“They’re just going to kill us all, from the inside.” Emma turned 16 years old in June. That was her response when the Government announced that London and the South East, where we live, would enter Tier 4 restrictions last month. But in the weeks since, as the Department for Education has stumbled from one U-turn to another, her fury has given way to frustration. As to the recent rumour-mill about whether schools would reopen, her standard response has been a cynical eye-roll.

After all, throughout this crisis Gavin Williamson has claimed that the education of children has always been “an absolute priority”. At the weekend, he even proclaimed that “we must move heaven and earth to get children back to the classroom.” Yet the narrative that has dominated the debate over school closures in the past year tells a very different story.

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Indeed, of all the most egregious elements of Britain’s chaotic battle with Covid-19, it seems that the weaponisation of education could be the most damaging. From the moment the pandemic gripped Britain, both the print and broadcast media have persistently presented schools as little more than petri dishes, and pupils as little more than germs on legs. As Mary Bousted, the National Education Union’s joint general secretary put it in May, pupils are “mucky, who spread germs”.

In the months since, as confusion and uncertainty have morphed into charged animosity, we seem to be in an even worse position than we were back in the spring. Much of the concern surrounding the impact of school closures has tended to focus on the considerable welfare implications for children from deprived or abusive backgrounds. There can be little doubt that those from disadvantaged households, for whom the classroom both offered an escape and a ladder, will invariably be left worse off by being banned from the classroom.

But as a sociologist and university lecturer, I fear this focus on welfare leaves little scope for discussion about the importance of schools as educational institutions. Indeed, the Government’s stated aim to keep schools open by turning them into mass Covid testing centres suggests that it sees them primarily as an arm of the public health state.

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Crucially, the closure of schools could also have far deeper implications — not just for young people but, as educational values are eroded, for society as a whole. For schools are so much more than a collection of classrooms. They are the place where the adult world meets the child world, where social norms and values are communicated across the generations. They are the place that lifts children outside of the febrile tensions of their daily existence and gives them a wider perspective on the human condition and a grounding for their futures. Even with the best will in the world, online learning can never be a substitute for that.

Unlike any other period in recent history, those coming of age today have been forced into an acutely intimate engagement with politicians as they wait for daily updates about whether they will be allowed to go to school or university, sit their exams, see their friends, keep their jobs or indeed do anything that they were previously told was crucial for their mental health, emotional development, and future careers.

They have found themselves on the sharp end of a vicious public narrative of ‘Covidiot shaming’, which has blamed young people for spreading the virus by daring to go about their normal lives: visiting the beach or cafes with friends in summer, going to university or school before Christmas.

This hounding tendency has had practical, and often visceral, consequences. When headlines last summer screeched that university students might ‘seed the virus’ across the land, a number of universities responded by introducing measures more akin to young offenders’ institutions than to places of higher learning. They demanded that students study from the confines of their bedrooms and erected metal barriers around halls of residence that were patrolled by security guards in case they fancied a walk or, heaven forbid, a visit to the library.

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At the same time, although many teachers — including Emma’s — have since gone above and beyond in their attempts to restore as ‘normal’ an educational regime as possible, the alienation caused by social distancing practices and the plummeting of attendance has given schools a conditional stop-start quality, which keeps children, teachers and parents constantly on edge, further increasing anxiety and demoralisation. Rows between parents and schools over social distancing, the necessity for keeping windows open in freezing cold classrooms and sanctions for Covid non-compliance have only exacerbated existing tensions between home and school.

And this is where things could start to get messy. For running parallel to the attempts of Britain’s leaders to impose political authority on the Covid chaos, Britain’s children have been subjected to an altogether different — and possibly more dangerous — crisis of authority as their parents and teachers become progressively infantilised by a web of ever-changing rules that they have to obey.

Take the Government’s orders for people to ‘Stay at home’, which — while many will claim are necessary to halt the spread of the virus — operate in an uneasy and destructive relationship with parental authority. Whether they like it or not, parents are responsible for ensuring compliance with these measures, even when they contradict their instinctive worries about the negative impact on their children’s physical and mental health, education and relationships.

