Children’s centres, parenting, and education in a post-pandemic world

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic has been an acutely challenging time for families and parents of young children. Periods of lockdown, and the economic and social dislocation associated with the pandemic, will have far-reaching consequences for children’s education, life chances and social relationships. This article extends our understanding of these issues by drawing on extensive qualitative data from a study that investigated the work of children’s centres across a major UK city during the pandemic. Empirically, the article extends research on the interconnections between parenting, the early years, and the pandemic by outlining the interlocking range of problems facing families who used children’s centres. These include social isolation, domestic violence, poverty and destitution associated with unemployment and changes to Universal Credit, food insecurity and mental health. This constellation of factors reflects not only the impact of the pandemic but also enduring and entrenched patterns of inequalities. The data provides a starting point for the more conceptual and normative part of the article. Drawing on scholars such as E.O Wright and Michelle Jackson, we consider the scale and scope of the social, economic and political transformations required to build an education system that can support the needs of all.

KEYWORDS:

• Early-years
• inequality
• COVID-19
• education
• food insecurity

1. Introduction

The full social, economic, political, psychological, and educational impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic remain unclear. However, an emerging body of research suggests that they are likely to be far-reaching and cast a long shadow over the coming decade (The British Academy 2021). Evidence suggests that the pandemic exacerbated economic and educational inequalities and caused mental health and well-being to decline significantly (Blundell et al. 2020; Major, Eyles, and Machin 2021; Mind 2021; Young Minds 2021). Rates of domestic violence increased substantially as did levels of food insecurity (Power et al. 2020; Usta, Murr, and El-Jarrah 2021). In short, the pandemic has had profoundly disruptive and destructive effects. Research in the coming decades will no doubt assess the short, medium- and long-term impact of COVID-19 on our individual and collective lives.

Particular concern has been expressed about the impact of the pandemic on young children and the primary and early years sector. This concern is justified for a range of interlocking reasons. Firstly, we know that the early years are crucial for young children’s cognitive, social and educational development (Waldfogel 2010; Eisenstadt 2011; Eisenstadt and Oppenheim 2019). Secondly, disruption to early years education may threaten children’s prospects for social mobility and further entrench educational inequalities (Engzell, Frey, and Verhagen 2021). Thirdly, access to and use of high-quality early years settings are also associated with improved parent–child relationships and other positive outcomes and are particularly beneficial for low-income families (Sammons et al. 2015; Hall et al. 2016). Closures to settings such as nurseries and the disruption to early years education are therefore likely to have had a significant negative impact on children and their families.

This article draws on data from a research project examining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children’s centres across the city of Bristol, England. Children’s centres provide a wide range of services aimed at supporting parents with young children; these include ‘play-groups’, parenting support groups, advice on housing, and how to access financial and social support services. Data collection took place from September 2020–April 2021; semi-structured interviews were conducted with children’s centres staff and leaders and local experts with knowledge of the city’s early years sector. The project had multiple foci: it was concerned with how the pandemic impacted on children’s centres as organisations: the services that were offered, how provision changed, and how they were experienced by staff. It was also concerned with understanding how the pandemic impacted the parents and children that centres worked with. As such, the participants were able to provide insights into organisational change during a period of profound disruption and offer insights into the challenges facing families.

This article makes three distinctive contributions that fit within the scope of this Special Issue. Firstly, this article presents new evidence on the experiences, actions and understandings of children’s centres staff during the pandemic; these perspectives have not yet been adequately captured in existing studies. This is despite the fact children’s centres have continued to provide crucial front-line services to families and children whilst also experiencing major changes to their working practices. Secondly, the narratives and accounts provided by children’s centres staff shed light onto the extensive challenges facing families with young children during the pandemic. Our data highlights how poverty, food insecurity, declining mental health and financial pressures created a ‘perfect-storm’ of conditions for vulnerable and marginalised families. Whilst these were exacerbated by the pandemic, they also reflect entrenched socio-economic inequalities. We suggest that in order to understand the impact of the pandemic on the early years, and education more generally, it is necessary to understand it in relation to a decade of austerity, a weakening social safety net, and particular funding pressures on family services, including children’s centres.

