How can we help children and young people recover from disrupted education?
According to My Life My Say’s Lost Generation report, three quarters of 18 to 24-year-olds in the UK think that the pandemic has had a bigger impact on them than any other social, political or economic event in their lifetime.
Studies collecting children and young people’s views throughout the pandemic present a similar picture. From disrupted education, to staying at home, to changes in access to services supporting health and wellbeing—the impact of the pandemic extends far beyond the physiological effects of the virus. Children are less likely to be made unwell by COVID-19 but instead suffer from the effects of measures put in place to protect the wider population.
The experiences of children and young people have varied according to factors such as socioeconomic status, but school closures and disrupted education have become pertinent issues because, to some extent, all children and young people have been affected.
Sam Freedman is a former senior adviser on schools at the Department for Education: “Across the board, we now have three to four months of learning already lost. Even with optimistic forecasts that require, for instance, a flawless vaccine rollout, we’re looking at five or six months in total.”
Sam acknowledges that while these figures are cause for concern, the amount of learning lost also depends on a child’s access to technology, a comfortable learning space, and additional private tuition to bolster school teaching if they’ve fallen behind. A recent survey found that 12% of UK children had no reliable internet access, 19.1% had no quiet space to work, and 26.9% did not have a desk.
“With schools now closed once again, we’re compounding the lost learning, reduced skills, and lost earning potential accumulated last year.”—Simon Burgess, Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol
New research from the Sutton Trust, meanwhile, found that 40% of middle-class children are undertaking over five hours of schoolwork a day, compared to 26% of those in working class households. In other words, home schooling is widening the attainment gap between socioeconomic groups.
The unequal effects of lockdown on learning partly explain calls to prioritise opening schools, including a report published by the Royal Society last summer. This calculated the impacts of learning losses on lifelong skills and earnings, and cited data from other countries showing limited evidence of a surge in infections following schools reopening.
Simon Burgess, Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol and a lead author on the report, says, “When children and young people returned to school in September, new data started to be gathered. This is in line with the estimates and claims on lost learning that we made last summer.
“The decision to close schools must have been a tough one and I can understand the reasons—but the priority should always be to keep schools open. With schools now closed once again, we’re compounding the lost learning, reduced skills, and lost earning potential accumulated last year.”
“When we’re thinking about the impact of the last year on children, the relative value of time is important”, says Dr Sunil Bhopal of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. “My two-year-old, for instance, has spent half of his life in lockdown. A year is an awfully long time for a developing brain.
“At this point, we have all the data we need to understand what’s happening. Children and young people are suffering through losses to education and impacts on health—with those from disadvantaged groups most affected. Now, we need to start thinking about how we move forward.”
Getting back on track
In the immediate term, a major priority is to provide support to those already in education and, in particular, young people in GCSE and A-Level exam cohorts. RCPCH &Us has been speaking with young people to understand the concerns that many rightly have towards disrupted exams.
“The fact the biggest year of my life has been completely cancelled has been difficult.”—Young person in an exam cohort, speaking at the RCPCH &Us COVID-19 book club.
“One reassuring thing is that when it comes to catching up, tutoring works,” says Simon Burgess. “Trials show that small group tutoring can successfully compensate for losses to learning and help young people catch up—and for less than 1% of the current school budget.”
The proposal from Simon and others to use intensive but time-limited tutoring has already been rolled out in the form of the national tutoring programme as part of the government’s £1 billion COVID catch-up plan. He says that while this is a promising start, the scale of the programme needs to be much bigger.
A recent article in the Economics Observatory, meanwhile, explored alternative approaches to exams. These proposals do not seek to replace externally set and marked tests. Instead, they suggest that adapting the timing and content of exams could take into account different learning experiences.
Allowing for flexible content, for instance, could help to reduce the unfairness caused by schools covering different amounts of the curriculum based on their resources throughout remote learning. Here, students would select exam questions from a wide set of options, much like university testing.
“People have been talking about the transformative power of technology in education for decades, but the evidence shows that you just can’t beat classroom teaching,” adds Sam Freedman. “With that said, digital devices do serve a purpose, especially when they’re our only option.”
Last month, the Centre for Education and Youth (CfEY) published The Digital Divide, highlighting how “our only option” is not an option for everyone. Just 1% of state primary schools can provide devices that their pupils can take home, compared with 38% of private primary schools.
“The fact that we still have digital exclusion is ridiculous—it’s hardly the most complex issue to solve during a pandemic.”—Loic Menzies, Chief Executive at the Centre for Education and Youth
This is particularly relevant with the advent of resources like Oak National Academy, a collection of video lessons from certified teachers created in response to school closures. While Oak has been celebrated as an excellent resource, it does require access to a device in order to access its content.
