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Tag: Lockdown Learning Gap

What has happened to the attainment gap during the pandemic?

Posted on by Andrew McAteer

Last week, pupils across Northern Ireland received their GCSE and A-level grades – the culmination of two years of work and learning that have been significantly disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Headlines focused on the rise in top grades awarded and the use of teacher-assessed grades, however we at the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement are keen to understand what the available data can tell us about how the GCSE and A-level attainment gap has been affected by the pandemic.

In a September 2020 blogpost I predicted that “if we were to consider final grades alone, 2020 will superficially appear as a highly successful year in the Northern Ireland Executive’s long-standing commitment to tackling Educational Underachievement”. In May, the release of the latest edition of “Qualifications and Destinations of Northern Ireland School Leavers 2019/20” by the Department of Education (DE), appeared to indicate that this indeed was the case. These data have been used for several years, according to the release, to “inform a wide range of policy areas aimed at raising standards and tackling educational underachievement”. They are used by “policy teams … across the education service”, “are used to respond to Assembly questions”, and “are included in the Department’s accountability and performance management process”. As such, these data represent the best available information for research and policy relating to educational underachievement in Northern Ireland. They feed into the highest levels of policy accountability through the Executive’s Outcomes Delivery Plan and particularly its Indicator 12: the gap between the percentage of non-FSME school leavers and the percentage of FSME school leavers achieving at Level 2 (GCSE) or above including English and Maths. In this blog, we argue that this data release can only provide misleading, half-answers to our question: “did the attainment gap narrow in 2020?”, and should be improved in order to better serve education policy in Northern Ireland.

A disclaimer was added to this year’s release, acknowledging that the way that GCSE and A-level grades were awarded in 2020 was very different to normal years, as well as many other qualifications:

“given the new method of awarding grades in 2019/20, caution should be taken when drawing any conclusions relating to changes in student performance. Year-on-year changes might have been impacted by the different process for awarding qualifications in 2019/20 rather than reflecting a change in underlying performance”.

Whilst this disclaimer confines itself to the technical detail of the awarding of qualifications, it also serves as a reminder of the wider impacts of the pandemic on education, which were unequally felt across the population. Whilst consistent attainment data prior to GCSE is not currently available for Northern Ireland, systematic studies in England identified a loss of learning across age groups and across the curriculum, which was roughly tripled for children eligible for Free School Meals (FSME). Our own research with parents and carers across Northern Ireland in both 2020 and 2021 found that children in disadvantaged households were spending less time learning, and that their parents were less confident teaching them. However – positive steps were also taken during this time, with the release of extra funding to supply low-income families with digital devices for learning and for catch-up programmes, and many inspirational examples of teacher networking, mutual support and upskilling in the use of blended learning. Having some idea of the effects of these unprecedented challenges and remedial interventions on the socio-economic attainment gap is vital as the education system continues to adapt and recover from the pandemic, to avoid further widening of educational inequalities.

What the data says about the GCSE attainment gap

So, did the attainment gap narrow in 2020? The graph below plots GCSE or equivalent (Level 2) attainment amongst FSME and non-FSME school leavers (Indicator 12), as reported in the school leavers survey data release over the past ten years. The increase in average grades appears to have benefitted FSME pupils slightly more than non-FSME pupils in this metric, closing the gap between them from 29 percentage points in 2018/19 to 27.7 percentage points in 2019/20.

% non-FSME school leavers and % FSME school leavers achieving at Level 2 or above including English and maths, School Leavers’ Survey 2019/2020

Taken at face-value, these data would indicate that the attainment gap did narrow in 2020, and therefore that rates of educational underachievement improved. It is clear that average grades increased significantly as a result of the use of centre-assessed grades, and it appears that FSME pupils benefitted slightly more than non-FSME pupils. Provisional GCSE statistics for 2020 released by CCEA suggest that the percentage of GCSEs awarded C or above increased by 7.5 percentage points in 2020, having remained roughly stable since 2016.

