In the penultimate episode of the Generation Pandemic podcast, we ask two important questions; where are we now in terms of the recovery of our children and young people, and what gaps in the evidence has the pandemic highlighted? Joining host Catherine McDonald are a selection of contributors from across the Generation Pandemic series. Transcript Catherine McDonald 0:04 Hello, and welcome to Generation Pandemic, a podcast from the Interdisciplinary Child Wellbeing Network looking at the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on children in the UK and Ireland. I'm Catherine McDonald and in this penultimate episode of our series, I've spoken again to a selection of our series contributors, to ask them where they think we are now in terms of our recovery from the pandemic, and what further research we should be engaging in moving forward? Here's Professor Susan Harkness, from the University of Bristol, and Professor Mary Murphy from the National University of Ireland Maynooth with their thoughts on where we are now. Susan Harkness 0:43 So I think as we come out of the pandemic, we really need to be keeping an eye on inequalities, and in particular the inequalities in children's learning. So I think what we're probably going to see as we get better and better data about how children are doing at school, but the broader sort of cognitive outcomes is going to be really important to understand how inequalities between children in terms of these in terms of their education are opening up or not. And I think in terms of policy, we will need to sort of step in if there's evidence that there are particular groups. So I think, you know, clearly some groups, some schools, some areas that have been more affected by COVID, than others. And I think we need them to need to really sort of think seriously about how we try and reduce inequalities between schools, between pupils, between regions. And I think maybe the other thing we need to think about as well is, I think we're gonna have to think about children's mental health and how they've really been affected by the pandemic. And I think once again, I think we've got evidence that there are big negative mental health effects. We know that children in single parent families, mental health has been more negatively affected, and it was already a bit worse pre-pandemic. And in many ways, it's not surprising because clearly, the pandemic has really adversely affected groups such as single parents, their employment has fallen more, it's going to be much more of a struggle, in terms of homeschooling in terms of sort of surviving on a single income over the course of the pandemic. And all these stresses, I think, are going to show up in both in mother's mental health, but also in their children's mental health. And I think we need to be concerned about whether these effects kind of persist in the longer term. And we've seen data, for example, on the Children's Commissioner talking about the increasing number of school absences, and the number of school refusals, I think we really need to be getting a handle on these children that are really, really a new and growing group are really going to be underperforming in terms of their education, I think that's a really, you know, there's a lot of very worrying trends for, for children and their well being and also differences inequalities between them. So not just between rich and poor, but between different types of schools and different areas, for example. So I think there's a lot of a lot of things we need to be concerned about for the future. Mary Murphy 3:00 It's very, very hard to tell, isn't it? Because in a way, we're still in the pandemic, and we're still having to cope with various social protocols around it. But we're also emerging into a new crisis in inflation, but also causing war in Ukraine, I think our policy system that our way of working has to be able to respond to an assumption that we are always going to be chasing our tail to some degree around crisis in the next couple of decades. But I do think that we begin with the impacts of what happened in the pandemic crisis begin to show for example, I'm here with our pet dog, who was the pandemic pet if you like, and is experiencing really genuinely high levels of anxiety, if left alone at all. And if you multiply that out, then to the degree to which families are readjusting to having been at home, as complete units, young children born into that situation, are now having to experience a return to work of parents, new institutionalised forms of care. And this is all difficult for families to manage and to cope with. If I look at my own experiences as an educator in third level, really genuine amongst maybe young people aged 19 to 23 really serious mental health stress and anxiety issues, as they cope with not only the how the second level education ended so abruptly, in terms of not being able to consolidate or even, you know, exit friendship groups, but ...
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