Evidence grows of lockdown harm to the young. But we act as if nothing happened | Martha Gill

My friends and I cornered the dean in charge of pastoral care and tried to get him to tell us how cool we were. They didn't have sex, didn't use drugs, spent all day in the library, and applied for internship jobs all night long. We said that we must have been so hard to control. It must be simpler for him now.

He said that you were all very nice. The real challenge was the new crop of first year students. They were much more difficult to manage than any other group he had seen. He was having to treat them more like teenagers than they were because they were immature.

The reason was clear. There is a spurt of maturity that comes in sixth form. They had not been able to socialize with their peers.

Parents spoke heartbreakingly of having to tell toddlers to stay away from others and not to hug their friends

Two years of intermittent lockdown have done damage to the young. We don't have the full picture, but we can now add data, because a lecturer friend tells me his third years are less confident and less academically advanced than his previous years. One of the more reliable indicators of how a group is doing is the results of the SATs. In England, the proportion of 11-year-olds who hit expected standards in reading, writing and math has fallen. That's a big change.

There are many young people. Parents had to tell toddlers not to hug their friends and to stay away from other people during the Pandemic. According to research published by the Education Endowment Foundation, England's youngest children were the worst affected. Four- and five-year-olds were starting school far behind and were overwhelmed by large groups of other children.

We need to admit that it was necessary. We did a mass experiment on young people. During the Second World War, there was only one comparison point. It's the opposite experiment. Children were separated from their parents. They haven't been with them in the last two years.

Colin passed away last week. He is remembered for his work on the importance of critical periods in development. The brain won't be able to see properly if a child has bad vision during a critical time after birth. The theme is related to developmental science. What happens to you as you get older is more important than you think.

The mental health of former evacuees was studied when they were older. The worst effects were suffered by those who were four to six years old. There is a chance that they will.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin did monkey experiments in the 1990s. One group of monkeys was separated from their mothers at birth and raised in a nursery with other monkeys. The group could possibly be called the "evacuee" group. Each mother- baby pair was isolated and the other set was allowed to stay with their mothers. A group of monkeys were locked down for a period of time.

The researchers found something intriguing at the end of the period. The mothersless evacuee baby monkeys were no worse off than the mothers who were locked up. They had similar issues. The evacuee monkeys were too rambunctious and the lockdown monkeys were too clingy.

Lockdown had all the aesthetics of fictional big-state dystopias – empty city squares, mass-testing centres, red tape on park benches

It's odd, but the national conversation seems to have moved on from fretting about the effects of lock down on young people. Maybe we don't have to think about it. It was a national talking point at the peak of the epidemic.

There is no government action on the matter. The education recovery commissioner for England resigned due to a lack of reliable funding. The government's latest budget commitment means we will spend more than in America and the Netherlands.

Maybe we forgot. Lockdown Britain was like a big-state dystopia, with empty city squares, mass-testing centers, tape around park benches, and neighbours who would love to report you to the police. Something bad might be happening to us all. As infections cleared up, the unworldly atmosphere disappeared, and life has mostly returned to normal.

We need to remember what happened. It was unnatural and harmful to keep a generation of children away from their friends. We need to collect more data than we are doing. The experiment has been done. We need to pay attention to the results.