Upon closer examination, however, we see that the data underpinning this picture are misleading. The extent to which the attainment gap was narrowed by the new method of awarding grades is obscured by the fact that each year school leaver survey data includes a large number of pupils who left school in 2020 at the end of Year 13 or 14 and therefore sat their level 2 exams one or two years prior. A rough estimate based on numbers of school leavers with A-levels as opposed to GCSEs as their highest qualifications reported in the release, suggests that two-thirds of school leavers fall into this category. For 2019/20, this means that most school leavers sat their exams in ‘normal’ pre-covid circumstances. These pupils, who according to the same data are more likely to be non-FSME, won’t have benefitted from the 2020 uplift. As such, it may be that much of the closing gap observed in the graph above is due to this discrepancy. This effect will be present in this data for at least the next three years, but it is difficult to know its magnitude as the release gives only a proxy indication of the numbers leaving school at the end of year 12, 13 and 14. Furthermore, as DE has suspended the annual Summary of Annual Examination Results (SAER) for 2019/20 and 2020/21, no other administrative data will be available on Key Stage 4 achievement for corroboration during this period.

What about A-level grades?

The point can be further supported by turning our focus to A-level grades as reported in the 2019/20 school leavers’ data, almost all of which will have been awarded in 2020. Here the increase in the percentage of students achieving the benchmark of 3 or more A-levels A*-C is significantly greater than with the Level 2 benchmark. However, we now see that the increase for non-FSME pupils exceeded the increase for FSME pupils by two percentage points, widening the attainment gap by as much.

% non-FSME school leavers and % FSME school leavers achieving 3 or more A-levels A*-C

 

If the uplift in average A-level grades benefitted non-FSME pupils more than FSME pupils, it is unlikely that the opposite is true at GCSE, despite the impression we might get from the first graph (indicator 12). The closing of the attainment gap only appears evident in the 2020 data because proportionally more FSME pupils leave education at 16 and received their grade in 2020.

How could the available data be improved?

In sum, this data release can only provide unclear, incomplete and inaccurate answers to the question “did the attainment gap narrow” in any given year. This crucial question lies at the heart of the Outcomes Delivery Plan’s indicator 12, and so we would contend that, given the uncertainties highlighted above, this data release does not serve its purpose to “inform a wide range of policy areas aimed at raising standards and tackling educational underachievement” and this is particularly the case in relation to the Level 2 (GCSE or equivalent) results which are most often cited as the key measure of educational achievement in Northern Ireland. The release would be greatly improved if it were to provide an accurate breakdown of the number/percentage of pupils represented within each year group, and this breakdown should be reflected in Indicator 12 statistics.

Of course, there may be several other policy areas and indicators that we have not considered here that are equally ill-served by this data. A clear implication of this conclusion is that a more comprehensive range of measures and available data are needed for effective policymaking and accountability. England’s National Pupil Database, which since 1996 has provided detailed, individual pupil data for research and policymaking, should serve as an example. Such data not only allows for accurate, disaggregated analysis of the impacts of policies and interventions, it also avoids duplication of data collection efforts by researchers and government departments. It can also be powerfully linked to other administrative data such as census, health, and employment data – something that has been explored recently in Northern Ireland to explore patterns of GCSE attainment.  The recent Action Plan of the expert panel on Educational Underachievement in Northern Ireland (A Fair Start) indicated that a forthcoming System Evaluation Framework in preparation at DE will make progress in this area, and argued that it must include the standardised collection of Key Stage 1-3 cohort data as well as more accurate measures of attainment at GCSE and A-level (or equivalent). Past failure to achieve consensus with teaching unions and schools should not stand in the way of progress in this area, which is it vital to understanding the true nature and extent of educational underachievement (especially post-covid) and to tackling it effectively.

The ongoing challenge for government, and for schools, is not only to keep on closing the attainment gap, but to do so in a way that is meaningful in terms of ensuring quality educational opportunities for all to create a more equal society. To do this, we will need better data, which will necessitate the allocation of adequate resources and require schools, teaching unions and government to reach a consensus.