Thirdly, this Special Issue asks how primary and early years education can be re-imagined. This is a crucial task that opens-up space for a radical re-thinking of how some of our basic institutions could work. We take this as an invitation to move the conversation beyond narrow framed policy-solutions of ‘what works’ and incrementalism. Of course, there are many directions in which this could be taken. In this article, we argue that one of the many things that the pandemic has taught us is that only when poverty and levels of inequality are radically reduced will early years and primary education be able to support the flourishing, well-being, and educational of all children, irrespective of their background. Therefore, re-imagining primary and early years education requires us to first envisage and suggest how broader socio-economic structures can be developed that ameliorate rather than exacerbate educational and developmental inequalities. In staking out this more normative perspective, we take inspiration from the work of Erik Olin Wright who advocated the need to develop emancipatory ‘Real Utopias’ and recent arguments put forward by Michelle Jackson about the need for social scientists to be much more ambitious and radical in proposing ‘solutions’ to the damage done by high levels of poverty and inequality (Wright 2010; Wright 2013; Jackson 2017, 2020).

In the next section, we review relevant literature on children’s centres; we also develop our argument that a necessary starting point for re-imagining early years and primary education is to tackle the key root causes of developmental and educational inequalities, particularly poverty and socio-economic inequalities. Following this, the data collection process and key issues in the research process are discussed. This is followed by data analysis section, which foregrounds the perspectives of children’s centres staff. In conclusion, we draw the threads of the article together.

2. Literature review

As was discussed above, our first contribution is to provide new evidence on the work of children’s centres during the pandemic. The extent literature on what were originally known Sure Start children’s centres emphasises how they were introduced in the late 1990s and extended by successive New Labour governments over the next decade. The core goal was for them to support family and child development in the hope that this would promote social mobility and reduce educational, social and economic inequalities (Waldfogel 2010; Cattan et al. 2019). Partly this was informed by theories of human capital and skill formation which proposed that early childhood intervention had the highest ‘payoff’ when it came to promoting children’s development and long-term economic outcomes (see Heckman and Mosso 2014). Children’s centres have typically offered support to families, including ‘health advice, childcare and early education, employment advice, informal drop-in facilities, and specialist support on parenting’ (Hall et al. 2019, 368).

Although there is little data to support the conclusion that children’s centres directly improve educational attainment, evidence suggests that they help to improve parent–child interactions and the quality of the home learning environment (Hall et al. 2016, 2019). More recently, research has focused on evaluating the decline in the number of children’s centres (from a peak of 3500 centres in 2010) and the support services they offer (Smith et al. 2018). Smith et al. estimate that between 2009 and 2017 up to 30% of centres may have close and this is largely attributable to declines in local government budgets. (ibid) The Social Mobility Commission has expressed particular concern about this trend:

These closures, in response to local authority funding cuts, risk isolating the least advantaged in society and risk the funding for the home learning environment, missing the families that need it most. (2019, 31)

This is crucial context for our project because it is suggestive of the fact that preceding the pandemic, children’s centres were already working in a very challenging environment. As far as we are aware, there has been no detailed study of the impact of the pandemic on children’s centres. This article is, therefore, well placed to complement studies that have examined how early years and primary school staff have experienced wide-scale disruption to their work that has often involved increased workload and financial pressure, stress, anxiety and led to major changes to working practices.

2.1. The impact of COVID-19 on families and children

It is equally important to trace the effects on the pandemic on both the parents of young children and young people themselves. As yet, there is little concrete evidence on how the closure of spaces such as children’s centres shaped the experiences and outcomes of the families who used them. More broadly, however, it is widely recognised that the pandemic created many challenges (e.g. home-schooling and social isolation) for young families, particularly those on low incomes and that this is likely to exacerbate existing educational inequalities (Burgess and Sievertsen 2020; Montacute 2020; Grewenig et al. 2021; The Sutton Trust 2021). Indeed, Andrew et al. argue that ‘inequalities may have worsened over the course of lockdown, especially for primary school students’ (2020, 679) Evidence has emerged that parental stress and anxiety increased dramatically during periods of lockdown (Brown et al. 2020). The negative impact on children’s positive development and long-term educational, social and economic outcomes is likely to be significant. Quantitative research is needed to more accurately assess these impact impacts. However, qualitative research is also needed that foregrounds the perspectives of parents and families and children’s centres staff. This provides a distinctive and complementary analytical view of how the pandemic affected the early years’ workforce and some of the country’s most vulnerable children and parents.

