Covid-19 restrictions caused lasting harms to child development and widened attainment gaps, Leeds expert tells Inquiry

The report makes a series of recommendations for mitigating these effects going forward, and in the event of a future pandemic or comparable event

Covid-19 lockdown restrictions had immediate, significant and lasting detriments on the youngest and most vulnerable children and intensified attainment gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged groups, concludes a major new report for the UK Covid-19 Inquiry led by a researcher at the University of Leeds.

Catherine Davies, Professor of Language Development at the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, is the lead author of the report, Little Lives, Big Changes: How Covid-19 Shaped Early Years Services and Children’s Development from Birth to Five Years.

Professor Catherine Davies presented her findings and recommendations during a two-hour session at the Covid-19 Inquiry public hearing on Tuesday 30 September, 2025.

Professor Davies said:

“The early years are a critical period for children’s development and external services play a crucial support role. Covid-19 restrictions greatly limited access to early education, health visiting, and other services during associated lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. Over five years on, evidence from across the UK reveals a broad range of lasting detriments to young children’s learning, most notably their language, communication, and socioemotional development.

“Children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and those with additional learning were particularly affected by the disruption to services, which were already under pressure before the pandemic and ill-equipped to deal with the Covid-19 crisis.

“In the event of a future pandemic or comparable event, risks must be rebalanced to reduce wider societal harms of lockdowns. Children and families must be fully informed and empowered to safely access the services they need, for example by keeping early education settings open as essential infrastructure and ensuring that services that work with vulnerable children continue to operate in person when it is in the child’s best interest.”

Investigating the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on children’s development

The UK COVID-19 Inquiry has been established to examine the UK’s response to and impact of the pandemic, and to learn lessons for the future. Professor Davies’ report was commissioned for Module 8 of the Inquiry to investigate the impact of the pandemic on children who were aged 0-5 between 1 Jan 2020 to 28 June 2022 in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Professor Davies presented the findings in-person during a two-hour session at the Inquiry’s public hearing (4:42:20 to 6:53:00) in London yesterday (Tuesday 30 September).

Using a wide range of published evidence, reviews, and recommendations from the four nations of the UK at various stages of the pandemic, the report concludes that a larger proportion of children than before the pandemic did not meet their expected developmental milestones between 2020 and 2022. Lockdown-era disruptions to children’s home lives, play opportunities, and education and other support services played a major role in this trend.

The report also highlights how the pandemic set back previous progress made on breaking the link between a child’s socioeconomic background and developmental attainment. Although progress in narrowing the gap between children living with and without social disadvantage had begun to stall in 2019 after a previous period of improvement, the gap rapidly widened between 2019 and 2022. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds remain at around 4-and-a-half months behind their peers with respect to their developmental attainment at five years of age.

Key recommendations

The report makes a series of recommendations for mitigating these effects going forward, and in the event of a future pandemic or comparable event. These include:

• Implementing effective interventions to help families and services recover from the crisis, including integrated support tailored to the most affected communities to address systemic inequalities. For example, providing enhanced support for socioemotional development and for early speech, language, and communication
• Adopting a long term, cross-government national strategy for children in their formative years, effectively targeting the social determinants of educational inequalities
• Ensuring equality of access to high-quality early education, supported by a professionalised early education workforce
• Enabling families to take up their offer of early education and supporting children’s regular attendance so they can fully enjoy and benefit from their early education experiences.

Other recommendations focus on developing stronger support systems for families, enabling long-term research into children’s development after the pandemic, and ensuring that early years services and vital interventions for vulnerable children remain accessible in any future emergency.

The findings of Module 8 will form part of the Inquiry’s wider recommendations to Government and policymakers.

The report was co-authored with Ivana La Valle with valuable contributions from Dr Cecilia Zuniga-Montanez.

Further information:

• Email media enquiries to University of Leeds press officer Mia Saunders via m.saunders@leeds.ac.uk.
• The full report and hearing transcript can be accessed here. Watch or listen to the evidence session here (from 4:42:20 to 6:53:00).
• Learn more about Professor Davies’ research into the impacts of Covid-19 lockdown restrictions on children’s development on the AHC Research Insights blog. 
• Professor Davies works with psychologists, educationalists, teacher practitioners, and government policymakers to use research findings to improve policy and practice, and to boost educational outcomes for children from diverse backgrounds. Read more about Professor Davies’ work.
• Evidence on the declining number of five-year-olds meeting statutory developmental milestones after the pandemic can be found in a report led by Professor Louise Tracey at the University of Leeds’ School of Education. Research into insufficient funding for inclusive early education has been undertaken by colleagues at Leeds University Business School (LUBS): Professor Kate Hardy, Professor Jennifer Tomlinson, Dr Helen Norman, Dr Xanthe Whittaker.
• Follow the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures on LinkedIn for the latest research news.