Dr Jonathan Harris is the Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement

Left to their own devices…again! The enduring inequality of lockdown home-schooling

Posted on by Andrew McAteer

Less than a month into the first national lockdown, I wrote a CREU blog highlighting the dangers of the digital divide. The blog concluded that “unless action is taken in the days to come, the current lockdown and the differentiated experiences of home-schooling have the potential to further disempower and disenfranchise, thus exacerbating the social injustice of an already deeply divided education system.” A subsequent research report based on a large parental survey carried out by our CREU team at Stranmillis confirmed my fears that pupils’ experiences of lockdown home-schooling in Northern Ireland were mediated by their parents’ backgrounds, especially their level of education. We found that better educated parents were more likely to be able to work from home, spent longer on home-schooling, were more directly involved in teaching their children and felt more confident throughout the process, despite the challenges. In contrast parents without university degrees were more likely to be essential/key workers, and often felt under enormous pressure to juggle their work and family commitments, to access online resources, and to motivate their children to engage with learning.

As I write this in January 2021 at the start of the second lengthy period of national lockdown and a return to enforced home-schooling for the vast majority of children, much has changed. Unlike the sun-kissed spring days of last April and May the weather is now cold, dark and (let’s be honest) dreary. The novelty of home-schooling has well and truly worn off to be replaced by lockdown fatigue and a sense of ‘here we go again’, while stretched family budgets must deal with the additional challenge of heating their homes during frosty weather when their children are off school.

However, I think some lessons have definitely been learned.

Teachers are better prepared for online teaching

We must all commend the dedication and commitment of our teachers who have worked incredibly hard to develop a range of digital learning skills since last March, often through the generous sharing of expertise and resources within their own communities of practice (such as @BlendEd_NI). As a home-schooling parent as well as a teacher educator, I can already see how during this second lockdown the confidence and competence of teachers is much greater than before as they embrace a wider range of interactive pedagogies including, this time, more of the recorded/live video sessions which were largely missing from the first lockdown. This time around it is clear that, for teachers, technology is much less of a barrier to be surmounted or even circumvented, and much more of a pedagogical springboard to engagement – that is definitely progress, and is something to celebrate.

Some households are no better prepared for online learning

We must also commend the work of the voluntary and community sector as well as the Education Authority over the past few months in providing digital hardware to those most in need. However, I fear that significant challenges remain in terms of access to laptops, tablets, and printers for home learning in too many households. Broadband access also remains patchy in many rural areas and will take years to improve. How can children be expected to learn remotely when they still don’t have a suitable device to access their resources, when they don’t have a printer to print their work, or when there is no broadband availability in their rural community? There is a world of difference between, on the one hand, waiting for your exhausted key worker parent to return from work in the evening to access your schoolwork on their mobile phone, and, on the other hand, sitting at your own desk with your own laptop and printer and degree-educated parent all available to support the learning process.

And in our preoccupation with tests, examinations and curricular content, let us not forget our commitments expressed following the first lockdown to promote the emotional health and wellbeing of our children, including our youngest learners. As fully expressed in another CREU blog by colleagues Glenda Walsh and Stephanie Gillespie, the September ‘restart’ was to focus on understanding, reassurance, connection and opportunities to play, relax and have fun, not least as a protection against social isolation and an uncertain future. Those principles remain centrally important in the return to remote learning.

SEN pupils spared lockdown home-schooling

Finally, we should be encouraged that in this second extended period of lockdown (unlike in March 2020), it has been decided that special schools should remain open to all pupils. This is not to underestimate the challenges facing special school principals in maintaining their high staffing ratios at a time when so many teachers and classroom assistants are off work, but it does represent a welcome acknowledgement that every effort must be made to provide access to education and on-site health therapies for some of our most vulnerable children and young people.