2.2. Reimaging children’s centres and tackling the root causes of educational inequality

Let us now return to the third contribution of this paper. In the introduction, we argued that when it comes to re-imaging early years and primary education in a post-pandemic world several steps are required. First, it should be acknowledged that the effects of the pandemic are going to be long-lasting and cast a long shadow over children’s lives. Second, the effects of the pandemic are likely to also reflect the enduring impact of poverty, inequality and racism and we should not lose sight of this. Thirdly, and given the previous two points and re-imagining of education, it is essential that we are not constrained simply by narrow questions of educational effectiveness and ‘what works. Finally, and crucially, what is required is not simply to re-imagine primary or early years education but also the broader social, political and economic arrangements in which they are forced to operate.

We suggest, therefore, that a re-imaging of children’s centres requires us to first think about the need for a broader, more radical and ambitious discussion about the root causes of poverty and inequality that makes the work of children’s centres so urgent and necessary in the first place. The risk of more narrowly focused approaches to change is, as Michelle Jackson argues that

The simple, profound, crushing impact of poverty and inequality on educational attainment or on life chances more generally is missed. (Jackson 2017, 34)

This more ‘utopian’ and open-ended conversation is particularly necessary in the UK, which is highly unequal and has high levels of child-poverty (Wright 2013; Dickerson and Popli 2018). Re-imaging children’s centres, therefore, requires thinking about re-distributive processes that reduce both poverty and inequality and significantly strengthen the social safety net that has been significantly eroded over the last decade.

This conversation is particularly pressing and important because of the events following hot on the heels of the pandemic – most notably the UK’s growing ‘cost-of-living crisis’ and the largest programme of tax cuts introduced by the Conservative government following the election of Liz Truss as Prime Minister of the UK, both of which are likely to increase poverty and inequality (Hill and Webber 2022). The cost-of-living crisis refers to significantly falling living standards associated with wages and incomes not keeping pace with high levels of inflation and dramatic rises in the cost of food, energy and other basic goods. Worryingly, poverty levels appear to be rising and particularly amongst families with young children (JRF 2022). Moreover, estimates by the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggest that recently introduced tax cuts will exacerbate inequalities because they disproportionally benefit those at the very top of the income distribution (IFS 2022). If the goal of reimaging primary and early years education is to help identify ways in which the life chances and experiences of marginalised and disadvantaged children can be improved, then a significant part of that conversation must be on identifying ways in which spiralling levels of poverty and inequality can be reduced.

3. Methods

The data drawn upon in this article, that helps to illustrate the points above, comes from a qualitative research project that aimed to investigate how the work of children’s centres in the city of Bristol was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The project was structured around answering the following research questions.

1. According to children’s centre leaders and staff, and key services providers, how has Covid-19 impacted on children’s centres as organisations, the services they offer, and the families that use them?

2. Following the initial ‘lockdown’ period (March 2020), what are the key challenges facing children’s centres in supporting and offering services to families and children, particularly those associated with promoting school readiness and tackling educational inequality?

3. How are strategies, responses and decisions developed and made in response to these challenges?

3.1. Semi-structured interviews

Semi-structured interviews were used to gather rich, in-depth information about people’s perspectives, experiences and understandings (Gerson and Damaske 2020). Interviewees were predominantly with children’s centres staff (e.g. those in family support roles) a large majority of whom routinely interacted with and supported families with young children. These were complemented by a small number of interviews with local early years education experts, and policymakers. A total of 60 interviews were conducted. Bristol was the research site for the project. Located in the south-west of England, it is the large city (population of 465,900) that is culturally and economically diverse. It is also a city of stark socio-economic contrasts with the highest levels of child-poverty in the south-west. An important feature of the city is that despite an incredibly challenging national funding environment, the decision was taken to prioritise keeping children’s centres open.

3.2. Data collection and analysis

Data collection took place from September 2020–April 2021. The core functioning of children’s centres was significantly affected during much of this time. Many children’s centres switched significant amounts of their provision online. However, in some cases, the most vulnerable and marginalised families were still coming into centres or being supported by family support workers. All interviews were placed online. This was done for several reasons. Firstly, many children’s centres were restricting visitors and, therefore, in many cases person meetings in children’s centres was not possible. Secondly, children’s centres staff were working under intense pressure during this period. On-line interviews made it much easier to work around their schedules and it put less demand on their time. We would argue that in the circumstances, online interviews were advantageous and should not be considered as the ‘second-best’ option (Edwards and Holland 2020; Thunberg and Arnell 2022). An advantage of online interviews is their flexibility – interviews could take place around the schedules of staff with minimum disruption. It also allowed interviews to take place if people were working from home, which they often were. Interviews typically lasted between 50–60 min; they all took place online using Microsoft Teams or Zoom.

