ATTENDING SCHOOL IS VITAL FOR CHILDREN...AND I SHOULD KNOW

MISSING months of school through illness made Robert Halfon determined to ensure no youngster lost out on teaching in the pandemic.

- Lucy Johnston

The chairman of the Education Select Committee was born with a disability that meant he was regularly unable to attend lessons while he underwent numerous operations that eventually allowed him to walk.

Mr Halfon, Conservative MP for Harlow, has been one of the leading voices calling for keeping schools open and ensuring children’s education remained front and centre when considering restrictions.

This position often left him at odds with colleagues from all parties, but studies have shown the damage to children’s education, and physical and mental health caused by closing schools, as well as alarming reports of increased child abuse and deaths at home during school closures.

Now Mr Halfon has revealed his own experiences as a child made him determined to minimise the damage to today’s youngsters.

The 52-year-old was born with a form of cerebral palsy known as spastic diplegia, and some doctors predicted he would never be able to walk.

Thanks to the surgical work of a professor at Great Ormond Street Hospital, which included Mr Halfon going to hospital week after week as a child, he became independently mobile.

With 100,000 children now missing from the school register since the first lockdown in March 2020, and one in six children with a diagnosable mental health condition compared to pre-pandemic levels of one in nine, together with an array of studies highlighting lost learning due to lockdown measures, Mr. Halfon is determined it should never happen again.