The increase in time spent online by many children puts them at higher risk of online grooming and cyberbullying.Ī heightened focus on learning catchup should not come at the expense of greater support for students’ emotional and social needs. There has been an increase in the number of calls made by children to Childline during lockdown and there was a 50% increase in calls to the national domestic abuse helpline during the first three weeks. There is a greater likelihood that families in smaller and overcrowded homes without gardens have experienced conflicts at home. With many parents and carers facing unemployment, reduced income or lower job security following the crisis, there will be a rise in child poverty. As Laura Partridge writes in a recent article on the kind of collaboration needed to provide the long-term change and support required by schools, evidence suggests that the pandemic has increased the needs for greater social and emotional support. There is also an increased need for social and emotional support for students. Learning catchup is, therefore, an area on which schools need to focus. It should be noted that the studies in that review are mostly of schools in the USA, where summer breaks are typically around twice as long as those in the UK. It does not, however, show any differential effect in the mathematics skills of middle- and lower-class students. The report draws attention to the most recent systematic review of the evidence on ‘summer learning loss’, which covers over a hundred years of research and estimates that in reading and language, ‘on average, summer vacations a gap of about 3 months between middle- and lower-class students’. The recent EEF report focuses on the impact of school closure on the ‘disadvantage gap’: ‘the interaction between the amount of summer learning loss and students’ socioeconomic status’.
Research shows that attainment gaps widen during summer breaks. This is supported by existing evidence from studies on the effects that school summer holidays have on learning. School closures have resulted in a significant loss in learning for students and the impact is greater for those who are disadvantaged. Covid-19 has thereby placed greater responsibilities upon individuals, institutions and states to alleviate inequality – both in the education students receive, and in the ways that education can be used as a means of reducing socioeconomic inequality by improving social mobility. Estimations of the rate the gap will widen vary from 11 to 75%. A recent report published by the Education Endowment Foundation (‘EEF’), ‘Impact of school closures on the attainment gap’, outlines global projections that ‘suggest that school closures will widen the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers, likely reversing progress made to narrow the gap since 2011’, with a median estimate indicating that the gap will widen by 36%. The pandemic has precipitated a regression of much of the progress made over the past decade in reducing educational inequality. The vast majority of these are from disadvantaged families. Most of those who have not continued to receive formal education are students with very limited access to the internet and technology.
As reported on the front page of the Times last week, two studies show that a fifth of UK children – two million pupils – ‘have done little or no schoolwork at home during lockdown’, with ‘little’ being defined as less than an hour a day. Many of these students have received little or even no formal education during school closures. The lockdown has resulted in half the world’s student population being out of school or university. What kind of collaboration is needed to foster the community support required to address the challenges raised and exacerbated by Covid-19?ġ. Fruitful co-operation between the members of a community requires effective collaboration. The importance of community is becoming greater as we address the challenges we now face in education – both the new challenges and those that have been given greater urgency by the pandemic. (For ways to foster a community that imitates the classroom community when teaching online, see this earlier blogpost.) These are fostered not only through social spaces, but also in the classroom: a class is an intellectual and social community, and classroom environments foster intellectual and personal bonds between students and between the teacher and the class. Schools and universities provide intellectual and social communities. This has also been one of the most important features of education that students have missed since educational institutions closed worldwide. One of the things to which our attention has been most drawn is the importance of community. The most salient absence we have felt during lockdown is the company of others. Jonathan Beale, Researcher-in-Residence, CIRL
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