The process of data analysis was iterative and began following each interview. Brief summaries and memos were written to capture initial reflections and identify salient themes and issues that emerged. This allowed a rich picture of each interviewee and interview to be developed. This fed into the next stage of the process, where data was analysed in NVivo. Thematic analysis was used to identify key themes in the data that related to the project’s over-arching research questions (Braun and Clarke 2006; Kvale 2007)

4. Findings

The findings presented in this section are broken down into two broad areas. Firstly, we focus on the perspectives and experiences of children’s centres staff. This is crucial because it sheds light on how their work with families was changed and, in important respects, constrained during the pandemic. Within this, three main themes are given particular attention: (i) the impact of the pandemic and periods of lockdown on staff well-being, stress and anxiety, (ii) the challenges associated with changing working practices and, (iii) the impact of the pandemic on children’s centres as organisations and the services that they were able to offer. This is followed by a further section on children’s centres staff on the key issues facing families during the pandemic that they believed undermine children’s development and well-being.

4.1. Stress, anxiety and well-being amongst children’s centres staff

A key theme that emerged from the data is that children’s centres staff experienced the pandemic, and especially periods of lockdown as highly disruptive, unsettling and often leading to feelings of stress, anxiety and social isolation. This is mirrored in other studies that highlight how those working in educational settings and many other areas of the labour market found that the pandemic increased workloads, created pressure to learn new skills and often led to high levels of uncertainty (Bradbury et al. 2022; Kim and Asbury 2020). A manager of one children’s centre reflected on the general impact on her colleagues:

And I think, in terms of their personal wellbeing, we saw fluctuations. There was times when people would be quite buoyant and able to manage, and other times when they were struggling … (Jayne)

Fluctuating levels of well-being were widely reported across the interviews. Of course, some of this depended on the personal circumstances of individuals. As is widely acknowledged, those with caring responsibilities or health issues found working under the pandemic particularly challenging. One staff member who worked in a family support role elaborated:

Some people were really anxious, or they have underlying health conditions, or they have young children, and were just generally anxious because of the whole COVID situation. (Elise)

Given that many of the interviewees were women, the challenges associated with balancing work and family life were particularly acute that negatively affected their well-being, with a small number of staff reporting that they felt ‘burned-out’ and over-whelmed at work.

4.2. Changes to working practices

A key contributory factor here was the large-scale shifts in working practices that impacted on children’s centres. Whilst some centres remained open to support the most vulnerable families, some closed, and all centres had radically changed how they worked. Often this meant working from home, running activities and support services online, and finding new ways to support families. A children’s centres staff member highlighted the uncertainty associated with the situation and attributed this to a lack of government guidance for children’s centres. They remarked:

To be honest I’ve been working quite a lot on a ‘get through each day’ [laughs] kind of basis, because it’s just so hard to know what’s coming and what to do for the best and to believe that whatever the government puts in place is going to come off or be what actually happens (Antonia).

Sentiments about ‘getting through each day’ and having to work under conditions of great uncertainty was common across the interviews.

The most obvious and important changes to the working patterns of children’s centres staff were working from home. Experiences here were mixed. Some people valued the sense of freedom and time that working from home afforded them. One team leader at a children’s centre reflected that, ‘Some staff really didn’t like working from home, they felt they needed that routine, were really struggling to manage all of that’ (Paula). The rapid shift to running services and activities online was also regularly discussed as a challenge for maintaining contact with families. An issue that was widely reported across the interviews was that home and online working was initially made incredibly challenging due to a lack of IT support and computers. As one interviewee described:

The IT was a mess. We could not get online. When we could get online it was ridiculous what you were doing, it was such a delay. Our IT support was awful … our laptops were not networked … So that was just ridiculous. (Melissa)

Whilst this situation improved over time, maintaining effective communication between staff and children’s centres was an on-going issue. It was remarked that:

It’s changed our work with parents a lot because obviously we had to stop face to face kind of work for a long time and then you just, especially if you’ve got a new family that you take on, you just can’t build up that same relationship with them. (Lisa)

For some staff, there was also an upside to changes in working practices, they recognised some of the benefits of making greater use of e-mails and text messages to stay in touch with families and communicate with ‘hard to reach’ parents.

