Lana Collie-James was 14 years old in the midst of the Covid pandemic when she was offered a stark choice: her education or her mother’s life. “My mum’s clinically vulnerable. She has a compromised immune system, along with a plethora of other illnesses that would make Covid hit very hard,” she says.
“I got given the ultimatum. My mum said: do you want to go to school, do you want to go to secondary school and risk taking this home? So as a 14-year-old I had to make the decision to either get an education and risk my mother dying, or not get an education and try to teach myself the best I could. “That’s a very difficult situation to give to a 14-year-old, but also a situation that, whichever decision I made, whichever outcome I chose, would completely change the trajectory of my life.”
The damage the overreaction to Covid has done is still not entirely understood and indeed, I fear that no matter what the conclusion on this inquiry, there'd be nothing stopping the government from doing it all again at some point in the future.
Collie-James stayed in virtual isolation for the two years of education that culminate in GCSE exams at age 16 rather than risk her mother’s life.
With her school refusing to continue remote teaching and threatening fines for non-attendance, Collie-James took on the responsibility of teaching herself.
Which probably guaranteed her a better education than she's have got attending the propaganda-factorties we call schools, ironically rnough.
“I got, like, maybe a couple of tests [from the school], that’s it,” she says. “I don’t know if they marked them at all or if I got any feedback. I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Maybe I got sent a PowerPoint once or twice. “But even so, I then had to essentially teach myself GCSEs, which was a little bit insane, and I didn’t see anyone for two years. I saw two friends, one of them a neighbour, with social distancing, which was nice. But in general it was an extremely isolating and lonely experience because it was just me and my mum.”
After “spending a lot of money buying textbooks”, Collie-James concentrated on core subjects and managed passes in design and English, followed by resitting and passing maths when she started at college the following year.
Wondering if she'd actually done better than if she'd spent two years in the sausage-factory of modern comprehensive education, Reader? Yes, me too...
Kate Eisenstein, the director of policy, research and legal for the inquiry, says the four weeks of hearings will investigate how the interests of children and young people were taken into account by decision-makers, as well as evidence of the differing impact on children.
I'll save you the time, Kate. They weren't. No-one's were.
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