As a member of the Polish community whose children attend a Polish school in Preston, Ms Blika said the number of students has decreased significantly since the pandemic began.

“Bringing some people back and Covid certainly didn’t help,” she said, noting that some workers in their home countries may now have a better quality of life and a stronger economy than when they left. Were.

Post-Brexit immigration changes that use a points-based system should restrict the free movement of low-skilled workers from Europe to highly skilled workers in specific roles.

However, Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Monitor, a research facility at Oxford University, said it was difficult to draw a straight line between changes in the country’s immigration system and labor shortages. The lack of reliable immigration data, the fact that some workers are still on their last leave, and uncertainty about the pandemic have only blurred the real picture.

I have written about how immigration data collected in the UK during the pandemic paints an incomplete picture and warns that estimates of hundreds of thousands of European departures may be out of reach. She says the actual number is likely to be closer to the thousands.