For children, their parents’ constant need to adapt to ‘the rules’ has resulted in a string of shattered plans, broken promises and arbitrary decisions about where they are allowed to go, what they are allowed to do, and who they are see. As is to be expected, the impact is slightly different in teenagers. At an age that would typically render them on the cusp of independence, they find themselves no longer able to push against the authority of their parents in the small ways that they have always done, unless they wish to invoke the wrath of the state. Meanwhile, those parents tempted to assert their own authority against the excesses of ‘the rules’ will be fully aware that doing so would draw their children into conflict with official public health advice, thereby contributing to further corrosion of political trust and social solidarity. They simply cannot win.

No doubt some will scoff that this is a small price to pay for necessary measures in the face of a deadly pandemic; that at least the number of Covid-induced deaths will be reduced. In that vein, a sharp rise in mental health problems among the young, evidence of widening educational inequality and concerns about the debilitating effects of a year without sustained social interaction are shrugged off as necessary casualties in the fight against the virus.

But all that forgets that, whether we like it or not, the relentless attacks on our children’s spirit will leave a mark. When schools do reopen, it won’t just be young people’s education that has taken a bashing. It will be their trust in all the norms, expectations, and institutions of adult society. And what could be more disturbing than that? 

The Corona Generation: Coming of age in a crisis by Dr Jennie Bristow and Emma Gilland is published by Zer0 Books.

Anyway. The crucial point that our science teacher drilled into us was: when you do science, you change one variable, and you keep the rest constant. You want to see whether lids help? Then do one with a lid and one without, but if you put one in a styrofoam cup, put the other in one too, and use the same volume and temperature of water. Want to see whether styrofoam is better? Then do one styrofoam and one china, but if you give one a lid, you have to give the other one too.

The reason I bring this up is that a few weeks ago, it was announced that there would be a limited, phased re-opening of schools starting on 1 June. I had assumed that we would get to 1 June, give it a couple of weeks, and then see what impact — if any — the reopening had on infection rates.

But, then, a raft of other new measures were announced, all starting on the same day. Gatherings of up to six people are now allowed, in private gardens as well as parks; the extremely vulnerable are now allowed to leave their homes for short periods. Non-essential shopping is starting to reopen in outdoor settings. The Prime Minister told people that they can “even have a barbecue”.

But won’t it make it more difficult to assess the impact of each of these measures, if we haven’t kept each of them separate, changed one variable at a time while holding the rest constant? Isn’t that like putting a lid on your styrofoam cup but not on your china one?

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In short: yes. “The measures have been coming one after the other or at the same time, so it will be very difficult to unpick the effect of any one measure,” said Dr Sarah Lewis, a genetic epidemiologist at Bristol. “By opening all at the same time you’ll effectively mask the outcome,” says Dr Konstantin Blyuss, a mathematical modeller at Sussex: “you’ll never know what hit you.”

You can reduce the uncertainty: partly through statistical methods, but mainly by using old-fashioned epidemiological contact-tracing methods. By simply asking people questions — where have you been, who have you been in contact with — you can see that Person A caught the disease from Person B at the local farmers’ market or the school gate or whatever, and can avoid the need for the high-level, statistical assessment of what influenced what.

But you need thousands of contact tracers to do that. Estimates suggest that, in order to keep the disease suppressed as they come out of lockdown, the US will need between 100,000 and 300,000 contact tracers. That implies that Matt Hancock’s army of 25,000 is at the low end of what the UK needs, assuming that the UK and US situations are broadly comparable.

And it’s not a simple job. A  family member is a (retired) consultant epidemiologist who did a lot of infectious disease work; she once spent an entire Christmas Day tracing the contacts of infected people in a local meningitis outbreak. She says it’s not that you have to be a consultant epidemiologist to do it, but that it definitely helps having a background in epidemiology or public health so you know the follow-up questions to ask, and having good interpersonal skills so that people are willing to share private information with you.

