It is my pleasure to answer your question.
Ultimately, we have to take into account all dimensions of children's lives. The biggest ecosystem in most children's lives is the childcare centre when they are very young—in some provinces they are still at home—or the school when they are older. Clearly i, is extremely important to maintain the systems in which they develop in order to facilitate their success and reduce their vulnerability.
In our data, we observed a striking phenomenon. When a school is closed, the most vulnerable children are the most affected, because there is an entire ecosystem built around the school to help them. So we see that we could help these children more within the school structure, among other places. It would be desirable to do that.
It is therefore very important to maintain these systems and ensure that they stay open. We also have to preserve the services. When there are shocks, all of this becomes very important for these families, for all sorts of reasons. I could talk about this at length, because closing a school also has repercussions for parents and, by a ricochet effect, for children. When we are developing programs and policies, we have to make sure that the most vulnerable are protected.
Things always go well for the less vulnerable children. They come through it. They have all sorts of mechanisms around them that mean it will keep going and they will get through it.
However, when there are changes made, the situation can become quite serious for vulnerable children. The school closings, which lasted a very long time, were quite disastrous.
To be honest with you, I will add that it was really not possible to mitigate that. There was no way to replace daily human contact using Zoom, for example, particularly when we are talking about young children. It doesn't work at all. It is completely utopian to have thought we could replace the school.