IMPACT OF COVID-19
By Matthew Dodd, head of policy and public affairs, National Children’s Bureau
Necessity is the mother of invention, according to the well-known proverb. As the Covid-19 pandemic has unfolded, children’s services have had to adapt rapidly to keep children safe, secure and supported. There was no alternative, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
Each phase, with its accompanying rules and restrictions, created distinct challenges for children’s services and professionals. However, these have essentially blended together into a continual process of change and adaptation, which shows no signs of abating.
Some professionals will have thrived amid the need to innovate while others will have been more reluctant innovators. However, if they have enough energy to step back and consider what they have been able to deliver for children in these unprecedented times, then they should hold their heads high.
The short-term ability of professionals to adapt has been incredible. Teachers have learned to deliver online content, while still including children with special educational needs and disabilities. Social workers have come up with new processes to balance risks to children with the danger of infection. Professionals supporting children’s mental health have learned to develop honest and empathic relationships via phone or internet.
The innovations and adaptations that emerged during this period must be tested and evaluated before they are adopted in the long term. The most effective services are co-produced with children, young people and families themselves and ultimately their views and experiences must shape the innovations that stick.
However, the incredible resourcefulness of professionals to adapt should not be allowed to mask the fact that many services were already at breaking point before the pandemic struck. A decade of austerity in public services and rising poverty and inequality had led local systems into a permanent state of fire-fighting. The pandemic was just another fire to tackle.
Prevention and early intervention services had been decimated, with record numbers of looked-after children, rising school exclusions, and a huge spike in the number of education, health and care plans for children with special educational needs.
It is hard to view the long-term impact of the pandemic through any other lens than soaring need for children and young people’s services and an urgent call to action to properly resource them.
There is clear evidence from the Office for National Statistics that parents with dependent children have felt the most negative impact on their household income from successive lockdowns. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and others have warned that rising unemployment is likely to cause more children to fall into poverty. It is vital that children’s services are there to catch them.
Early evidence also suggests the most profound impact of the pandemic will relate to children and young people’s mental health. In April 2020, the Covid-19 Psychological Research Consortium found almost half of young people were reporting trauma-like symptoms related to the impact of the pandemic and there is evidence from University College London that young people have been more adversely affected than older age groups. Then there is the impact on babies and young children from increased parental stress and isolation. We are yet to see the true extent of this impact, but it is something we will have to prepare for.
This year’s comprehensive spending review offers a chance to do things differently. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has so far showed a willingness to make radical decisions. We need to replace piecemeal policymaking with a cross-government strategy to establish a new vision for childhood. This way, we can put out the fires that services have been battling to contain and create space for further innovation to deliver a better childhood.
THE VIRUS HAS AFFECTED EVERYTHING BUT I STILL FEEL POSITIVE ABOUT THE FUTURE
By Dmitrijs Meiksans, 15
Coronavirus has had such a great impact on every single step in the life of every young person across the UK. As a young person who had just entered year 10, the first lockdown cut out a crucial part of my secondary school experience. Teachers are now trying to catch up with the missed learning while continuing with the bits in the curriculum that they haven’t yet had the opportunity to cover.
The first lockdown was interesting for me. I became my sister and brother’s temporary teacher, while having to continue with my own education. I found this gave me a chance to be much more independent with my own learning and have more control over what I do and when. It felt very liberating in a way.
Thankfully, I was not affected by the exam results muddle. I cannot begin to imagine what the year 11s felt as they were left to wonder what was going to happen. Going back to school in September was really intriguing. A never-ending one-way system in my school was introduced, year group bubbles formed, and there was hand sanitiser at every corner. With the arrival of the second lockdown, face masks had to be worn in all communal areas. This was something of a relief to me. Something had to change to ensure young people had a sense of security, even though some didn’t like the idea of putting on a mask every time they entered a corridor.
The pandemic also had quite a big effect on my own mental health. The support systems at school that I almost took for granted pre-lockdown were not so easily accessible at home. The face-to-face contact and support were replaced by email and telephone where possible.
It is shocking to think the virus shaped the entirety of the year 2020. It has impacted everything and I just hope there will soon be a “new normal” where we can meet all our friends again without restrictions. I want us to have some sort of human contact – again, something that I took for granted – and so much more.
