David Penberthy: How is it they can’t get a proper testing regimen in schools?

Unions and leaders are at war over an utterly unacceptable back-to-school plan without a word from the people they’re squabbling about, writes David Penberthy.

The nationwide confusion over the return to school in Australia underscores one of the saddest facts to emerge from the pandemic. Kids don’t have a voice.

There’s no children’s version of the ACTU, no toddler equivalent of ACCI that goes on the political chat shows at night to speak on behalf of the under-18s. The reason kids need a lobby group to represent their interests is a depressing one.

It’s because we adults often do such a poor job on their behalf. The physical health impact of Covid-19 has centred on three key groups – the really old, the already unwell and the profoundly deluded. I would not begrudge any of the efforts on behalf of the elderly and the vulnerable.

I love my parents, have friends and relatives of varying ages with underlying health conditions, and recognise that the response to the pandemic has been essential to keep them safe. As for group three, the anti-vaxxers, they invite nothing but scorn in making a big problem vastly greater by clogging our hospitals with people suffering avoidable illness.

The young might have an easier time of Covid-19 in a physical sense, but who knows what this ongoing up-ending of their lives, education and development will have long-term. We are seeing evidence from lockdown of significant spikes in juvenile and adolescent mental health conditions.

The quality of education has been eroded by learning from home, especially for poorer kids without access to technology. Their ability to socialise and transition to adulthood has been hurt by the on-again, off-again nature of everything from sport, music and drama, to socials, graduation balls and get-togethers with friends.

Professor Nicola Spurrier at The Heights School. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

To those of you who say: “Suck it up, our generation lived through the Blitz”, or whatever past horror you care to mention, I’d counter that we are a flint-hearted lot if we use the suffering of previous generations as a foil for reflecting on the suffering of this one.

And we definitely know that they will suffer economically from all this, as we have blithely handed them the bill for a Boomer-led campaign to protect the elderly, the infirm, and the idiotic.

They will spend the rest of their lives paying for this exercise.

I have spent much of this past fortnight marvelling at the daily cavalcade of emails from the primary and secondary schools attended by my sons aged six and 15. It’s not a knock on the schools, as they are playing the hand they have been dealt, but these emails are largely incomprehensible in terms of logic and content.

As things stand, it is my understanding that when my 6-year-old returns to start grade one at a primary school that has all mixed grade one/grade two classes, none of the grade twos will be there. Conversely, my 15-year-old will begin year 11 in his bedroom, kicking off a hugely important learning year, effectively the first year of SACE, listlessly dialling in via Zoom to hear the muffled and delayed stylings of a frazzled teacher with zero cogent interaction with his peers.

Oh, and if you have any questions about what happens if your kid gets Covid-19, or one of their classmates gets it, or a teacher gets it, there’s a handy 40-point SA Health explainer that takes care of all that, in much the same way Barry Jones’ Noodle Nation diagram helped take care of Labor’s election chances in 2001.

The confusion has been compounded in the past week by the threats from the SA branch of the Australian Education Union of strike action.

This union and its members deserve praise for the manner in which they soldiered through the pandemic and showed leadership by accepting the scientific wisdom of vaccination, rather than going into bat for the tiny number of deluded members who read nonsense on Facebook.

But they have undone much of that work this week with their strike talk, reminding us that this union is in no way an advocacy group for children, but an industrial organisation for adults.

They have form on that front, having opposed policies such as testing or performance pay, out of a muddle-headed sense of solidarity, which effectively holds that it’s better to see a child put up with a crappy teacher than to see a comrade penalised for incompetence.

If this strike goes ahead, it will have a negative effect on kids at a time when they least deserve or can afford it. It suggests that the SA branch is lapsing back into militancy after the departure last year of the level-headed Lara Golding, who commendably took the Greenhill Rd old guard to task after their tin-eared personal attack on Professor Nicola Spurrier.And for an organisation that has always hated the Liberal Party, the threat of strike action seven weeks from polling day rightly invites the cynical raising of an eyebrow.

A RAT kit handed out in Adelaide. Picture: Emma Brasier

I wouldn’t let the government off the hook here either. How is it they can’t get a proper testing regimen in schools, yet they’re rolling out daily RATs for the traffic management centre within the Transport Department, traffic being a phenomenon that last afflicted our city in 2019?

And how is it, if all the decisions in our farcical Federation are based on health advice, that the teacher testing regimes in NSW and Victoria are much more robust and vigilant than SA? This looks like a supply and distribution problem at our end, dressed up as a health-based measure to avoid embarrassing those in charge.

There is one group of people who tried to speak up on behalf of children, the 26 eminent paediatricians, infectious disease experts and child psychiatrists who penned an open letter to the PM last month insisting that it is “safe to allow schools to be open for face-to-face learning’’.

“A delay in returning to in-person learning puts children’s mental health at risk with additional increases in the risk of child abuse, obesity and delayed social and emotional development,” the letter stated.

As per this column, the letter concluded by describing kids as “the lost voices of the pandemic”. We will see the results of that voicelessness next week, when school “returns” in an utterly unacceptable, wholly avoidable form.