EDUCATE Ventures publishes nine-month study into impact of Covid-19 on education
The first part of the most in-depth study of the UK education system during the pandemic to date, Shock to the System: Lessons Learned from Covid-19, has been published by EDUCATE Ventures and Cambridge Partnership for Education.
The wide-ranging research examines the results of daily polls, interviews, data sources and expert perspectives, and presents recommendations to equip policymakers, leaders and educators to drive not only recovery, but progress.
The study took a three-pronged approach to experiences of the first 2020 school lockdown and looked at perspectives from schools and the teaching profession, families who were home-schooling and the EdTech companies providing resources and online programmes.
The report was launched during a webinar in which the report’s authors discussed their findings. The event was chaired by Jane Mann, managing director of CPfE and included commentary from Charles Clarke, a former Secretary of State for Education.
Professor Rose Luckin, director of EDUCATE Ventures, described how the school lockdown had created an “unprecedented opportunity and experiment — not one that we wanted, but one [from which] we needed to learn”.
She praised the response from schools, parents and EdTech developers who managed, literally overnight, to put in place some sort of provision for a majority of pupils.
However, the exercise also highlighted the divisions that already existed within the education ecosystem. In particular, the report found, divisions were exposed in communications between the different part of the education ecosystem and in a failure to understand how different communities were coping. For example, for single parents the main concern was not learning loss but financial. Only 16% of non-single parent families had the same concern.
EdTech companies, meanwhile, began to seen more as supportive of the teaching and learning process, rather than something that led to financial outlay for already overstretched school budgets.
One of the main findings was the lack of trust in government during the school shutdown, and how little schools felt supported by Ministers. Mr Clarke, who was education secretary between 2002–2004 under Tony Blair, said building consensus during a crisis was “crucially important”. However, this had not been achieved which had led to “running warfare going on” between schools and the Department for Education. He added that the quality of leadership within schools was also a factor in how well schools managed the impact of the pandemic.
EDUCATE Ventures’ researchers, Dr Carmel Kent, head of educational data science and Karine George, chief education adviser, discussed the importance of data collection and analytics in schools, so that teachers could get a better grasp of how to support learners in challenging times.
Ms George said that wholesale reform was needed of continuous professional development so that training in data handling did not become merely a bolt-on in an already overloaded curriculum.
In the coming days and weeks, we will be highlighting some of the main findings from this extensive report in a series of Medium articles, starting next week.
*Volume 1 of the report can be downloaded here. It includes an executive summary, a set of recommendations, commentaries from expert representatives, from the educational technology sector, and a narrative of the implications we have drawn from the data and research we have analysed. The Appendix also includes a range of invaluable practical guidance.
Volume 2, which will be published shortly, contains the data and evidence upon which this first volume is based, plus an explanation of the methodology that was used.
