in contrast, has confined freshers in their rooms spending hours every day staring into their laptops.

Barney, a physics student at a UK university, is just one of thousands of first year undergraduates corralled into a university experience like nothing we have ever known. Miles from home, he has been incarcerated in a university flat and socially distanced from a world his predecessors took for granted.