Covid Inquiry: Concerns with former Children's Commissioner Anne Longfield's witness statement

Inconsistencies and a failure to mention Long Covid

The role of the UK’s Children’s Commissioner is to represent the rights of children in regards to government policy with reference to the UN Charter on the rights of the child, this includes the right to be free of preventable disease.

Anne Longfield held this position throughout 2020 and left her post in 2021 to be replaced by Rachel de Souza. Her tenure during the deadliest waves of the pandemic was controversial, however this escaped media attention except for reporting in the Byline Times. Families and groups representing clinically children and those with long covid became frustrated with Longfield failure to engage with their concerns while at the same time she publicly supported the group UsForThem.

UsForThem opposed all efforts to reduce transmission in schools, called for children to be allowed the “benefits” of infection, and coordinated an antivax campaign against child vaccination. The founder Molly Kingsley has shared calls for Nuremberg 2.0 against anyone involved in child vaccination and defended disgraced MP Bridgen’s claims that covid vaccines could be worse than the holocaust. Despite UsForThem's disinformation and promotion of far-right conspiracy theories Longfield has continued to support them even submitting joint applications with them for other modules of the covid inquiry.

Longfield was one of the few people the government consulted with in regards to education policy, however on a number of occasions UsForThem seemed aware of government decisions before they were announced to the public.

A Freedom of Information request to the Children’s Commissioner regarding communication between UsForThem to Longfield and her successful Rachel de Souza were denied because there there were too many communications to process.

Longfield appeared at the inquiry hearings and provided a witness statement.

Concerns

• Didn’t acknowledge that children can be harmed by covid, no mention of deaths, long covid, or other harms

• Claims pubs were prioritised over schools, claiming pubs returned in June while schools were closed

• Exaggerated children being locked away at home, created the impression parks and soft play were closed for much longer than the were in reality

• Quoted an Ofsted report as evidence of harms to early years without acknowledging nurseries were reopened and stayed open after 10 weeks of lockdown, the report also cited staff absence as the greatest barrier to learning

• Quoting the Centre for Social Justice report on ghost children to claim children had disappeared from education, these children have not left education, DfE stats show illness is the main cause of absence

• Does not acknowledge transmission in schools, selectively quoted SAGE October 2020 meeting as evidence schools could have continued in January 2021 without impacting transmission. Didn’t quote later meetings where there was more evidence of significant transmission particularly in secondary schools, didn’t mention the Alpha variant’s impact on government decisions

• Made claims the unions and DfE were refusing to cooperate with each other, claims her public intervention (which misrepresented the unions who were calling for collaboration) brought the DfE and unions together to plan. Considering her access to high level meetings she should know the DfE continued to refuse to collaborate with the unions.

• Implied there was major opposition to students returning in September, there wasn’t, there were questions regarding what measures would be in place

• Suggested measures such as isolating positive cases and close contacts was the cause of disruption in autumn term 2020 rather than ongoing infections in education

Response to Testimony and Evidence 

Concerns have been raised regarding former Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield’s testimony and evidence to the covid inquiry on 5 October. Longfield focused entirely on the impacts of pandemic measures on children, long covid was only raised near the end of the hearing when the inquiry’s chair Baroness Hallett interjected with a question on the subject.

While Longfield made many valuable recommendations about long term investment and improvements in children’s services, there are some inconsistencies between her recollection of events and the records, however a number of these are examples of a form of collective amnesia seen across media reporting.

Longfield opened by explaining the issues caused by inadequate remote learning and children being “locked away”.

“What happened was that in June and July, when we should have had a period of schools starting to open, planning being undertaken for the September term, planning for any possible future outbreak or variant to take place. Instead, schools stayed closed and instead had the Eat Out to Help Out, instead of schools opening. And that for me was a terrible mistake and one which played a huge part in children's very negative experience of the lockdown period.”

In June there was an increase in student numbers, while the DfE’s initial plans to get all students back into schools didn’t fully go ahead, several year groups returned in primary and secondary.  This was before pubs reopened, the announcement was made in June, but pubs reopened with considerable restrictions on 4 July. The statement that pubs were open while schools were closed is only accurate during the summer holidays. The Eat Out to Help Out scheme was also only in August during the holidays, however it was a political choice of priorities to spend close to a billion on subsidising restaurant meals rather than providing that funding to schools. 

“Pubs prioritised over schools” has become a common assumption in the media, however when schools returned in full in September 2020 pubs still had many more restrictions, and pubs were shut repeatedly through the tier system and November circuit breaker lockdown whilst schools were expected to continue with only the addition of masks being worn in secondary school communal areas in regions with high infection rates 

Longfield said a lack of visibility had led to increased harms “which was something wouldn't have been the case if services had been operating in a normal way, schools had been open and nurseries had been open.” The impact of not attending education was also cited as contributing to a range of harms in early years children.