“The fact that we still have digital exclusion is ridiculous—it’s hardly the most complex issue to solve during a pandemic,” says Loic Menzies, Chief Executive at CfEY. “This was initially understandable, last spring, but it’s now been months and we still have pupils without access to data and devices.”
Like Simon and Sam, Loic says that catch-up tutoring and alternative exams provide some options for getting children and young people back on track. He also suggests that an initial triage, when pupils return to school, will be crucial in allowing us to identify those most in need of extra support.
“We’re still at the point where we can intervene,” says Loic. “Headlines discussing a ‘lost’ or ‘scarred’ generation of young people can be useful in highlighting the issue—but the key thing is to take action now, to avoid creating a lost or scarred generation while we still can.”
Thinking big
Sir Al Aynsley-Green is Professor Emeritus of Child Health at University College London, former President of the British Medical Association, and was the first Children’s Commissioner for England. In his 2018 book, the British Betrayal of Childhood, Al explores why outcomes for UK children are among the lowest in the developed world.
“If we’re thinking about the future, it’s important to understand our history,” says Al. “The NSPCC was founded 60 years after the RSPCA. We were the last country in Western Europe to build a hospital for sick children. And we use Mosquito alarms to keep young people from congregating near shops.”
Al suggests that educational attainment and other outcomes have historically been low due to value decisions in policymaking. The Every Child Matters initiative, for instance, aimed to reduce educational failure, but gradually lost funding with the advent of austerity policies introduced in 2010.
The 2010 Cameron-Clegg coalition championed the Big Society, a flagship policy that proposed to bring about social cohesion through reduced government spending. Individuals, grassroots organisations, and charities would have more power to deliver efficient public services in place of the government.
Understanding this history, says Al, allows us to understand the present moment. For instance, the recent comments from Conservative MP Kevin Hollinrake suggesting that “it’s a parent’s job to feed their children” in a discussion on child food poverty, make sense in the context of this wider political ideology, which continues to shape government policy into the 2020s.
“The pandemic is, and needs to be, an opportunity for a paradigm shift, rather than a return to the status quo,” says Al. “We don’t just need a recovery plan—we need to celebrate new ways of improving the lives of children. And as Churchill rightly said: never let a good crisis go to waste.”
“When we went into emergency mode last spring, most people understood the need to ‘park’ children and young people for a moment. But it’s time to step out of that mindset,” adds Sunil. “A recovery plan will need to be a collaborative effort combining people from across sectors including education, healthcare, justice, social care, and advocacy — as well as parents and children and young people themselves.
“When it comes to education, teachers are the best placed to know what needs to happen. Paediatricians, meanwhile, can support with health and emotional needs. Other professionals will be best placed to speak about their respective fields. But we will need to work together if we’re going to get children and young people back on track for the lives they deserve.”
“We don’t just need a recovery plan—we need to celebrate new ways of improving the lives of children. And as Churchill rightly said: never let a good crisis go to waste.”—Sir Al Aynsley-Green
“We also need to ask ourselves what we expect schools to be,” adds Loic. “Right now, they’re providing childcare, education and, following a decade of austerity, acting as bridges to social services. We’re asking them to do at least three big tasks—none of which is focused on educational quality. We either need to reorganise or relocate some responsibilities to other institutions.
“There’s also a discussion to be had about how we view GCSEs and A-Levels. We need to create better pathways into lifelong learning so that it is far easier for pupils to gain qualifications later in life rather than this being their one shot—regardless of circumstances and context. This shouldn’t determine the rest of your life.”
A recent paper on “the costs of just failing high stakes exams” explored the impact of just missing out on a grade C in GCSE English. This important threshold can cause those who don’t achieve this grade to be excluded from higher levels of education—and even employment. Critics argue that this is compelling evidence to rethink a system that places so much emphasis on one form of assessment at the age of 16.
With ongoing school closures producing additional learning losses in this academic year, it is expected that more pupils will be pushed beneath such thresholds, ultimately reducing social mobility for those from disadvantaged backgrounds if no action is taken. School closures also restrict access to other forms of support that schools provide, including connecting pupils with public health services.
“Grades are important, but only inasmuch as they allow pupils to get to where they want to be”, says Sam. “That’s why it’s important, right now, to pay particular attention to exam cohorts. And to provide colleges and universities with the catch-up resources they need to support them.”
Although a person’s lifetime earnings correlate with their parent’s income regardless of educational attainment, education is still a strong driver of social mobility. Addressing inequalities in education, therefore, will be an important aspect of mitigating against the wider effects of the ongoing pandemic.
