There follows a guest post by Hugh McCarthy, a retired Headteacher in Northern Ireland who until recently served as a Director on two of the province’s main education councils and who remains a ministerial appointment on one. He is horrified by what society has inflicted on children over the past two years in the name of combating a virus from which they are not at risk – and all as the evidence piled up of how much it was harming them.
I welcome the recent Ofsted report highlighting the damaging effects of the Covid restrictions on the development and learning of young children. It highlights a huge range of damaging impacts, including:
- delays in babies’ physical development
- a generation of babies struggling to crawl and communicate
- babies suffering delays in learning to walk
- babies struggling to respond to basic facial expression.
- toddlers struggling to make friends, with their speech and language, and toileting independently
- regression in children’s independence
- children with limited vocabulary
The report also highlights the ongoing negative impact of face masks on young children’s language and communication skills, noting that those turning two years old will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks and who have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes regularly.
The observations of Ruth Sedgewick, the Head of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) in Northern Ireland, back up what the reports says.
Article: What are we doing to our children?