‘Empathy isn’t there’: the pandemic effects on children’s social skills

Following the Ofsted chief's comments, we hear from Jemma, a nursery school teacher in Dorset

If children have siblings and they've mixed with others, they tend to be on the same level socially as before the pandemic. But the ones who are only children and have just been in the household with mum and dad don't know how to interact.

They have issues with sharing, being very overexcited and turn-taking. They're quite advanced in numbers and letters for their age because they've been at home with adults, or they've been playing a lot on tablets, but they are very behind socially, the empathy isn't there.

Where I work it is a fairly affluent area, there aren't a great deal of social problems. It seems to be the slightly more middle-class children who're socially behind. They're more likely to be only children, have older parents, and their parents are mostly office workers so they worked from home and were more isolated. A lot of children were put on tablets.