Nurseries were not treated the same as schools, they were only partially closed for the first ten weeks of lockdown, after this they were advised by the DfE to return to normal. Nurseries were also expected to stay open during the lockdown that began in January 2021.  

Longfield referred to children being "locked away" and unable to exercise for more than an hour.

“They would normally go to the park, they would normally meet their friends. None of that was possible. And the whole kind of,you know, socialising in public space policy seemed to be geared towards adults. We had the one hour for exercise.”

Government guidance never stated that exercise could only be for one hour as remarked on at the time by Professor Adrian Bell, Dean for Prosperity and Resilience and Professor in the History of Finance at the University of Reading

“It has been regularly reported in the media and remarked by people that we were only permitted one hour of exercise per day”

“Revisiting the actual sources confirms that the law passed to underpin the lockdown allowed exercise as one of the excuses for leaving your home, but this was not limited by frequency, length, distance or time. This law has been embellished, and phrased as only one form of exercise being permitted for each person per day. Although Boris Johnson stated ‘one form of exercise’ would be permitted in his public broadcast on March 22 to announce the start of lockdown, he also did not specify a time limit.

The hour was first suggested by Michael Gove when interviewed outside his house on 29 March by Andrew Marr. ‘I would have thought that for most people, a walk of up to an hour, or a run of 30 minutes or a cycle ride of between that, depending on their level of fitness is appropriate’.

“It seems surprising that such a statement went on to underpin the so called rule of one hour of exercise a day, but historians know that myths generally have very flimsy foundations.

“What is interesting is the fact most people respected this restriction, despite the fact it was never legally enforceable.”

On 10 May Johnson clarified the government position that outside exercise was "unlimited", and by August 2020 children's indoor activities such as soft play were reopened. During the summer Newspapers also showed pictures of beaches and parks packed full of people. Outdoor sports teams were also allowed to resume and ignore the rule of six limit.

In her submitted evidence Longfield quotes Ofsted’s report on early years from April 2022 as proof of the most alarming of harms from nurseries being closed and a lack of socialising. This includes children unable to speak, walk or not being potty trained.

The Ofsted report is based on anecdotal evidence collected over a period of inspections accounting for around 10% of providers. While lockdown was cited as a potential cause of harm, Ofsted found that the greatest barrier to learning was inconsistent staffing due to sickness an high staff turnover. 

In her evidence Longfield quoted the Centre for Social Justice report on “ghost children”  “They reported that 100,000 children had almost entirely disappeared from education since schools returned.” While this report has been widely quoted in the media becoming an accepted fact by many, it's another example of where media misrepresentation has replaced reality, like being limited to one hour of exercise a day, pubs being prioritised while schools were closed, and children being locked away for two years. 

This has been fact checked and reported on by the Byline Times, 100,000 children have not disappeared from education, that is simply a rhetorical flourish designed by the report’s authors to create hard hitting facts against public health measures. The figure is for persitence absence, and the DfE keeps careful track of this data, the data shows the vast majority of absence is due to illness, and the main cause of illness is covid. Much of this is acknowledged in the small print of the CSJ report, however this is never mentioned by those who quote the report. 

The data is easily available for Longfield to see for herself, efforts have been made to contact Longfield regarding how she is representing the data, yet she continues to talk of children disappearing from education. 

While Longfield fails to recognise the disruption to students' education caused directly by covid infections, she notes that absence continues to increase.

"The number of children absent from school has continued to rise. 22% of children are now persistently absent from school with 125,000 severely absent for more than 50% or the time."

Although its been two and a half years after the last lockdown, the CSJ and Longfield have only considered the harms of measures as a cause of increased 

Longfield did not support schools being included in the January 2021 lockdown, answering at the hearing that she supported the initial first lockdown. Several times in her hearing and evidence she describes children as being low risk, however while being at lower risk than other groups they were still at higher risk than from other viruses such as influenza.

In her evidence Longfield questioned the need for schools to be included in any lockdowns beyond a short period at the start of the first lockdown.

"There are questions about the integrity of assumptions made around the impact that school closures would have on the transmission of Covid; the apparent lack of any serious recognition of the short-term and long-term harmful effects of prolonged school closures on children; and the apparent failure of the government to prepare realistically for the scale and duration of school closures, despite having been advised repeatedly by SAGE for several weeks that school closures may be required, and that such closures would need to be lengthy in order to have any beneficial impact on reducing transmission."

Longfield is correct in highlighting the government's failure to prepare for a large reduction in students going to school, however her choice of language in questioning the "integrity of assumptions" on transmission in schools deserves examination.