4.3. Impact on services and organisations

There was a major impact on children’s centres services and how they functioned as organisations. It was often noted that the general approach was to focus on maintaining ‘core services’ that offered support to particularly vulnerable families rather than more universal services. In practice, this meant focussing on mental health services, those experiencing domestic violence, food insecurity and supporting the parents of new-born babies. As one interviewee explained:

… so a lot of the services that were offering in the Children’s Centre we weren’t able to do that anymore. For example, the universal Stay and Plays where families come together and play, we couldn’t do that, parenting courses with a large number of people, not able to do that. (Gemma)

A down-side of moving many services online is that some of the more universal services were often used by staff to identify parents and families who needed further support. A family support worker stated that:

Well I think our universal services have reduced the access for everyone, you know, our stay and play groups … we quite often met people that we realised had more support needs by them coming to that busy group. So that’s not as easy now. But I think our services have much more focused and targeted since the beginning of lockdown … (Debbie)

When services were moved online, the picture was mixed. Some staff reflected that running online play groups gave parents an important source of support during periods of lockdown and decreased feelings of isolation. Others noted that they were often poorly attended and attributed this to a lack on in-person interaction. Overall, changes to and reduction in services created significant extra work for staff that dramatically altered how they operated as organisations. Reflecting on how children’s centres can most effectively communicate and build relationships with parents in a post-pandemic environment is crucial because evidence suggests that they are particularly effective at building parental social capital (Small 2009).

4.4. Perspectives on parents: the challenges they face and supporting the most vulnerable and marginalised families

We now turn to focus on children’s centres staff’s perspectives on the impact of the pandemic on parents, children and families. Declining mental health, growing poverty associated with disruption to work, poor quality housing and social isolation were of central importance and commonly reported concerns. A common theme running through the interviews was that many parents were reported to have experienced high levels of stress and anxiety, especially during periods of lockdown. This was particularly true for parents who had children during the pandemic. As one family support practitioner put it:

There’s been a lot of work with families around anxiety, depression, and just that whole isolating factor, because that was probably the one thing that was keeping a lot of families sane was being able to see other people, and then obviously lockdown happened, and they couldn’t see anyone, no family, no friends, no neighbours from the block next door. (Emma)

Social isolation also compounded the effects of underlying mental health conditions. Another interviewee explained:

I think isolation is the biggest one. I think isolation. When I think of some key families that I’ve had contact with, yes. They’re just so isolated. One of them had a baby. She has got quite significant mental health issues. Under normal circumstances, we would have been getting her into the groups … (Julia)

This point was expanded on in another interview:

… mental health has been a massive thing to come out of lockdown. Because people that were suffering with mental health before seemed to be managing it, but lockdown, being isolated, just threw a lot of people into a completely different world that they didn’t know, around anxiety and being scared to leave the house because of COVID … (Cath)

As the above extracts make clear, lockdown was an acutely challenging time for families and children’s centres staff expressed significant concern that the pandemic would have negative long-term impacts on both parents and children. Unfortunately, staff also recognised that in some important respects, they were not able to support families in the way they normally would. High levels of stress and anxiety were also attributed to the challenges of home-schooling.

4.5. Domestic violence

Many children’s centres staff have expertise in supporting victims of domestic violence and run specialist groups that offer various kinds of support to victims. This was one of the core ‘crisis’ services that children’s prioritised during the pandemic. The frequency in which issues of domestic violence was raised as an issue and likely reflects the broader trend of how domestic violence increased during this pandemic (Usta, Murr, and El-Jarrah 2021). Children’s centres staff were acutely aware that domestic violence was a core issue for them to work on alongside other service providers:

The domestic violence charities that we work with are seeing crazy numbers of referrals and it’s scary because you hope that when you make that referral, that family’s going to get support straightaway, and at the moment it’s not always the case. (Naomi)

Another interviewee explained:

So there’s a lot of isolation obviously because people can’t go out and they’re in small, crowded flats and mental health issues have risen I would say. They were high anyway but they’re risen. Same as the domestic violence situation we’re in. (Daisy)

Multiple interviewees attributed increasing levels of domestic violence to the pressures associated with the pandemic. Continuing to support victims of domestic violence was recognised as a key priority for children’s services following the pandemic.

