'I wanted Mum to live'

Teenager's devastating dilemma in Covid years

- Richard Adams Education editor

Lana Collie-James was 14 years old in the midst of the Covid pandemic when she was offered a stark choice: her education or her mother's life. "My mum's clinically vulnerable. She has a compromised immune system, along with a plethora of other illnesses that would make Covid hit very hard," she said.

It meant when schools reopened to pupils after the initial closures, the single mother and her daughter living together in Bournemouth faced a wrenching decision.

"I got given the ultimatum.

My mum said, do you want to go to school, do you want to go to secondary school and risk taking this home? So as a 14-year-old I had to make the decision to either get an education and risk my mother dying, or not get an education and try to teach myself the best I could.

"That's a very difficult situation to give to a 14-year-old, but also a situation that, whichever decision I made, whichever outcome I chose, would completely change the trajectory of my life."