In her evidence she quotes a section of the minutes from a SAGE meeting in October 2020 which covers potential impact of closing schools, the section also notes that keeping schools open would have a greater impact on:

 "Schools which are most likely to be sites of transmission (high poverty, low resource), may be those with the least capacity to take up additional interventions due to background stressors and resource constraints. Affected areas would suffer in terms of adequate preparation of public exams and therefore perceived fairness of the system."

This demonstrates the complexity of attributing pandemic harms to particular causes when disadvantaged communities faced disproportionate impact from either transmission in schools, or remote learning. It's well documented that disadvantaged communities faced higher transmission rates and worse health outcomes.

Having questioned the "integrity" of evidence that schools played a role in transmission Longfield also highlights another section of the October 2020 SAGE meeting.

“SAGE’s assessment also noted the following in terms of the efficacy of school closures in preventing or reducing the transmission of Covid: “Overall, low confidence... unclear how much schools may contribute to community transmission.”; “Low to moderate impact. Not clear the role that children play in transmission”; “Modelling suggests that resuming early years provision has a smaller relative impact than primary school, which in turn has a smaller relative

impact than resuming secondary schooling.”

Why did Longfield choose to quote the October meeting in regards to the January 2021 lockdown? After this meeting Johnson chose to keep schools open during the November lockdown. How relevant is the October meeting compared to later meetings.

The November 2020 SAGE meeting and SAGE subcommittee the Children's Task and Finish group documents cited a new paper showing that while children had previously been as likely as adults to be the index case bringing infection into a household, since schools had returned in full in September children had become far more likely to be the index case than adults.

The October 2020 meeting was also before the Alpha variant had been identified which was also cited as a factor by the government in the decision to lockdown in January 2021.

Longfield wasn't an observer during the pandemic response, in her evidence she explains that she attended meetings where policy was discussed before it was decided, and she had policy preferences in regards to keeping schools open that she championed. She also cites her public interventions as having influenced public debate and government decisions.

"The Children’s Commissioner’s office was widely recognised as having exerted significant influence on high level decisions during this period, and I was often one of a small number of voices making the case for children to be a priority."

One intervention Longfield highlights is during May 2020 when she told unions and the DfE to quit "squabbling" and to sit down and collaborate. Regarding this intervention Longfield says:

"It is widely recognised as having led to a change in attitude within Whitehall and contributed to Government and teaching unions taking action to deliver a solution."

Longfield’s intervention in the media frustrated the unions, she portrayed then as being as obstinate as the DfE, however recordings of interviews at the time will show for the NEU had looked at what other countries were doing and were suggesting the UK consider the Danish approach. There is even an NEU video on their YouTube of Joint General Secretary Mary Bousted interviewing the head of the Danish teachers union regarding how their children returned to school. The unions had offered repeatedly to work collaboratively with the DfE, but the DfE refused to share any potential plans with the unions.

Whitehall and the unions did not take action to get students back as Longfield claims. The DfE continued to refuse to share any planning with the unions, who only found out about the government's timetable for schools through the daily press briefings, just the same as the rest of the public.

Longfield says her next major intervention was “in June 2020 the government decided to keep schools closed while reopening pubs, theme parks, zoos, and shops. The Education Secretary Gavin Williamson then conceded that all primary schools would not reopen before the end of the summer term in July 2020.”

“Following my intervention, the Prime Minister adopted the mantra that education should be “the last to close and the first to open” and the Government made clear that it expected all children to be back in school full-time from September 2020, subject to local lockdowns.”

“The Education Select Committee and many Parliamentarians backed my interventions to reopen schools. The Secretary of State for Education and Children’s Minister both contacted me privately on different occasions to thank me for intervening in this way.”

There was no opposition to schools returning in September, the education unions had questioned if adequate measures were in place and called on the government to give schools the funding to provide the additional resources Longfield said she wanted, however there is no acknowledgment of the union’s efforts for safer schools. 

Receiving thanks from ministers demonstrates how Longfield played a role in how school’s returned in September. The term leading up to Christmas was chaotic for education workers and schools. Longfield recognises this.  

“Public health measures and a series of in school restrictions meant that many children were in and out of school during the term - particularly in disadvantaged areas where infection rates were higher.”

.However her emphasis to the inquiry and in her media interviews at the time suggest that measures were the cause of disruption rather than transmission in schools as Longfield still maintains the stance that children don’t play a significant role in transmission and the risks to children are so low that they do not need to be prevented. 