US contact tracers are being offered a free six-hour training online course on Coursera, although whether they’re required to do it differs from state to state; in the UK, the training seems minimal. One US epidemiologist I spoke to (who works with the government so could only speak off the record) said that “absolutely there are training and skills required” for contact tracing, and that it’s not clear that over there, at least, those skills are in place. I don’t get the impression that they are here, either, although we shall soon find out. 

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This is of more than academic interest. If relaxing some lockdown measure — say, reopening schools — drives the rate of infections up, then it’s important that we know, so that we can decide whether or not to close it down again. If we only change one thing, it will be easier to know.

That said, it would still not be easy. Blyuss points out that people’s behaviour has been changing significantly as well, at least partly independently of government instruction, so it’ll be hard to tease that out from any policy changes anyway. “It’s nice to talk about rules about groups of six or more, but the reality is very different,” he says: “Everyone is in groups. The weather doesn’t help.”

Dr Babak Javid, an infectious disease specialist at Cambridge and Tshinghua universities, adds another layer of difficulty. It’s absolutely true that holding all of your variables but one constant makes tracking the disease easier, he says. But doing so comes at a cost. Say you reopen schools, and you want to see whether it has an effect on some outcome. The very earliest you could start to see anything would be a week or so later, when the first people infected would be showing symptoms, but realistically it would probably be two weeks; if you were looking at hospitalisations or deaths, even longer. 

So if you wanted to reintroduce all these measures one by one, in this careful, targeted way, it would take a while. Including schools, I’ve mentioned four different measures. We’d be talking about two months to introduce them, as a bare minimum, and there are lots of other things to change — other school years, for a start. “If you do everything very precisely and incrementally, we’ll open up in September,” Javid says.

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But the lockdown comes at significant social, health and economic costs. He stresses that he’s not saying that we ought to do it all at once (“I don’t want to comment on the overall net cost or benefit. That’s a policy issue, not a scientific issue”), but merely that it’s not a straightforward decision; many lives will be lost and damaged if we carry on with lockdown, as well as if we come out of it. “A&E attendance is way down,” Javid says. “Can heart attacks really have dropped by 30%? We’re delaying cancer diagnoses and treatments. These are genuine, real risks to prolonging lockdown, and they’re medical and sociological, not just economic.”

There is another way to assess the risks and impacts of the various relaxations, and that is to remember that this isn’t happening in a vacuum. We can look at other countries which have done some reopening themselves. I had a quick look at the indispensable Our World in Data, and picked six European countries — Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain — which partially relaxed some measures no later than 11 May, to give us a full three weeks.

So far, there’s no sign in any of them of any increase in deaths or cases apart from a very tiny wobble in case numbers on 29 and 31 May in France, which seems likely to be noise and doesn’t seem obviously connected to measures taken three weeks earlier. All the scientists I spoke to agreed that there’s no sign anywhere of any major second waves; Lewis mentioned the Netherlands and Switzerland as other examples.

It struck me that there are three possible explanations for this. One, which is moderately hopeful, is that the measures taken to relax lockdown in each country are sufficiently conservative and well-targeted to avoid sparking a new outbreak. The measures are all somewhat different, and that makes me think that our own first, cautious measures — which look roughly in line with the broad swath of others — might similarly avoid a new wave of infections.

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The second explanation is less hopeful. We’ve all become aware of the concept of “R” recently, the reproduction rate of a pathogen. It’s the average number of people that one infected person will pass the disease on to.

The word “average” is key there: If the R is 2, that could mean that out of 100 people, every single one passes it on to two people; or it could mean that 99 people pass it on to nobody, and one person gives it to 200 people (or anything in between). 

It’s recently become clear that Covid-19 is more like the latter of those two examples. Most people don’t pass it on at all, but every so often, one person will happen to give it to dozens or hundreds. And that means that the behaviour of the disease can look very different, as the LSHTM epidemiological modeller Adam Kucharski explains in this Twitter thread. It could be that the disease lies apparently quiescent for a long period, as most people fail to pass it on, and then when we think we’ve got it under control it explodes up again. It may be that the reason we haven’t seen more resurgence in Italy or Spain is simply that they’ve been lucky so far. 

