THERE are fears over the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown on the town's youngsters.

Councillors on the children’s health, care and education scrutiny committee heard some of the negative effects on children over the past year – and were told the real impacts might take their time to be seen.

Director of inclusion and achievement in the council's children’s department Annett Perrington said: “There has been an impact on both the emotional wellbeing of children and their learning.”

Ms Perrington said there has been a decrease in the number of funded places for very young children in early years settings.

She said: “That means things like speech and language difficulties are being identified later and listening skills are reduced because children are not in nursery classes.

“But other settings have found that some children appear to have benefited from additional time with their families and have returned with increased confidence and new skills – for example they are toilet-trained.”

There has been an increase in referrals to the council’s Early Help team for families, up from 1,165 for October 2019 to January 2020 to 1,868 for October 2020 to January 2021 – a 60 per cent increase year on year.

Ms Perrington said: “We know there has been an impact on families and children but we don’t know exactly how, or the extent of it yet.”

There have been some successes over lockdown in improving things for young people.

Attendance rates at schools – both in person and virtually – has been high and generally above the south west average.

The attendance of the children in the council’s care has been particularly good.

Ms Perrington said: “Overall attendance for all looked-after children attending education settings at 80.5 per cent is consistently above national figures. Attendance at all primary is 89.5 per cent to date and attendance at all secondary settings is 72.5 per cent to date. Both are significantly above national figures.”

To help, the council delivered more than 700 laptops to children with social workers in 2020.

One area which needs more work is the impact of the pandemic on children in ethnic minority groups.

Ms Perrington said: “The 2020 census suggests that for primary and secondary pupils including sixth form, 10,987 pupils are BAME out of a total of 35,661 – which is just over 30 per cent.

"No targeted work has yet been undertaken to assess the impact of Covid-19 on children in Swindon from BAME communities as the focus has been on all children being safe and able to access learning.

"Further work is needed to understand any specific impact on BAME pupils in Swindon and officers will work with education settings.”