However, although we have learned much and our spirits have been buoyed by the roll-out of vaccines, my fear remains that this second lockdown is likely to reproduce and exacerbate many of the inequalities of the first. It could lead to a perpetuation of the ‘Matthew effect’ of accumulated advantage we saw then, as the rich get even further ahead and the poor get left even further behind. As we enter this second extended period of home-schooling, we need to work together to learn the lessons of the first lockdown, to honour the commitments we made then, and to ensure that all our children, whether rich or poor, urban or rural, are given equal opportunities not just to learn but to thrive.

Dr Noel Purdy is Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement

“There is no education like adversity”: learning from the positive experiences of lockdown

Posted on by Andrew McAteer

As Disraeli once wrote “there is no education like adversity”, a maxim that seems just as relevant during the current pandemic crisis as when it was first penned a century and a half ago. In this blog we consider what can be learnt from the positive experiences of home learning for some children and families during lockdown.

Dr Noel Purdy is Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement at Stranmillis University College, Belfast.

Alistair Hamill is Senior Leader in Lurgan College, responsible for Teaching & Learning, and Learning Lead in Craigavon Area Learning Community.

There is now a wealth of evidence from studies here in Northern Ireland (Walsh et al., 2020, O’Connor et al., 2020) across the rest of the UK (Sutton Trust, 2020; IFS, 2020), in the Republic of Ireland (Mohan et al., 2020) and further afield (Goldstein, 2020), that lockdown has been very challenging for many children and for their parents/carers, often leading to an exacerbation of existing social inequalities (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2020; ONS, 2020) and widely divergent educational experiences.

Among those most likely to be negatively impacted have been those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, those with special educational needs and those in rural areas with poor internet connectivity (Walsh et al., 2020; O’Connor et al., 2020). Most of our attention has now justifiably turned towards planning for what has been referred to as a flexible ‘recovery curriculum’ to prioritise emotional wellbeing needs, to redress the imbalance of educational access and to bridge the learning gap which will inevitably have widened during lockdown.

However, it is important to acknowledge that there have also been some children who have had overwhelmingly positive experiences of learning at home since March, and we argue here that there is also an onus on schools to meet their needs during the Restart and, where possible and appropriate, to seek to learn from and use their positive experiences to promote better learning dispositions among the wider peer group.

Many families have enjoyed home learning

First, and most broadly, the findings of the CREU online parental survey carried out in April/May  highlight that for a sizeable minority of families, the experience of home learning has been enjoyable, offering them an opportunity to spend more time together, enjoying a calmer pace of life, giving parents time to engage confidently and more directly than ever before in their children’s learning, supported by appropriate online resources from the school, while also giving children more time to play, relax and enjoy the outdoors.  Indeed this resonates with a recent UK-wide study where 26% of parents reported that their relationship with their children had improved during lockdown (especially where the youngest child was under 4 years old) and only 4% said the relationship had worsened.  In open-ended comments from the Stranmillis CREU study, several parents also commented specifically on how their children were really enjoying the home-schooling experience (though often missing their friends and classmates), feeling less stressed by the pressure of external exams, benefitting from a ‘slower pace of life’, and enjoying opportunities to re-connect as a family:

The difference in our kids is amazing they are so much happier and more relaxed the whole house is much less stressed, adults included.

I think my children have coped very well – they are settled, contented and enjoy the cocoon of home.

It has given my children more time to play freely which is positive.

My son suffers with anxiety at school and with being at home with the lockdown I find it really has helped my son focus more on school work and not the class clown or feeling anxious or worried so he definitely seems more relaxed and has the head space to study better with less stress

Some children with ASD and ADHD are benefitting

Second, and more specifically, while it has been noted by NICCY and others that many children with special educational needs have undoubtedly struggled with the lack of additional learning support, therapeutic intervention, familiar structure, leisure and respite opportunities, conversely a smaller number of other children with special educational needs have actually thrived.  Some parents in the CREU survey spoke of children with ASD and ADHD in particular whose anxiety levels have fallen, free from the social pressures of a busy school environment, away from the threat of bullying, and able to learn in a less regimented, more flexible and secure home environment:

Our son has Aspergers. He is v bright but lacks concentration. When he is in the mood to do work, we do it. He needs a lot of attention to keep him in tasks.  Generally speaking he is much less anxious than when at school, he struggles with the social side of school which results in massive anxieties and OCD behaviours. These have significantly reduced since he has been at home.

