The union leader who did his job… and left millions of children counting the cost

Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain. • Martin Lewis: the money-saving expert… who accidentally cost Britons billions• The American woman who ripped the heart out of Cadbury• Britain’s pubs and clubs are dying – thanks to this obscure anti-noise crusader I will never stop being angry that during the Covid-19 pandemic we reopened pubs while millions of children were still shut out of their classrooms. That schools closed so often and for so long. That we scarred the lives of a generation of children, and did lasting damage to the expectation that children should go to school every day, because we put the protection of adults ahead of the education and development of the young. School closures helped to break Britain. They damaged children’s learning, development and wellbeing, and weakened the habits and expectations that sustain regular school attendance. Today’s problems with children’s behaviour, anxiety and persistent absence have many causes, but some of their roots lie in those long months in 2020 and 2021 when we told children and parents that going to school was neither necessary nor possible. Those closures had many dismal authors. But Kevin Courtney deserves a proper share of the blame. Courtney was joint general secretary of the National Education Union, Britain’s biggest teaching union. During the pandemic, he was among the loudest and most influential voices arguing against schools reopening. To be fair to Courtney, he wasn’t the only union leader pushing this regrettable agenda. His fellow NEU leader Mary Bousted was just as active – and subsequently received a Labour peerage. But that means she’s still in the public eye, exposed to criticism, including from me. Courtney, meanwhile, has been able to retire and fade from public life, his record largely forgotten. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that his otherwise detailed Wikipedia page recounts several of his positions and campaigns as NEU leader, yet somehow neglects to mention his leading role in the campaign to delay children’s return to school during the pandemic. Those efforts really started in May 2020. Britain was emerging from the first lockdown and Boris Johnson’s government was proposing to reopen primary schools to some pupils from 1 June. Courtney had other ideas. He told NEU members: “Don’t engage with planning a June 1 return to wider opening – await further union advice.” To be clear, that is the leader of a union representing people employed to educate children telling those people not to co-operate with efforts to resume educating children in the classroom. The NEU insisted that five tests had to be met before schools could reopen. These covered infection rates, testing, distancing, outbreaks and protection for vulnerable people. Did you spot what’s missing from those five tests? Children. Where was the test measuring the harm done to disadvantaged kids denied lessons and supervision? The children living in overcrowded homes? Kids parents who couldn’t help with schoolwork? Children for whom school offered stability, friendship and perhaps the only decent meal of the day? Maybe even safety? There was a lot about Covid that wasn’t clear in early 2020. The impact of closing schools and keeping them closed wasn’t one of them. It harmed children. This was known on day one of the pandemic, to teachers more than anyone else: they know the lost learning – and worse – that falls on some kids during every long summer holiday. Despite that knowledge, Courtney and his fellow union leaders actively campaigned to keep schools closed. In the face of organised resistance by teachers and warnings that distancing rules made a full return impractical, in June 2020 the Johnson government abandoned its feeble ambition to get all primary school pupils in England back before the summer holidays. Shamefully, Keir Starmer’s Labour opposition welcomed the retreat. So did those who had opposed the reopening timetable. The pubs reopened in England in July. Millions of children had to wait until September for a brief return to classroom teaching. Of course, Courtney didn’t make these decisions. Ministers did. Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, at least tried to argue for children but Boris Johnson ultimately decided otherwise. They bear the greatest responsibility here, although they have also faced the appropriate levels of criticism. What about the union leaders who created the conditions for ministers to keep schools closed? Governments don’t exist in a vacuum. Politicians make decisions in response to pressure. And the pressure from the teaching unions was towards keeping schools closed. In November 2020, as the government prepared another national lockdown, the NEU demanded that schools should close too. This was despite the evidence already accumulating about the harm inflicted by the first closures. In August 2020, by which time some kids had been away from school for five months, Childline reported a 22 per cent increase in the number of counselling sessions about physical abuse it was having to deliver. Then came January 2021. With schools preparing to return after Christmas, Courtney and his colleagues organised an extraordinary mobilisation. The union advised members that they could invoke health and safety law to refuse to return to classroom teaching. It supplied template letters for teachers to send to headteachers. It announced that 400,000 members attended an online meeting to discuss resisting the return. The day after that online rally, Johnson announced another national lockdown. Schools were closed to most pupils until March. Courtney might argue that in January 2021 Covid’s Alpha variant was spreading rapidly and government scientific advisers had recommended stronger restrictions. The union line is that it was trying to protect its members from the risk of infection. But Covid policy was about choices between competing harms. Protecting adults from infection mattered. So did protecting children from the developmental, educational and emotional damage of isolation. Courtney represented one side of that argument, energetically and effectively. Who represented the children? Not the government, consistently enough. Definitely not the Labour opposition. And sadly, not the unions whose members were employed to teach those children. We are still counting the cost. Educational inequalities widened. Children’s mental health suffered. Persistent absence from school rose dramatically. Not all these problems began with lockdown, nor can they all be blamed entirely on school closures. But months of enforced absence from classrooms made them all worse. Courtney might say that he acted to protect teachers, pupils and their families. I’m sure he believed he was doing the right thing. But good intentions do not obviate responsibility. The question is not whether Courtney cared about children. It is whether his actions contributed to harmful outcomes. A generation of children know the answer to that painfully well.