The quality of home learning in England improved substantially over the first year of the pandemic, with particularly big improvements for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. This much-needed improvement is welcome – but, on their own, more equal experiences going forward won’t be enough to overcome the large inequalities that the first lockdown has baked in.
Limited support and large inequalities in provision for self-isolating students during the Autumn 2020 term also worked against efforts to address lost learning during that term. And, with a quarter of parents believing that it will take their child at least a year to catch up, schools and teachers will be facing big challenges as they meet their new classes this week.
One challenge will be ensuring that the pupils who most need support access it. While the majority of parents support tutoring programmes to help children catch up on lost learning, the poorest families were the least likely to accept an offer of catch-up tutoring. Among the poorest fifth of families, 11% of pupils had been offered tutoring by March 2021 but had chosen not to take it up – twice as high as the 5% of pupils from the most affluent families.
These are among the findings of a new report from Institute for Fiscal Studies, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. The report analyses data from two specially designed online surveys (in April/May 2020 and February/March 2021) to assess how children’s learning evolved over the course of the first year of the pandemic.
Other key findings
- Home learning improved substantially over the course of the pandemic, especially for secondary school pupils. Compared with the first lockdown, the second round of school closures saw secondary pupils’ learning time rise from 22 to 29 hours a week (22 to 26 hours a week among primary school pupils).
- Pupils learning at home were almost twice as likely to be offered online classes in February/March 2021 than in the first lockdown, and were more likely to have access to devices at home.
- However, despite these improvements, 40% of children did not meet the government’s minimum guidelines for learning time even during the second period of school closures.
Compared to the first lockdown, the improvement in home learning experiences in early 2021 helped to reduce inequalities between disadvantaged children and their better-off peers.
- Among those who were learning entirely remotely, children from disadvantaged families spent a similar amount of time learning each week as their better-off peers. During the first lockdown, children in the poorest fifth of families had done 8 fewer hours of learning per week than those in the richest fifth.
- And, compared to the first lockdown, poorer families were much more likely to be offered online classes – and to have the technology at home to access them. During the second period of school closures, schools attended by the richest pupils were 5 percentage points more likely to offer interactive resources like online classes than the schools attended by the poorest (89% vs 84%). During the first lockdown, that gap had been 20 percentage points (67% vs 47%). Poorer pupils also benefitted from expanded access to in-person schooling during the second period of school closures.
Outside of national school closures, however, provision for absent students was poor.
- On average, pupils missed around one-tenth of school days during the Autumn 2020 term.
- Just one third of pupils had access to online classes (live or recorded) when learning at home during the Autumn 2020 term. This is a substantial fall from the over half (55%) of pupils who had been offered such resources during the first lockdown.
- Support was particularly lacking for disadvantaged pupils. Only one in four children in the poorest fifth of families had access to online live classes while self-isolating, compared to a third of their peers in the richest fifth of families.
Adam Salisbury, a Research Economist at IFS, said: “Thanks to the efforts of teachers, schools, families and policymakers, the second round of remote learning went far better than the first time around. But even with this welcome improvement, many children still struggled with home learning; around four-in-ten pupils did not meet the government’s minimum guidelines for learning time during the second round of school closures. With this huge hit to children’s learning we have seen so far, it is perhaps unsurprising that a quarter of parents think their child will need a year or more to recover learning lost during the pandemic.”
Angus Phimister, a Research Economist at IFS, said: “The first lockdown was particularly tough on the schooling of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, who spent around 8 fewer hours a week learning than their better-off peers. Welcome improvements during the second round of school closures meant that learning experiences looked much more similar. But catch-up policies need to be carefully designed to be taken-up by poorer pupils if they are to have any chance of putting a dent in the educational inequalities that have grown so much wider during the pandemic.”