My child is currently being assessed for ADHD which does at time impact her focus and motivation and I feel she has enjoyed the flexibility/autonomy of our lessons.

I think my dyslexic son benefits as he doesn’t have the same pressures as the classroom and I can work with him 1-1 and produce much better work than when he is in a class of nearly 30 pupils. I can also work one on one to improve his attention issues.

Remote learning has benefits for pupil self-regulation

Third, lockdown has highlighted the importance of self-regulation among learners.  Schools provide a highly structured, regulated environment, with a high degree of timely accountability for the pupils as they do their work. For pupils who struggle with self-regulation, this environment can, at the very least, produce compliant learners: pupils who will turn up to class, generally do the work set by the teacher and mostly hand work in on time. In the lockdown environment, the loss of the direct experience of this structure, regulation and accountability has left pupils with much more freedom – and responsibility – to self-regulate. A recent ETI report found that many post-primary pupils struggled even with basic levels of compliance in this context, but there is evidence that other pupils managed this freedom very well, supported by learning resources from, and interactions with, their teachers.  More significantly, there is evidence from studies such as a recent school-based study in the Netherlands that learners who can self-regulate go on to achieve more highly.

So, what are the qualities exhibited by such pupils and what can we learn from them? An Education Endowment Foundation report summarises the evidence on self-regulation and metacognition, and cites a range of strategies that help pupils learn independently, including: ‘setting specific short-term goals, adopting powerful strategies for attaining the goals, monitoring performance for signs of progress, restructuring one’s physical and social context to make it compatible with one’s goals; managing time-use efficiently; self-evaluating one’s methods; attributing causation to results and adapting future methods’.

Based on the additional experience of online teaching of 14-18 year olds in one local grammar school during lockdown, it has become clear that some pupils, especially those in KS4/5, have developed sufficient self-regulation skills not only to comply with the work set, but to become fully engaged in their learning. More than that, it has given some pupils a high degree of agency in their own learning, as they have shown significant self-awareness to adapt their learning schedules and strategies based on self-reflection to align with how they learn best. These include pupils who have designed their own learning timetable for the week, using the learning support from the school as a foundation, but adapting it, based on a high degree of self-awareness, to best facilitate their own learning.

Looking ahead we would recommend that schools seek to do more to develop self-regulation skills among pupils, a view echoed by the EEF, whose report on remote learning published at the start of lockdown, made the following recommendation:

Supporting pupils to work independently can improve learning outcomes. Pupils learning at home will often need to work independently. Multiple reviews identify the value of strategies that help pupils work independently with success … Wider evidence related to metacognition and self-regulation suggests that disadvantaged pupils are likely to particularly benefit from explicit support to help them work independently, for example, by providing checklists or daily plans.

With the possibility of further school disruptions in the 2020/21 school year, the need to train pupils in self-regulation skills early upon their return to school is imperative.

Learning from lockdown

As schools transition back to a blended model of face to face and remote learning, how do we respond to what has been learnt from this time? The following questions might facilitate some self-reflection for teachers, school leaders and policy-makers:

1. How do we ensure that our approach to education after lockdown is more balanced?

In what ways can we make school less pressured, more pastoral, less assessment-driven and more focused on the well-being of individual children, while recognising the potential to build on positive experiences of family and parental engagement since March?  How do we prioritise relationships – within schools, within families and between schools and families?

2. How do we best prepare some of most vulnerable learners with special educational needs for the return to school in August/September?

It must be acknowledged that this will not be a return to school as they knew it before, and that during the last few months, new routines will have become established in settled home environments where face-to-face social interaction and communication could be kept to a minimum.  How do we ensure that these pupils’ anxiety at the prospect of the Restart is minimised, and that school itself is a safer, happier place for all learners, irrespective of their needs?

