When we try to take stock of government choices that have made the Covid-19 epidemic so much more harmful than it need have been, it is hard to know what item will top the list.
The failure, shared by leaders worldwide, to keep infected people from entering the country and spreading the disease when the epidemic was still confined to the Far East? The carnage in care homes? The wanton undermining of the economy through an unnecessarily protracted lockdown supported by unaffordable state aid?
Education, however, will probably figure, if at all, a long way down the list, because the effects of the failures in school and examination policy are almost invisible – no excess deaths, no direct redundancies or bankruptcies. Yet these unseen effects may well represent the greatest loss of all.
The collateral damage alone is serious enough: millions of parents unable to carry on with their work, abused and vulnerable children left without support, children without the social life, routine and need to accommodate others which trains them to be proper members of society.
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