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.
It meant when schools reopened to pupils after the initial closures, the single mother and her daughter living together in Bournemouth faced a wrenching decision.
“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.”
Covid disrupted the lives of millions of young people across the UK. This week some of their stories will be heard for the first time when the Covid-19 public inquiry reconvenes, with testimony from politicians and policymakers including Gavin Williamson, the education secretary during the pandemic.
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.
“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.
Looking back, Collie-James says staying out of school wasn’t a difficult decision. “It was a given that I didn’t want my mum to die. She gave me that choice and immediately I was like, I’m not going, because I don’t want to kill her. That is an absolutely insane thing to have to do. And even just thinking about that, it makes me sick, and I would cry and be so upset, it was just so scary.”
Having finished college, Collie-James is now working to save up money and think about her next steps. “I have no clue what I want to do because I’m just so lost with everything going on,” she says.
“My education, my future, genuinely the entire situation completely changed the trajectory of my life. It completely just took it, spun it on its head and maybe threw a couple of rocks at it.”
Mark Simpson, a teacher at a comprehensive secondary school in south-west London for the past 18 years, says the pandemic period was “hugely frustrating” because it disrupted the personal interaction between schools and their pupils, and cut off pupils from the wider community.
“Children are incredibly resilient … but they only get the one childhood. I can absolutely see that losing those two, two and a half key years makes a huge difference to their five-year or seven-year secondary school experience,” he says.
“School, I think, is about so much more than just the results or the academic attainment. It’s the fact that you’ve got 1,200 people learning how to live as a community, learning how to deal with issues that might arise in the everyday world, knowing how to negotiate relationships, how to pursue extracurricular activities, doing sports. For our schools, that’s what education is. And if you don’t feel like you’re in that community then the whole ethos changes.”
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.
“We’ve heard stories of bereavements, of children living in overcrowded housing really struggling to keep up with their studies, lack of access to digital devices, and those living in families where there’s conflict, not having a safe space to turn to while schools were closed,” she says.
“But we also heard amazing stories of children’s confidence growing because they were learning in a more independent way, or finding positive communities online. So that takeaway of resilience and adaptability has been startling to see.”
