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Boris Johnson at the Covid-19 inquiry in London (Picture: UK Covid-19 Inquiry/PA Wire) Boris Johnson has told the Covid-19 inquiry that his government was ‘slow’ to realise the ‘full horror’ of the pandemic’s effect on British children. The former Prime Minister is the latest witness to be called in front of the committee, which is now in its third year of investigating the UK’s response to the crisis. Its latest phase focuses on the impact of policies such as school closures and social distancing on the country’s young people. In his evidence to the inquiry, Johnson highlighted that government officials and medical experts did not know how the virus would affect children early in the pandemic. He said: ‘We didn’t know much about the transmissibility of the disease. ‘There were all sorts of things that were simply unknown and difficult to plan for.’ The ex-PM said he does ‘regret very much’ the widely criticised model for replacing school exams in summer 2020, when education had been massively disrupted by lockdown. Johnson told the inquiry: ‘We had to find a way of adjudicating on the academic achievement of the kids that didn’t involve an exam. ‘And Ofqual came up with this system. I was not expert enough to comment on it, on whether it was viable or not, but plainly it let down a lot of kids whose grades didn’t reflect their abilities and their achievements.’ However, he added: ‘What I would say in our defence is it wasn’t easy to come up with the right model.’ He later said the approach ‘was very undermining for the confidence of kids who thought they deserved a better grade, and it was a bad system’. The Covid inquiry also heard Johnson had considered sacking his Education Secretary Sir Gavin Williamson over the fiasco. Messages were shown, in which he told his then-chief advisor he was in his official residence at Chequers and ‘in a thoroughly homocidal mood’. But Johnson paid tribute to Sir Gavin’s work this morning, saying: ‘I think if I look back at my handling of my beloved colleagues over the three-and-a-bit years I was in government, I can think of all sorts of changes I might have made. ‘But I don’t think there’s any point in speculating about it now, except I think that on the whole, given the difficulties that we faced, I think that the department under Gavin did a pretty heroic job in trying to cope with Covid, and that was my judgment.’ Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk. For more stories like this, check our news page.