4.6. Poverty, precarity and food insecurity

During the pandemic, there was significant pressure on family’s financial resources. This is despite significant interventions by the government through initiatives such as the furlough scheme and the temporary increase in Universal Credit.¹ A key concern for many of the interviewees was how changes in the employment situation, job precarity, and challenges in accessing state benefits made it harder for parents to provide necessities for children – from food to heating and clothing. As one staff member explained:

… the furlough scheme has missed people out … .There was people thinking that they would get furloughed but didn’t furlough and things like that. That was tricky. Then there was people that were on furlough thinking that they might get some Universal Credit but because their partner, has got a fairly good job … then they would be counted out. (Olivia)

The impact of the pandemic on the financial situation of families was so significant that multiple staff members reported mothers’ not being able to afford necessities for their infants:

She never had any money for milk or nappies, so, I was a bit like ‘okay’! So, I went and spoke to management and we just went and got her emergency stock of nappies and milk so that was a bit of a real eye opener that people are really struggling … . (Mary)

It’s important to recognise here that the challenges associated with the pandemic reflected, in important ways, longer term changes to labour markets (e.g. zero hours contracts) and a weakening of the social safety net, that exposed families to higher risks of falling into poverty.

In responding to these challenges children’s centres focused particular attention on responding to food insecurity which research suggest is particularly damaging for children (Aceves-Martins et al. 2018). During this period, children’s centres across the city played a key role in tackling food insecurity by running ‘FOOD Clubs (Food On Our Doorstep). These clubs offer access to cheap food and essentials such as toiletries. Run in conjunction with FareShare, parents could become members £1 and then pay £3.50 per week to receive approximately £15 of food and essentials. This formed a key part of children’s centres strategy for tackling food insecurity and hunger. As one staff member summarised about its importance:

FOOD club has been massive for us. We’ve started to really get to know people because people are coming to food club that we’ve maybe never seen before, so that’s helped, and also just making people aware that food is there. (Joanna)

The importance of FOOD Clubs was widely recognised across the interviews and was regularly discussed as one of the critical services that support vulnerable families. It was also regularly noted that their work on food insecurity was beneficial in other ways. For example, it enabled staff to build effective relationships with parents and identify other challenges that families may have been facing. FOOD Clubs were, therefore, about a lot more than food, as important as this was.

5. Conclusion

The pandemic has proven to be an incredibly challenging time for children’s centres and the parents and families that use them. It is likely that it has had a range of negative impacts on both vulnerable and marginalised families and early years services and organisations such as children’s centres. The negative impacts are likely to be broad and cut across children’s physical, social, emotional and cognitive development (EPI 2020). This article provides the first assessment of how children’s centres across the city of Bristol were impacted by the pandemic and the steps they took to continue offering support to families. We have shown that children’s centre staff experienced this period as highly disruptive and challenging but were also highly effective at supporting parents. In doing so, we contribute to research showing the importance of children’s services as front-line services that can promote positive child development and are particularly valuable in times of crisis (Hall et al. 2016, 2019). Our findings also provide important new information about the key challenges facing families during the pandemic and as we move into a post-pandemic world. The data presented in this article suggests that significant further funding is required for children’s centres in order to respond effectively to the damage done to young children and families and to support children’s centres following a period of intense organisational change. This requires a national and holistic national education recovery plan than fully recognises the importance of early years education. Moreover, there is a need to focus on the social and emotional needs of children as much as their cognitive development.

A key argument that we have made in this article, however, is not to focus so much on piecemeal and incremental changes only. Re-imaging early years and primary education so that all young people have the ability to succeed and flourish requires us to think more radically and critically about the need for transformative change in how some of our core social and economic institutions work. We have emphasised that this more ambitious and utopian way of thinking should focus on the damage done by high levels of poverty and inequality (Jackson 2017; Wright 2010). These are the key drivers of many educational and social inequalities. There should be a focus on tackling the root sources of such inequalities rather than the symptoms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The furlough scheme was a significant by the UK government policy response during the pandemic aimed at protecting jobs and business. During the pandemic companies were able to place staff on leave (furlough) and the government would pay employees 80% of their wages up to a maximum of £2500.