Aftershock is an occasional podcast series by award-winning journalist Isabel Hardman. In every episode she asks how we can fix the damage caused by the pandemic to a different part of British society.

In this episode, Isabel looks at how schoolchildren have been affected by 18 months of lockdowns and remote schooling. Some have been hit harder than others: in fact, there are now more children missing from school rolls than at the start of the pandemic. Where have these ‘ghost children’ gone? And does the government’s response come anywhere close to being enough to stop Covid from being a blight on the rest of their lives, rather than an episode most can easily recover from?

Featuring: James Scales, head of the Education Policy Unit at the Centre for Social Justice; two young people from the Leicestershire Cares charity; Jan Appleton, who is the director of the Eagle’s Nest Project; Lord Blunkett who was education secretary in the Blair government, Rachel de Souza, the children's commissioner for England, and Robert Halfon, the chair of the education select committee.