What an incredibly busy week, with the multitude of announcements and updates from the Prime Minister, DfE, Ofqual and Public Health to name a few! In amongst all of this ‘busy-ness’ we held another very successful and engaging Camden Conversation with Lee Jerome, Associate Professor of Education at Middlesex University. Lee delivered the session on Children’s Rights in Schools, where he shared international research evidence about the impact of children’s rights education (CRE) and highlighted the benefits for both children and teachers.
Last week, I met a couple of Heads to discuss early reading, playing with sounds and reading stamina, with a particular focus on the challenges of keeping reading engagement alive. This coincided with a report from the DfE examining the extent of learning loss among primary and secondary school pupils during the autumn term. The research, carried out by Education Policy Institute (EPI) and Renaissance Learning for the Department, provides new evidence on the impact of the pandemic on pupils’ attainment. You can read the DfE report here.
We are all aware of the huge disruption to their education that pupils have encountered over the past year, but, to date, there has been limited evidence detailing how much learning they have lost. The research finds that by the first half of the 2020 autumn term, pupils had already fallen behind with their learning by up to two months in reading, and up to three months in maths. The analysis shows that learning loss in schools that have a large proportion of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, were around 50% higher than those schools with very few pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. This underlines the need for pupil catch-up interventions to be heavily targeted at the poorest pupils. Since the autumn term, pupils have faced further disruption as a result of this period of school closures. While teachers, parents and pupils have been going to great lengths to adapt to remote learning, the real concern now, highlighted in the report, is that these learning losses could increase. The report is definitely worth a read, but the summary analysis finds that:
- Pupils in poorer-intakes schools are further behind in reading
- Reading in all year groups has suffered
- Year 7 pupils experienced the smallest learning loss in reading
- Learning loss in maths is greater
- Evidence of regional disparity in reading losses
In amongst all the announcements this week, it has been outlined by the government that schools will split a £302 million “recovery premium” to support catch-up; and secondary schools will get £200 million to run summer school programmes. Ministers have also pledged £200 million for the “expansion” of the National Tutoring Programme, extension of the 16 to 19 tuition fund and additional support for language development in the early years. The finer detail and approach has yet to be understood and agreed, but once we know more, we will then be able to plan a coherent local approach to catch up, which will also include a comprehensive summer university programme.
Jon Abbey
Managing Director of Camden Learning
