Today the Department for Education (DfE) has published a new
report examining the extent of learning loss among primary and
secondary school pupils during the autumn term.
The research, which provides new evidence on
the impact of the pandemic on pupils’ attainment, was carried out
by Education Policy Institute (EPI) and Renaissance Learning for
the Department.
You can read the DfE report here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupils-progress-in-the-2020-to-2021-academic-year-interim-report
Commenting on the new EPI-Renaissance
research, Jon Andrews, Head of Analysis at the Education Policy
Institute (EPI) said:
“We know
that all pupils have encountered huge disruption to their
education over the last year, but to date there has only been
limited evidence detailing how much learning they have
lost.
“Our new
research, which analyses over a million Renaissance Star pupil
assessments from this current academic year, fills this crucial
evidence gap. We find 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.
“Our
analysis shows that learning losses in schools that have many
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.
"EPI and
Renaissance will continue to undertake analysis on the impact of
the pandemic on learning loss, where we will consider its effects
on different pupil groups, and at later periods in the current
academic
year.”
Natalie Perera, Chief Executive of the Education Policy Institute
(EPI),
said:
“These new
findings show that considerable losses in pupil progress were
already evident by the first half of the autumn term, with pupils
in primary schools, secondary schools and in different parts of
the country all seeing their academic progress penalised by the
pandemic.
“Since
then, 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 is that these learning losses could
increase.
"We need to
continue to look at how we can support all pupils through
effective catch-up programmes, but particularly those from
disadvantaged backgrounds, whose education has taken the biggest
hit from the pandemic. Policies need to be well-targeted to
account for the different amounts of learning loss among
pupils."