3. How do we best support the full range of pupils’ self-regulation habits as schools open more widely?

How do we find ways of fostering and encouraging the continued growth of effective self-regulation shown by some pupils? In what ways do we ensure that the re-introduction of the highly structured environment of school does not cause them to lose the agency they have developed during remote learning? How can we find ways of sharing this effective practice with those pupils who have struggled more with this, encouraging them to learn from the example of their peers? And, how do we explicitly teach and upskill all pupils in the learnable techniques of self-regulation and metacognition?

We not have not sought here to deny or minimise the reality of the challenges faced by many children and their parents during lockdown (and these have already been well documented).  Instead we set out to look for learning opportunities as a result of positive experiences where they did occur, despite adversity.  In reporting these here, we hope to have provided some encouragement, though also many further questions to consider together over the coming days.  In so doing, we have every confidence in the educational workforce of Northern Ireland to rise to the challenges that lie ahead.

Bridging the Lockdown Learning Gap (Part Two)

Posted on by Andrew McAteer

In the first instalment of this blog, I considered two initial questions around the lockdown learning gap: (1) Is there a lockdown learning gap? and (2) What does the lockdown learning gap look like?

In this second instalment, we turn to the third key question: what steps can we take to bridge the lockdown learning gap?

Dr Noel Purdy is Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement at Stranmillis University College, Belfast.

Bridging the lockdown learning gap

Over half a century ago, in Education and the Working Class Jackson and Marsden (1966) highlighted a system of educational apartheid in England which benefitted the elite and disadvantaged working class children. More recently Diane Reay has argued that, despite a common curriculum and many other changes to the educational landscape, ‘educational success is still restricted to a few’ (2017, p.177) and that the winners are predominantly those from families with wealth, influential social networks and a history of educational success. Reay argues that the upper classes and most of the middle classes have been ‘insulated’ from the last decade of austerity and its consequences, while the working classes have struggled. Reading the emerging research studies of lockdown learning experiences across the UK (Sutton Trust, 2020; IFS, 2020; Walsh et al., 2020) leaves little doubt that once again children from working class backgrounds with less educated parents are struggling most, with less access to online resources, less time spent learning at home, and less support from their parents. Once again, it seems, there is no ‘insulation’ for those already disadvantaged in our education system and society at large. Instead, the social injustice of the lockdown learning gap is striking, and as we consider practical blended strategies to adopt over the coming months of (at best) part-time schooling supported by further home-schooling, we must be mindful that the gap will not be bridged easily or quickly.

In the figure below, based on a reading of the most recent research, supplemented by my own convictions, and adapted for a new, untested educational landscape, I set out what I see as the seven key ways to bridge the lockdown learning gap, followed by seven underpinning foundations:

Pastoral Support for Pupils

The first practical consideration has to be effective pastoral support for pupils all of whom, at the very least, have lived through the crisis of a global pandemic that none of us (as adults) have ever experienced in our lifetimes. Many will have experienced the uncertainty of their parents being furloughed or losing their jobs, some will have felt the hunger of reduced family incomes and lived off food banks, others will have seen at first hand the devastating effects of COVID-19 and lost loved ones, especially grandparents, and will be experiencing the pain of bereavement. It must be recognised that many pupils will need emotional reassurance and support, and will feel anxious about leaving home to enter a strangely different, socially distanced school environment. Schools already have highly-skilled pastoral teams, but they should be prepared to encounter many more emotional health and wellbeing needs in the months to follow, and should adopt a child-centred approach of whole-school understanding and trauma-sensitive ‘flexible consistency’ to ensure that all children feel physically, socially, emotionally and academically safe. Pastoral care is a feature of every classroom, and all teachers must be encouraged and empowered to show compassion, understanding and sensitivity to children whose experience of lockdown may have been completely at odds with their own.

