First published in The Telegraph, 26th December 2020:
We have heard some awful statistics during the pandemic. Perhaps one of the most grim was highlighted by the Chief Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman, setting out in stark terms just how damaging our children’s lost learning has been. She noted that “one day of national school closure works out at about 40,000 child years of education in total”.
While we were clapping the NHS, organising an NHS volunteer force, establishing Nightingale Hospitals (all welcome), less in comparison was done for education. Despite the individual efforts of schools, teachers and support staff, there was no similar education army of volunteers, remote learning was patchy to say the least, exams were embroiled in controversy and the government’s laptop programme took many weeks to reach pupils on the wrong side of the digital divide.
The fact schools were open for vulnerable children during the first lockdown, was somewhat illusory – as 82 per cent of those children did not attend. Over two million children did barely any learning at all during the second half of April. The £1 billion catch-up programme (something I campaigned for since Easter) is hugely welcome, but whether it can help repair the educational loss to millions of children remains to be seen.
It is not just what happened to children during the early lockdown that we should be worried about. Hundreds of thousands of pupils are still missing school on a weekly basis. At the end of November, more than 800,000 pupils were absent because of Covid-related reasons. How many of these were from year groups taking exams this summer is not collated by the Department for Education.
It is a mystery why the DfE would not gather this information, as knowing how many absent students are doing GCSEs or A-levels next year and where they are in the country would mean they could make adjustments. Since schools returned on September, I have been urging that what is needed is not just proper data on school absences, but a national assessment of pupils, starting with those in exam years. Such information would enable ministers and school leaders to assess how much lost learning there has been and what catch-up is needed. If this information had been collated from September and October, the Government would have been much better prepared to make the right decisions on exams.
What is needed now is a tracker, worked through by the DfE, Academy Heads and local authorities – perhaps with help from Ofsted, to find out not just about lost learning, but also track what remote learning is being offered and whether or not these children are still learning properly at home.
Many will argue that this will be a lot of work and hard to collate. Yet the DfE gathers some serious micro-information as to what is going on in schools in terms of Sats, league tables and exams. Why can’t they do the same and establish a national tracker programme, at least for students in exam years, to ensure they get the learning they need?
Tracking is all the more important given the Government has now said that there will be staggered starts for secondary schools in Janaury. What will happen to the five million secondary pupils who will be at home for a week or more? Will they be getting the remote learning they need? There are now directives from the DfE and a requirement for three hours of daily learning for primary schools and four hours for secondary. But directives are one thing, making it happen in practice is another. Only if there is regular information and data from schools and local authorities can this be done.
The new rapid testing regime announced for schools will make a difference. Teachers and support staff too, should be on the priority list for vaccinations, meaning more education professionals will be in school, not forced to go home. But as a country, we need a national conversation as to whether the education of our children is a priority, or well down the pecking order. If we carry on down this path, with schools opening and closing like a revolving door that is never still, we are damaging the life chances of our next generation. Above all, the Government must be consistent – make decisions and stick to them. Are schools going to remain open or not? Will exams take place or won’t they?
When the history of Covid-19 is written, it is hoped that historians will not have to take account of a new epidemic of educational poverty. Ultimately there is no panacea for educational deprivation. Thanks to the genius of science, the march of new diseases like Covid can be halted. But there will never be a vaccine against the lost opportunity and wrecked life chances of a generation.
