Have we turned into a country that hates children?

It’s September, so it’s back to school for the young folk. But only if you’re lucky. This year, because of the possibility of a concrete ceiling falling on an entire class – like Chicken Licken, only for real – some children haven’t returned in the normal way. My daughter has started sixth form in a new school and the first letter from the head was to say that the fifth form and upper sixth would be learning remotely while the contractors were in. Like the pandemic, all over again.

This week we learned that the overhaul of school buildings was one of the first casualties of the coalition government’s austerity measures in 2010, when the then-education secretary, Michael Gove, scrapped the Building Schools for the Future capital spending programme, something he now regrets. It was, admittedly, an ambitious project but if the overhaul of existing buildings had been maintained, we probably wouldn’t be in this state. Did schools, did children, get quite the priority they deserved during the austerity years? Doesn’t look like it, does it?

Which makes you wonder: have we turned into a country that actually hates its children? This isn’t to suggest that anyone actively wants children flattened but somehow, the present situation is symptomatic of our nation’s approach to young folk.

It’s never the case that children are our first priority for government attention, state funding or public services. The quality of education secretaries says it all. An education secretary with real intellectual heft is rare – Gavin Williamson anyone? The education brief is never seen as the most important office of state. But what could be more important than looking after those who are essentially the country’s future?

This failure to put children first, or even to think about their needs, is evident throughout society.

You can tell a nation’s priorities when there’s a crisis, and the pandemic told you all you needed to know. Children were the least likely to catch Covid-19 or die from it, but the first response to the pandemic was for schools to close and we saw restaurants and even theme parks open before they did. As a result – a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London suggests children suffered. Nearly half of parents (47 per cent) reported children’s social and emotional skills declined during lockdown. As for learning, if you were in a state school, as my two children were, you simply didn’t have proper lessons; but at least my son got one of the promised laptops – many children didn’t. It says something, doesn’t it, that the nation’s playgrounds still had tape around them while everyone else was eating out to help out.

The consequences are still with us, according to the children’s commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza. One in five children is persistently absent from school post-pandemic. That means missing more than 10 per cent of school days, and 22 per cent of children do. They’re the ghost children. A report from the Centre for Social Justice, entitled Lost and Not Found, reported that tens of thousands of children have never returned to full-time education, with lasting effects on their happiness and employability. That’s a rise of 134 per cent on pre-pandemic levels. A national scandal from which no lessons are being learned.

And then there’s the bigger question about what support we are giving to families. Dame Rachel launched her report this year on the effect of families on children at a meeting for Policy Exchange chaired by Ruth Kelly, former education secretary in the Blair years. She recalled that “when I was a government minister families weren’t really talked about. Children were talked about but in a way to avoid talking about families…there were many attempts to prioritise the needs of women, of parents, but there wasn’t much talk about relationships, about care.”

With little political or social will to change things, we now have one of the highest number of families headed by lone parents than almost anywhere else in Europe. And, no judgement, but children in lone-parent families do worse by every measure.

This lack of support for families may be a contraceptive in itself. Half of women in England and Wales are now childless by their 30th birthday; in 1971 that was just 18 per cent. Last year, the UK became the most expensive country for childcare access in the developed world, prompting thousands of people to protest in cities across the country last October in what became known as the “March of the Mummies”. Since then, new measures have been announced by the government to offer more affordable childcare for working parents – but if you think you’d like to look after your own children when they’re young – there’s even less support to compensate for lost earnings.

Take a moment to reflect on what other countries offer in terms of generous parental leave and pronatalist policies. A while back, I interviewed their minister for children in Hungary, an ex-diplomat called Katalin Novak (now president), who was emphatic that encouraging couples to have children was the government’s single greatest priority. France has a “birth grant” and as far back as 2013, a small principality in Finland introduced an incentive called the “baby bonus” meaning residents giving birth would be entitled to €10,000 paid over 10 years. Benefits elsewhere offer everything from grants for flats for young families, more grants for family cars and state-funded holidays for children who want them. In Hungary, if a woman has four children she never pays income tax again. Can you even imagine what the reaction would be if the government tried that here?

Instead, we are living in a climate that is starting to feel actively hostile to children, whether that be in how we support their parents or how we treat them when they get to school. Even their safe arrival can’t be assured. A police inquiry now looms over yet another maternity unit inquiry after dozens of babies died or were left with serious injuries in maternity units at the Queen’s Medical Centre and City Hospital in Nottingham.

And there are the anti-children lifestyle attitudes too where not “burdening the planet with children” is now seen as a valid ethical and environmental choice. See too, the unbridled enthusiasm for things like adult-only flights and restaurants. It’s like Vulgaria, that terrible principality in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang where children are banned and adults behave like children. A friend who goes to Portugal always marvels how different it is there where children are petted in restaurants not shunned and parents with children are ushered to the front of queues whether they are in the supermarket or the airport.

Instead, here children are undervalued and shortchanged from the top down. What a strange way to behave towards our most precious asset – these millions of young people who have all of our futures in their hands. Nelson Mandela famously observed: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” By that reckoning, we’re not doing terribly well, are we?