Impact on daily life

Impact. 12^th November
Primary school children seem to have suffered from the lockdowns.   They had tests in September and their results were not good.  They have slipped back a lot in Maths and other subjects.  Children who have free school meals have had the biggest drop in their scores.  The effects are worse in the North of England and in the Midlands.
Because of the virus and lockdowns and job losses, more and more people are borrowing money or using credit cards.  This is worse when families are already poor and the danger is that they borrow money from “payday” lenders because the Universal Credit (benefits) takes five weeks to arrive.  Payday lenders are people (sometimes companies) which lend money and then charge very high rates of interest which poorer people cannot pay back.  Then people borrow more to try to pay back and the interest rate gets higher and higher.  This problem just got worse because of the job losses which started in March this year.
When can you become a criminal?  When do you know what is right and wrong and understand consequences of what you do?  In England, that is by age 10 and children can be on trial.  In Scotland it is 12 years and many other countries say you have to be a teenager before you can be put on trial.  Scientists say that the brain is still developing into the teenage years and so it is wrong to put children on trial for crimes before they have developed.  The UN Committee on Children’s Rights say that the age should be older.  The problem is that in England too many of the children in custody are Black.