(Equally, it may be that the superspreader events are largely prevented by the sort of lockdown measures that remain in place, says Javid — things like keeping bars, sporting events and churches closed.)

My third possible explanation is that there’s something strange going on with immunity, so some people are differentially immune to the disease even before they get it. The serology data coming back has found that even countries that have had terrible outbreaks — like Spain and the UK — have only had about 5% of the population infected. If there’s some reason why a non-negligible percentage of the population were already entirely or partially immune, then that could be keeping the second wave somewhat suppressed.

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That third option is extremely tempting to believe, and it’s not insane — Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta believes it, and all of the scientists I spoke to thought it was plausible, but that as yet there’s not much good evidence for it. They also all said that a combination of all three factors was possible. “I’ve read evidence pointing to all three of those,” said Lewis. “I saw something suggesting herd immunity had been reached in London because not everyone exposed would get the virus, which would explain why virus numbers have gone right down despite people using public transport.” It’s worth adding that, pace the neuroscientist Karl Friston, Javid said it seems very unlikely that this background immunity theory explains the difference between the UK and Germany.

It has a dark side, though: one more expert, who also wanted to remain off the record — it’s all very cloak-and-dagger, this epidemiology stuff — pointed out that there have been very different levels of infection in, say, London and the south-west. Something like one in six Londoners have had it, compared to one in 20 elsewhere in the country. 

He thinks that as measures are relaxed, the danger is that we see London do relatively well — acquired immunity, on top of whatever this mysterious background immunity is, meaning that the disease finds it hard to spread — while places like the south-west see sudden upsurges, because the population is still mainly susceptible. If he’s right, and he said it was his ‘prediction’, then major second waves could be triggered. It’s worth remembering that the second wave of the Spanish flu killed more people than the first — but it’s also worth remembering that public health policies were very different back then. 

I started by saying that in science, you hold all your variables constant except one: keep the lid on your styrofoam cup and your china cup. That’s true, and if we were doing pure science — if we only cared about finding out what lockdown measures worked and which didn’t — then it would be simple: introduce measures one at a time, wait and see, do it slowly. 

But we’re not doing pure science. We’re also trying to make a country that works for its citizens, in conditions that change daily. “We’re trying to build a plane as we fly it,” my US epidemiologist told me. The most important thing, according to Javid, will be “nimbleness; being able to change policy in the light of new evidence”. If it turns out opening schools was wrong, then close them again. And we in the media need to be wary of shouting about mistakes and U-turns and instead say: when the facts change, you change your mind.

These are very minor problems, obviously, compared to tens of thousands of dead from a frightening disease. But in the Chivers household they’re very salient, and it would be dishonest of me to pretend they’re not a factor.

So. I wanted to look at the elements that go into a decision to reopen (or not reopen) schools; what the evidence says; and what the trade-offs involved are.

First: there’s been a lot of attention lately on a strange syndrome that appears to be associated with Covid-19 in children. It’s an autoimmune condition, similar to a condition known as Kawasaki syndrome; the body’s defences overreact and cause severe inflammation, especially of the coronary arteries. It was first spotted in Bergamo, Italy, and Prof Liz Whittaker of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) told a briefing that Bergamo would normally expect to see about five cases of Kawasaki syndrome in a year, while they saw 10 of this similar condition “in five or six weeks”. Since then, about 75 or 100 have been seen in the UK.

It’s got a lot of press attention and Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has said he is “worried” about it. But — without wanting to minimise the seriousness of it — it is very rare. Whittaker’s colleague Prof Russell Viner told the same briefing that even including the Kawasaki-like cases, children are at extremely low risk. “The deaths tell us all we need to know,” he said. “You can count [children’s deaths from Covid-19] on two hands, out of [a total of] around 30,000.” There have also, he says, been fewer than 500 hospital admissions for under-18s in the UK, compared to hundreds of thousands for adults.

