Millions of children will be returning to school this week. For many, it will be the first time that they have been in five months. The consequences of this loss of schooling will be profound, persistent and socially unjust.
You cannot fairly assign grades to a cohort of students who have not done the exams. A Levels "didn’t need to be this much of a mess", writes Paul Johnson.
How reforms to the pensions provided to public sector employees led to a £17 billion bill to rectify the incompetence of ministers and/or civil servants.
The pandemic will lead us to question many aspects of the way we are governed and the way we run our economy, writes Paul Johnson. It should certainly lead us to question the dominance of Whitehall and the historical subservience of local government.
Thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, "there has been rather a lot of soul-searching going on within the economics profession", writes Paul Johnson. "I do think that we could be an awful lot better and that greater diversity would help us to be better."
"School closures don’t merely put progress on educational equity at risk", Paul Johnson writes, "they put at risk years of slow progress towards gender equality in the labour market."
When and how should the coronavirus lockdown end? "We need some framework for decision-making, not a set of opinions about the right decision", argues Paul Johnson.
By the time the coronavirus lockdown ends, the government's choices "will be utterly different" to when it took office, writes Paul Johnson. "How it makes those choices could prove even more important than the immediate response to the crisis."
"Doing a degree on average adds significantly to earnings over a lifetime", Paul Johnson writes. But still, "we do not have an education and training system that provides...routes into good employment for enough young people."
