Covid Britain’s two-tier education system
by Gareth Sturdy, spiked:
The teaching establishment is livid that poor children are coming to school expecting an education.
The third national lockdown is starting to reveal the depth of the teaching establishment’s elitism towards the education of poor children.
It took only three days of schools being closed to most pupils before headteachers and teaching unions began to express their horror at the number of poor kids turning up at the school gates because it is their only chance of getting an education.
Instead of being welcomed with a can-do attitude and a determination to give a fair chance to all, these kids were accused of trying to abuse the system and of endangering lives.
‘Fears schools will be overwhelmed by laptopless pupils’, said the BBC, after the headteachers’ union, NAHT, said nearly a third of the 2,000 members who joined an online meeting reported attendance levels of between 20 to 30 per cent at their schools.
Only vulnerable pupils and the children of key workers are currently allowed to attend school. However, these groups are larger now than during the first wave of closures last spring. This is because the government has widened the definition of both groups. Key workers now include a greater range of people who provide vital manual and caring services, following criticism that during the early stages of the pandemic the focus was too exclusively on NHS workers. Crucially, the vulnerable category now includes pupils without access to a laptop or a quiet place to study at home.
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