FROM THE EDITOR: Why protecting vulnerable children must be given priority as schools welcome more children back

Did we do well?

As individuals the vast, vast majority have done incredibly well – brilliant, in fact.

We have locked ourselves away unless absolutely necessary to go out for work or food and we have not only helped ourselves but also everyone around us.

If you remember back, before the messages from the government got so confused and easy to misinterpret, the main aim of the country as a whole was to protect the most vulnerable.

We didn’t stop our children hugging their grandparents so much to protect the young as to help the over 70s who suffer most with this virus. It took all of us and, no matter how awful the death figure in this country is now, what we did has made a difference.

That number – and every individual story of heartbreak behind it – doesn’t bear thinking about if we had all carried on with life as normal.

So now we find ourselves here, lockdown partially open and rules that are murky, to put it politely.

The vast majority of children aren’t in school still.

That said, every school in Sheffield has been open throughout lockdown in order to care for the youngsters of key workers but – and this is a big but – the plan was also to allow the city’s most vulnerable children into class too.

Sadly, this idea fell down almost immediately because most of the pupils who could have attended did not.

We could be forgiven for thinking that is probably to do with the fact that there are too many ‘at risk’ children in Sheffield, like every big city, with parents who can’t be bothered to make sure they go to school even at the best of times.

Perhaps we should give them the benefit of the doubt and say they, just like most parents, were worried for their safety and decided to protect them at home.

The problem is there are thousands of children in our neighbourhoods right now who are not safe when they are at home.

If you can picture that then you get some idea what it must be like to never feel safe anywhere, to not have those havens that most of us treasure.

Whatever happens with getting schools back to normal, these youngsters must be our absolute priority.

Nobody has their back and so we as a city must.