Enforced absences due to infection (which was highest in the poorest areas) and other measures (such as the requirement for class ‘bubbles’ to isolate, which applied to all children and from which vulnerable children were not exempt) meant that many children missed significant amounts of school, even when schools had reopened. It has been estimated that on average each child missed 115 days of school in the first six months of the pandemic alone

It appears Longfield is questioning the need to isolate children. Longfield has publicly been very supportive of the lobbying group Us For Them, who throughout the pandemic have campaigned against testing children or isolating them, saying children with covid should be allowed to go to school unless they are too sick to leave the home. She also appears to be suggesting that at a minimum vulnerable children should have been exempt. She doesn’t appear to think that allowing more infections in schools would have resulted in increased disruption to education 

Longfield speaks of schools returning to limited numbers in January 2021 without mentioning the Alpha variant.

“However, confusion and indecision in response to rising cases of Covid in the community led again to the closure of schools in January 2021.”

Long covid was not mentioned by Longfield in her 46 pages of submitted evidence, it took for the chair Hallett to raise the issue with an interjection near the end of questioning.

Q. One final topic I'd like you to help us with, if you can, is, you may have seen the videos, at the beginning of the Inquiry, of this module, in relation to long covid and how that's impacted families, and it in fact impacted children who had long covid, and I wanted to ask you whether long Covid for children was an issue you became aware of during your time as Child Commissioner or some of the work you have undertaken thereafter?

A. Well, I was certainly aware during the pandemic that some children had particular health needs, and they were suffering from reduced support during the pandemic, and also the effects of isolation. And since the pandemic,I have become more aware and had more conversations with those groups of families.

I think it's important to understand and recognise this is very real, it's a reality for families, it has a devastating impact on children and on families, and needs to be much more part of not only the debate but also the policy making decisions.

For some reason Longfield avoids using the term long covid referring instead to health needs, skipping over the direct issue to focus on support and isolation. Her comments suggest she isn’t fully aware of the scale of long covid, and she doesn’t say she has undertaken any work on the subject beyond some conversations with certain groups. A number of these groups have struggled to get engagement with Longfield despite several years of contacting her. If she truly believes long covid should be much more of a part of policy decisions then why has she not raised this in her evidence or testimony. Why hasn’t she made any recommendations regarding how long covid should be considered in policy making decisions when she has made a substantial number of recommendations in other areas.

There is also no mention of those children who have died from covid or the thousands of children who lost a primary caregiver due to covid. The challenges of access to education for clinically vulnerable children 

There was one final question from Lady Hallett:

Can I just ask one before we go to Ms Twite.Ms Longfield, did anybody ever consider, instead of just keeping schools open for the vulnerable, which you say sadly not enough went, and children of key workers,whether you could have a system of having, you know, oneclass in one week.”

Longfield: Yeah, well I think --

Lady Hallet: Did anybody think about it?

Longfield: Yeah, yeah, so you can imagine there were -- you know,there were various discussions that popped up and went down, and I certainly remember those. Morning and afternoons were another.

But I think what you saw in other countries was,you know, governments making a decision to take over public buildings next to schools so you'd have more space, you could do more social distance, you could have better air quality, and also to bring in, you know,reserves of ex-teachers and the like that could actually, you know, step in for staff that often were sick.

I suppose what I felt was that we had, you know, we had the fantastic Nightingale endeavour for health, furlough in terms of employment, but actually for schools we failed quite miserably, we weren't very creative, we weren't ambitious, and we didn't have the recovery -- you know, the recovery programmes that were put forward weren't backed, they were turned down.

So it was as if children were very much at the back of the queue, coming second, and always being overlooked when it came to an important decision.

Longfield is vague with her response regarding rotas, considering her high level access she should be aware that before schools increased student numbers in June 2020 SAGE had modelled nine scenarios regarding how schools should return, several of these involved rotas. Initially schools were allowed to start planning for rotas, then the DfE had an abrupt change of mind and sent out instructions to schools banning the use of rotas.

Longfield should also be aware that rotas were one of the most commonly used methods of returning students to school in other countries during 2020, for instance New York used rotas and was held up as an example in the media of how to successfully increase student numbers. Rotas were also one of the main recommendations of the  education union and Independent SAGE.

Summary

Elements of lockdown could have been better managed in regards to supporting children and families, and there are sections of Longfield’s statement that make good suggestions, she also calls for a greater focus from government in providing education the funding and resources it requires to support students moving forward.

Longfield firmly believed that the best place for children is in school, however she failed to acknowledge transmission is an issue in school, currently over 70% of school absence is due to sickness, and according to DfE data, covid was the most common cause of sickness in the last school year. By failing to recognise transmission in schools she failed to advocate for the measures that would have reduced disruption to education. This may be because she trusted the claims of the most senior paediatricians working with the government and didn’t believe the concerns being raised by parents and education workers, but she also failed to engage meaningfully with clinically vulnerable families and children with long covid.

Children with long covid have struggled to access appropriate medical support and public recognition. As a former children’s commissioner if Longfield had championed their cause it would be higher up the public agenda, she could have done this whilst still calling for the resourcing of education she’s calling for.