The impact of Covid is “moving like a series of waves” through the school system as secondaries grapple with reading difficulties and poorly-organised pupils and primaries tackle “acute developmental needs” among new starters, a new report has warned.
The paper by assessment expert Tim Oates for the ASCL school leaders’ union lays bare the “sliding set of distinctive challenges”. He cautions against assuming schools are “back to normal” and says the educational challenges will continue to unfold over the next five to 10 years.
Oates, who works for Cambridge Assessment, called for better early years and parental support, earlier intervention for pupils with mental health needs, as well as other “well-funded” and targeted actions.
Although a “wealth of high-quality research” into the impact of Covid on schools exists, “we have spent little time on how this all adds up – the pattern of individual, local and system-wide impacts”.
In working through the existing studies, “we begin to understand that the totality of the problems across all age groups presents a very new type of public policy challenge: All children were affected, some profoundly.
“It is not just about ‘learning gaps’, interrupted education affected subject learning, school connectedness, social and emotional development and / or cognitive development.”
What results is a “public policy problem unique in its depth, distribution and persistence”.
1. Covid is ‘not a thing of the past’
Covid impact is “not a thing of the past – it is moving like a series of different waves up through the system”, Oates argued.
And “different impacts occur for each year group, down through the system, to those born and young in the pandemic, who now appear to be prone to fundamental problems in cognitive and social development”.
Secondary schools, for example, reported an increase in reading difficulties among year 7s, as well as “poor personal organisation and challenging patterns of interaction”, Oates said.
Staff in primaries report “very serious problems of arrested language development, lack of toilet training, anxiety in being in social spaces, and depressed executive function”.
2. ‘Major issues’ in early primary
Oates said this “rolling process” was “exemplified by major issues now emerging in early primary.”
With “considerable variation” around delays in obtaining diagnoses for Education, Health and Care Plans, challenge and difficulty “is loading up in the first years of primary in some localities”.
There are “serious dangers in simply assuming that schools are ‘back to normal’ – they are not – and assuming they will easily be able to meet the needs of young people affected by lockdowns and pandemic”.
3. ‘Immensely hard on schools’
Oates said this impact at different age points resulted in a “sliding set of distinctive challenges – wide and deep – moving upwards through the education system”.
“Put succinctly, this ‘sliding problem’ means that if a school has thought that it has solved the problems of Covid-19 impact on key stage 3 pupils, then it is important to think again, since a new problem will be along very soon, with the new intake, differently affected by Covid-19.
“This is immensely hard on schools.”
4. Impact ‘highly individualised’
Before Covid, we “became habituated to seeing ‘underachievement’ and ‘disadvantage’ in terms of defined groups and places – ‘London versus the North’, ‘working class boys’, and so on”.
Covid impact is “completely different. It requires a different way of looking at the data and the current reality in schools”.
Impact has been “right the way across society – and as well as being widely distributed, it is highly individualised”.
“Similar children in similar contexts have been very differently affected.”
5. Focus on Covid exam years ignores wider issues
Oates said focusing on the pupils unable to take GCSEs and A-levels during the pandemic meant “we tend to think of a problem which ‘peaked’ then, and has now diminished as news stories have abated”.
Thinking only of this “makes us feel that things are improving and normality is being restored”.
“But right now, in 2024, diminished linguistic, social and cognitive development of those born and young in the pandemic is a wave hitting the schooling system from the bottom – just as young people moving from primary to secondary present a different problem – deriving from learning gaps in key areas of learning.”
6. Schools should not ‘adapt’ to lower development
He warned the problems were “not only affecting these children’s capacity to benefit from education but also fundamentally affecting school capacity.”
He pointed to studies revealing how some schools having to improvise with sign language for five-year-olds to “older children absent through anxiety”.
These problems are “real, widespread and significant…but I do not believe that we should adapt schools to accommodate this lower level of infant development and widespread absence”.
“We should urgently apply remedies to these problems and ensure the problems are diminished – hopefully to zero – rather than accept and accommodate them.”
7. Fears impact may ‘transform schooling’
Oates warned the waves of Covid impact “may transform schooling as they do, as behaviour, attendance and other problems impact on the processes and provision of schools”.
He said he worked with one secondary school in a deprived borough “whose teachers and management have realised that they have inadvertently adapted their curriculum to one which does not require reading to access content”.
“Yes, that improves the chances for the current Covid-19-affected cohorts, but the staff realise that they run the risk of permanently lowering the requirement to develop the skills which are essential for good later educational and professional progression.”
8. ‘Concerted action’ needed
Oates argued for an “evidence-driven response” with strategy and resources “co-designed by schools, unions and government”.
The National Tutoring Programme, which recently closed after the government removed subsidies, shows “that provision of effective support is not just a question of securing large amounts of funding”.
“Action needs to reach the acute and chronic needs in a system where the adverse impact is widely dispersed and highly differentiated.”
Early years and parental support “can mitigate the problems for younger children”, while “much earlier” identification and support can help older children with anxiety.
Without “concerted action, depth and scale of residual Covid-19 effects will most likely pass as waves through the system”.
“It will require parental support and community engagement. It will require protracted, grinding effort. It will require politicians dedicated to following the detail of what is happening on the ground, analysing data, listening to schools and finetuning strategy.
“Policy formation will need to be followed by well-targeted and effective implementation which gets support to where it is needed most. It will be a long slog, not a walk in the park.”
