The hidden victims of lockdown: an interview with the Children’s Commissioner

When schools were closed during lockdown, it wasn’t only education that suffered. The classroom can offer an opportunity to identify children in danger of abuse, with tens of thousands of pupils on the at-risk register. Take away schools and this safety net vanishes. Now and again, stories emerged of just how badly things went wrong: for example, the murder of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes at the hands of his stepmother.

‘If that little boy had been in school, I do believe there would have been an extra chance to hear him,’ the Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza, tells me, when we meet at The Spectator’s offices to discuss her mission to help the hidden victims of lockdown. ‘The safeguarding effect of him not being in school meant his voice wasn’t heard.’ Her office estimates that since the first lockdown, around 40,000 children who should have been referred for help from social services have not been, because of school closures. When schools reopened, some 80,000 pupils had vanished from the system entirely.

De Souza is now determined to track down these children and it’s a task that defines her role. The Department for Education looks after schools, but what about the tens of thousands of children who are being denied their right to education? England’s system makes it relatively easy to declare that a child is being home-schooled or sent to a private institution which may or may not exist. The Children’s Commissioner, a role created in 2005 and taken up by de Souza last year, aims to fill in such gaps.

‘There was always a problem of some children not attending — and some children not even being on school rolls,’ de Souza says. ‘But if we go to what the pandemic has done here, I think things have got a lot worse.’ There are alarmingly few checks on children who are withdrawn from the state school system, with no mandatory inspections. It’s a system closely guarded by middle-class parents who oppose supervision of home-educating families — but it is also creating a regulatory blind spot where outright neglect is possible.

With the government and opposition parties having backed lockdown, there are few voices in the House of Commons drawing attention to the collateral damage it caused. De Souza’s predecessor, Anne Longfield, sought to do so, and de Souza has now taken up the mantle. She’s a former head teacher who built a reputation for turning around schools in deprived areas — co-founding the Inspiration Trust of academies in Norfolk and Suffolk in 2012 alongside Tory peer and former academies minister Lord Agnew.

Making her name on school reform did not endear her to the trade unions, with plenty questioning her credentials when she was selected for her current job. She has long been a favourite of the Tories: when Michael Gove was education secretary he said his ideal policy would be to ‘clone Rachel 23,000 times’. Such endorsement has its pros and cons. ‘Gove visited one of my schools in Norwich and was giving a local press interview and that’s when he made that quote and I knew it would stick forever,’ she says, with a slight sigh.

The daughter of a steelworker father from Scunthorpe and a refugee mother of Hungarian-Austrian background, she was taught by nuns at her local comprehensive but learnt Ukrainian at home from her grandparents. Her first political memory was an exchange with Margaret Thatcher — writing to her, aged ten, in Ukrainian about freeing some Soviet dissidents. The prime minister wrote back. ‘She agreed with me completely and was going to do her best to free Valentyn Moroz!’

Not that de Souza wants to be seen as party political. On her career in education, she speaks of a ‘golden thread through education reform which started with Blair and Adonis. Gove really put his foot on the gas’. Her career began in Kidlington in Oxfordshire, teaching at a comprehensive — ‘it was a really nice place to have your first job’ — before going to the Sir John Cass School (now known as Stepney All Saints) in Tower Hamlets, London, where she had a reality check. She recalls a young Somali girl, Hoda, ‘basically living in slavery’ who contracted tuberculosis, as well as seeing ‘deportations from the classroom’: ‘The social deprivation issues the community was facing were massive. But it was there that I really learnt how to do school improvement.’ It went from being at the bottom in the UK English league tables to one of the most improved schools in the country.

She went on to become a head teacher by 36 and has garnered a reputation as a traditionalist, bringing in classical music, strict uniforms and a ban on phones in school during her first academy headship in Luton.

But the group that now concerns de Souza most are those absent from the classroom — particularly those in difficult situations at home or at risk of falling into crime. ‘I went to visit a colleague in the police to look at their criminal exploitation work. She showed me a list of all the children who weren’t on anybody’s roll that they’d come across, and it was a big list,’ she says. ‘That’s the group that are likely to come to the notice of the police, that could get involved in gangs, could be exploited. It’s a very worrying thing.’

She is also concerned about the impact of remote learning during lockdowns and its role in widening inequalities. She recently conducted a survey of more than half a million children from every local authority area. ‘What hundreds of thousands of children have told me is that they love school and are so pleased to be back in the classroom,’ she says. ‘The sports, the drama — they were not as keen to go to shopping malls, they were asking me “Can we play football again? Can we not just be together?”’

Even with schools open again, there are hangovers from the past two years —swings in playgrounds still chained up and local authorities failing to reopen sports grounds. ‘I remember talking in Bolton to a little group at a primary school. One girl had had quite a lot of deaths in her family from Covid and she said “I just want to be able to go to my local park”,’ she says.

De Souza’s lobbying has persuaded the government to create a register for children not in school. The details are still up in the air, but she knows she will face opposition from well-resourced groups who think check-ups on home-educating families represent a grotesque intrusion (including some in the Catholic and Muslim communities). ‘I think you do get religious groups wanting to home-educate,’ she says (in France, President Macron has said he worries about Muslim children withdrawn from school in a sign of deepening social segregation).

The difficulty is that no one really knows how many school-aged children are not in the classroom. ‘I think it was always on the “too difficult” pile,’ she says. ‘It’s 2022, we are in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, this shouldn’t be happening. At the moment you have a school number, an NHS number; if we had one, we could at least pick them up. If I were Secretary of State, I would want live data.’ She says she is prepared to ‘physically go out to find the children’— with the police if need be.

There have been previous attempts to do this, but politicians have been quickly rebuffed by the home-school lobby, who point out that the law leaves the education of children in the hands of parents. Will she succeed where they failed? ‘I think we just need to really carefully explain that it is a parent’s right to be able to home educate,’ she says. ‘That’s not where I’m going. I’m looking at the vulnerable children, the children who are not getting the education that they need. We are talking about life and death and children’s lives. It’s a grown-up conversation we need to have.’