That doesn’t make the deaths that did happen any less awful, but it does mean that each child is not at significantly greater risk than they are going to school anyway, from accidents or other illnesses. As Viner said elsewhere, about 160 or 170 children die in car crashes each year: “Those deaths are tragic but also rare. How do we manage those?  We take steps to prevent these deaths. We buy child seats, we use seat belts, we sometimes buy better cars. But we don’t stop driving. This syndrome is much, much more rare than car accidents involving children.”

Every paediatric specialist and epidemiologist I’m aware of says that the risk to children is minuscule. But, obviously, that’s not the only factor involved. We want to know the risk of children spreading the disease; and, equally importantly, we want to know the costs of children not going back to school.

I’m not going to pretend to be able to give you a definitive answer. But I’m going to go through the factors to give you a sense of why it’s so complicated.

First: we need to know whether kids have the disease in great numbers. Dr Sanjay Patel, a paediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Southampton, pointed me to a study that came out in Spain last week, which tested 60,000 people for Covid-19 antibodies. Distressingly it found that only 5% of Spaniards had had the disease — suggesting that, if those numbers are accurate, despite Spain’s awful outbreak, they are still nowhere near herd immunity. 

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More hearteningly, though, it found that only about 1% of babies, 2% of one-to-four-year-olds, and 3% of five-to-nine-year-olds had it. Earlier studies in Iceland and Italy found almost no children infected at all. 

The economist Emily Oster, who like me is very interested in all of this because she wants to send her kids to camp, also points to an interesting study which found that in the Netherlands, 6.5% of people who turned up at their GP with flu-like symptoms tested positive for Covid-19 — except for young people. The under-20s actually did have the flu.

That said, the Office for National Statistics released some data recently, looking at live virus rather than antibodies, which found children were no less likely to have the disease than adults. Other work finds that children have viral loads comparable to that of adults. 

So children may have the disease less than adults, or they may not. It’s not clear. If they do, it’s probably only somewhat less — half as much, or so — not orders of magnitude less.

But that’s still not the only question. The next question is — if children do get infected, how likely are they to pass it on?

There are reasons to be hopeful. An un-peer-reviewed paper in Australia, released on Monday, found very little transmission from children in schools. And there’s been some attention on some more Icelandic research which I am extremely keen to believe: a company running the testing and tracing in that country has so far failed to find a single example of a child passing on the disease.

Patel thinks the situation is unlikely to be that extreme — “it’s not that children cannot be infectious; that just doesn’t make sense and isn’t likely to be true”. But there are, he thinks, good observational reasons to think that children are less likely to spread it.

First, he points out that there haven’t been any outbreaks in schools and nurseries among the children of key workers, or in countries such as Iceland where the schools stayed open. In Denmark, the spread of the disease accelerated briefly after schools were reopened, but quickly fell back to where it had been. Patel points out that all these schools have maintained social distancing, which may have kept the disease from spreading, but “you can’t expect totally robust social distancing in nurseries and primary schools”.

And besides, to some extent, if it’s working, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s the social distancing or something innate to children that’s stopping the disease from spreading — although if it’s the latter, it may mean we can end social distancing in schools a bit sooner, which is good because those pics of children playing two metres away from each other break my heart.

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So, we don’t really know whether kids get the disease at the same level as adults, and we don’t really know if they pass it on as readily, although there are encouraging hints on both fronts. Dr Aubrey Cunnington, a paediatric infectious disease specialist at Imperial College London, is extremely cautious: “The bottom line is we really just don’t know whether children are going to spread this virus to each other, and to their families and the community, once we reopen schools.” 

But that’s still only half of the story. The other half is — what are the costs to keeping children out of school? If there were none then it would be simple: just keep them at home. Obviously, it’s not simple.

There are economic costs — there are nearly nine million children in UK schools, meaning that millions of parents will have to take time off work to look after them. And those economic costs are real and damaging to people’s lives. But they’ve been addressed elsewhere, so let’s look at the direct costs to the children.

Sam Freedman, CEO of the education nonprofit Education Partnerships Group and former executive director of Teach First, breaks down the impacts for children in three ways. They are: direct educational cost; impacts on socialisation; and risk of abuse at home. “People who are on the ‘keep everyone safe until September’ side of things are underestimating the negative impact on kids,” he says.