Coming out of the pandemic, I think schools need to have more visible measures in place to support students’ mental wellbeing and welfare. They need to ensure students know exactly where they can go to speak to someone about how they feel and it should be compulsory that schools do everything they possibly can to remove stigma around mental health. The government needs to look at investing further in child and adolescent mental health services. These are vital services that a lot of young people need to use to access crucial support. Funding would reduce waiting times, improve facilities, and allow more young people to access them.
Despite all the gloom, I do feel very positive looking at the future because all you can be is positive, especially now we have several coronavirus vaccines.
How different sectors have fared during the pandemic
SOCIAL WORK
Referrals to children’s social care fell sharply as the country entered lockdown in March 2020. The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) says current workloads are similar to usual, but social workers anticipate a peak in referrals in the near future. “We are beginning to see a cohort of newly vulnerable families that we have not previously worked with who are experiencing domestic abuse, neglect and financial hardship,” says ADCS president Jenny Coles.
Successive lockdowns forced social workers to change how they work in creative ways that, if sustained post-pandemic, could renew practice for the better, according to a report from Research in Practice. “Changes to practice that would have taken months or even years to realise have become the norm in a matter of weeks, such as the transition to remote hearings in the family courts,” says Coles.
With social distancing rules, more visits have taken place in public spaces and on the doorstep. Research in Practice’s study found practitioners achieved emotional closeness to children by being able to be more playful with them in gardens and parks.
An NSPCC report into children’s services responses to Covid, due to be published this month, found communication over lockdown was most often over telephone, followed by video-conferencing and email. Initial findings suggest virtual delivery has the potential to enhance future services, where appropriate, in terms of reach, accessibility and efficiency. But the organisation stresses training for practitioners and access to effective software is important.
“Social workers let us know that the use of video chat or messaging apps has helped them gain new and richer insights into children’s experiences as these methods of communication are more familiar to young people, and less formal,” says Coles.
According to the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), changed ways of working have had mixed results. “The issue of some families not being fully kitted out with technology and limitless data and wifi means some parents and children are now harder to reach, and cannot fully engage in, say, formal child protection meetings,” says Gavin Moorghen, BASW professional officer for England.
The effectiveness of electronic “home visits” may be undermined if there is no safe, quiet place to talk openly at home, while under-fives are particularly vulnerable, as they are often unreachable through digital platforms.
During the pandemic children’s services looked to retired professionals and those who had left the sector for extra support. This was not a smooth process, says Moorghen: “We had a number of social workers already registered with their regulator who were keen to offer their services during the pandemic but found their offers of support were not accepted.”
While some staff were recruited this way, most local authorities have responded to shortages by redeploying their existing staff to fill gaps, says Coles. “Therefore, it is unsurprising that relatively few social workers have been recruited by local authorities through this route,” she says. Anticipating an increase in pressures on children’s services, ADCS is calling for a national recruitment campaign.
YOUTH WORK
Earlier this year, charity UK Youth found two thirds of more than 1,200 youth organisations surveyed were at risk of permanent closure in the next 12 months. “The sector is in a weak and worrying position,” says UK Youth fundraising director Lindsay Marsden.
Covid has shone a light on the work done by youth organisations, which carried on providing services when formal education was closed. “There are lots of mentions of youth work and young people in current Covid legislation so there is a recognition coming from across central government that this is essential work,” says Abbee McLatchie, director of youth work at the National Youth Agency (NYA).
Recognising that the fallout from the pandemic has hit young people hardest, the government launched a £16.5m Youth Covid-19 Support Fund at the end of November. UK Youth has also been able to secure £2m from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s Community Match Challenge scheme. While this is welcome, it is not enough, says Marsden. The organisations responding to UK Youth’s survey needed more than £46m to keep them going until 2022.
Youth organisations have shown creativity, innovation and flexibility as they continue to support young people, developing new partnerships in the community. “The knowledge and experience gained from the lockdown will be used to feed into future work,” says Marsden.
For example, St Helens Council youth service delivered personalised “isolation survival kits” including baking kits, and arts and crafts materials, to young people’s doors during lockdown. “We asked them what they liked and might find useful,” says the youth service’s outdoor activities and programme coordinator Matthew Cunliffe. Youth workers also developed digital initiatives and outdoor activities such as kayaking for small groups when regulations permitted.
Digital media has been a challenge and an opportunity. An increase in digital capacity post-Covid may help youth workers reach more or different young people. However, young people do not all have the resources to access online activities. Capacity is also an issue. UK Youth partnered with Microsoft and Raspberry Pi to build youth workers’ digital capacity through training and equipment donated to organisations and young people.