If children don’t go back until the start of the new academic year in September, they’ll have missed around 22 weeks of school since March. “People tend to think it’s only a few more weeks, it’s how much difference can it make, but what I’m worried about is the loss of learning over that period,” Freedman says. You can detect “learning loss” — kids forgetting what they’ve been taught — over the six-week summer break, so a near half-year gap would be presumably much worse. And, as with so many things, it will be unequal — “some kids will be fully homes schooled and having a great education, for most it’ll be worse than being at school, and for some it’ll be nothing”.

For younger children, like mine, the actual stuff you’re learning in school might not seem so important — they can colour in pictures of Pokémon just as happily at home. But the socialisation side is even more paramount. “It’s so important at that age,” says Freedman. “My daughter is four; if she doesn’t go back to school until September, she’ll have gone 15% of her life without seeing a child her own age.” Cunnington agrees: “socialisation at that age is key, and you can’t do it with your parents.”

And of course there’s the abuse factor. I don’t know how common it is, but, Freedman warns, “it’s probably a lot more prevalent than most of the middle-class people arguing on Twitter realise”. 

So, getting children back to school is important. But at the moment, the plan is to start with three school years — Reception (age four to five), Year One (five to six) and Year Six (age 10 to 11) — from 1 June. Then the impact will be assessed, and assuming no major change in the spread of the disease, other years will be brought back.

But by then it’ll be only four or five weeks until the summer holiday. And presumably children won’t be going back full time — one school I’m aware of is planning half the children in Monday and Tuesday, a deep clean on Wednesday, and the other half in Thursday or Friday. Something like that will have to be implemented everywhere to allow social distancing. “Half a day for four weeks is not a lot in the scheme of things,” says Freedman.

Other countries such as Italy, which have summer holidays from June, have simply said they will restart after the summer break, and Freedman wonders why the government isn’t bringing forward our summer holiday; it’s not as if anyone has any foreign holidays booked. But perhaps there are good logistical reasons for it, and it would be better than nothing — there may be some repetition of what’s already been taught this year that can reduce learning loss; it would be good for socialisation; it would give parents and kids some time apart and thus hopefully reduce abuse.

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Cunnington adds that some contact with teachers means that those teachers can provide children work for the rest of the week, and also that from a safeguarding point of view even contact just once or twice a week would be a useful way of checking up on at-risk children: literally just asking them if everything is OK at home, or in other ways seeing if they’re not doing well, could be very useful.

The main thing, though, is that none of this is once-and-for-all. Freedman is watching other countries with interest — not just Denmark and Norway and Iceland, where the outbreaks were so limited that they do not make a good comparison, but other hard-hit states like Belgium, the Netherlands and France. “Our debate is very parochial,” he says. “Every country is having this debate. Watching the impact is what I’m interested in. If we get to the end of May, and France or Holland seem to be seeing a significant increase in infection rate, that’s a strong argument for us being cautious. If they aren’t, then it isn’t.”

Patel, likewise, says that we can be cautious — “it’s not just once we’ve made the decision we can’t go back. It’s doing it tentatively, with clear testing, tracing, and isolation in place”. He appeals to a sense of collectivism – parents are understandably worried about the risks to their children, he says, but the harm to other children by keeping them off school could be even greater.

“We have to be entirely honest with the public, that we don’t have the answers yet but doing nothing is not an option,” he says. “There is a very small risk for the child, grandparents can’t do drop-off, parents can’t aggregate at school gates: it’s not a green light to do anything, but if we do it sensibly then we can get our country back to some new sense of normality, and reduce the harm from the educational and wellbeing health perspective.”

As I said at the top, I’m keen to see my children back at school, for selfish reasons, for work reasons, and for their sake. I entirely understand those — I know several — who go the other way: the IFS recently found that 50% of parents wouldn’t send their children in, even if schools reopened.

But if it’s done carefully, and with acknowledgement of the huge uncertainties and a close eye on the experiences of other countries, it could be done safely, and could reduce the real damage that gets done. I hope we manage it. I want my kids back at school.