With young people unable to come to youth clubs, detached youth work has also expanded. The NYA and the Federation for Detached Youth Work set up a resource bank and training to support organisations setting up detached youth work practice. Some organisations have struggled to get insurance due to lack of understanding of the work while another challenge has been the need for specific training.
“I think we will see a revitalisation of detached youth work. It is cost effective and we have got some real economic challenges,” says McLatchie. “But it is important we protect a broad range of approaches.”
MENTAL HEALTH
Changes forced on the mental health sector by the pandemic may end up becoming part of long-term service delivery. “So many more consultations are happening remotely,” says Dr Bernadka Dubicka, chair of the child and adolescent faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
This means families do not have to travel long distances and children can take less time off school but there are also downsides. Some children find video consultations threatening. Risk assessments are difficult because it is harder to pick up non-verbal clues and observe interaction between family members plus it is more difficult to establish a rapport. There are also issues with privacy. Dr Dubicka advocates a blended approach, with virtual consultations used as an additional tool rather than a replacement for face-to-face contact.
Charity YoungMinds has changed the way it supports young people such as bringing forward the launch of a web chat service for parents, for example. The charity has also provided extra support for those staffing its advice lines now they are working from home.
The pandemic has had a well-documented effect on children’s mental health. While some children have thrived, especially those who found school a challenge, many have been impacted by anxiety, isolation, and the withdrawal of support services. During lockdown some areas cancelled routine appointments, only offering crisis services, while support offered by charities, schools and community groups was disrupted. YoungMinds saw a 63 per cent rise in calls to its crisis line while its own survey found 31 per cent of children who were accessing support for mental health pre-Covid were not receiving it by the summer. A Centre for Mental Health analysis found 1.5 million children will need mental health support in the next 10 years. This increase in demand is likely to affect child and adolescent mental health services waiting lists, although Dr Dubicka says the impact will vary. “It depends where you live – we have always seen a postcode lottery,” she says.
THE NOVELTY OF LOCKDOWN AND BEING OUT OF SCHOOL SOON WORE OFF
By Fatimah Hamza, 18
In the beginning it felt surreal. Being sent home from school was exciting. It was an extended period for A-level revision, away from all of the stress of school, teachers and targets. In the beginning the Zoom quizzes with your friends were fun, unfamiliar. We began to hear whispers of exams being cancelled but teachers, parents, adults reassured us that was impossible.
However, the exams were cancelled, and almost instantaneously the novelty of being at home wore off. The Zoom sessions became repetitive and the days blended together with no word from teachers or the reliable structure of a school day. Even reading a book became a challenge, the days of studying until ungodly hours long forgotten along with any sense of hope. As the number of weeks in lockdown increased, the state of our mental health decreased. During the first lockdown my physical health took as great a hit as my mental health. Planned surgery was cancelled, along with physiotherapy linked to previous operations and I was now classified as vulnerable.
A constant feeling of dread plagued me. My body was painfully imbalanced and I could no longer swim to soothe my aching joints. When A-level results day descended upon us, I welcomed the distraction. We all were naïvely optimistic that the government would be fair and just. However, the majority of us woke up that morning to the exact opposite. Finding out children in private schools had not been wrongfully downgraded like us felt unsettling – as if they had all been given their desired university choices and we were stuck with the leftover scraps that nobody wanted. Even after the government made amends, it was too late for many.
Some of my friends are stuck at home stacking shelves in supermarkets, worrying about how their families will afford to keep them at home for another year. We are apprehensive about our futures. Our career paths appear to be as restricted as we are inside of the four walls of our bedrooms. Whether it is crucial work experience or urgent surgery, we are all waiting for something, stuck in a limbo of uncertainty, hoping to finally progress with our lives.
However, despite all of the distress we have endured during the first lockdown, the second one was more bearable as we planned activities to do ahead of time instead of relying on others. Nevertheless, despite our adjustment to the “new normal”, schools and other services need to ensure they are still sending resources to children and not just abandoning them in the midst of chaos. For many of us it can be easy to become reclusive and withdrawn. We desperately need emotional support from professionals working with us. An email from a teacher or a class get together on Zoom can be enough to make us feel like somebody cares and that there is still life beyond our bedrooms.