Quality Blended Teaching and Learning

The second priority has to be quality blended teaching and learning. In September it is likely that pupils will be in school at most 50% of the time, so there will still be a need for effective provision of remote learning. Some teachers naturally feel out of their comfort zones, but I would reassure them that the key elements of effective pedagogy remain the same as before, irrespective of the teaching medium: clear learning intentions, engaging content, differentiated tasks, opportunities for a range of meaningful pupil activities, and timely formative feedback on work submitted. Our recent report of parents’ experiences of home-schooling in Northern Ireland also revealed that almost a quarter of homes did not have access to a printer.  Others were struggling to afford the cost of printer paper and ink. As a result, some schools have already signalled their intention to offer printed hand-outs which is welcome. Creating online quizzes rather than asking pupils to print pdfs to complete, scan and submit is also something that can reduce inequalities as well as helping to reduce a teacher’s marking load.

Curricular Innovation

As my colleagues Dr Sharon Jones and Dr Glenda Walsh have suggested in their recent CREU blogs, there are, thirdly, opportunities for curricular innovation in the post-lockdown learning environment. While formal changes to the curriculum will take time, teachers can immediately explore the flexibility of the existing curriculum to integrate more outdoor learning play opportunities, to focus on the positive elements of character education within Personal Development and Mutual Understanding (Primary) and Learning for Life and Work (Post-Primary) and, I would argue, to make opportunities to discuss and process children’s experiences of the past six months. Moreover, there have been some wonderful examples in the past of how school communities have come together in the wake of natural disasters (e.g. Carol Mutch’s work following the 2010-11 New Zealand earthquakes) through creative projects to recount, illustrate or commemorate their own experiences and stories.

Professional Learning Opportunities for Teachers

Fourth, teachers have worked hard in challenging circumstances to upskill themselves, but ground-up initiatives like @BlendED_NI illustrate that there remains a skills gap across the profession and an urgent need for Professional Learning Opportunities for Teachers. The key considerations here are the availability and affordability of such learning opportunities. Stranmillis has recently provided free CPD to over 300 teachers on its Remote Teaching and Learning course (see website for details of all Stranmillis professional development courses). The other obvious concerns here are teachers’ own access to the internet, availability of appropriate hardware and software, and teachers’ own need to maintain a work-life balance. While there is much to learn from online courses, recent experiences have also illustrated the potential from emerging online ‘communities of practice’ where materials are increasingly shared openly, and much-needed guidance offered by peers.

Focused Learning Support

Fifth, there will be a need for focused learning support for pupils in September. Although pupils are likely to be in school only part-time, it will be important to use some of that time to quickly assess what exactly are the learning needs of the different children in each class, and to consider approaches to support. For those children on the SEN register, the additional learning and therapeutic support which was often partially or completely absent during lockdown, can be restored but it is important to note that budgets are already incredibly tight in schools and as the 2019 Northern Ireland Affairs Committee inquiry on educational funding highlighted, SEN spending and classroom assistant support are often among the first cuts to be made as school leaders struggle to balance their budgets. Providing additional focused learning support without additional funding will simply not be possible.

Catch-up Tutoring

Sixth, and returning to the opening discussion of the social injustice of lockdown learning, the widest learning gaps to be bridged will require more than skillfully differentiated classroom teaching. For those children who have been engaged in little or no home learning since 23 March, the challenges of re-entering the educational system cannot be overestimated. In response, there are several options for catch-up tutoring. One is the summer school model which has been adopted by schools across Harlem Children’s Zone and which endeavours to use vacation time to fast-track the recovery process. Another model is to enlist community volunteers or university students to offer free tutoring to disadvantaged pupils. The recent EEF report notes that a pre-COVID evaluation of low-cost tutoring provided by third-level students generated a positive impact on pupil learning of three additional months’ progress. As ever, there are significant challenges in meeting the learning needs of the most disadvantaged children, including demands on teacher time, affordability, safeguarding, and ongoing digital access inequity.

Enhanced Parental Engagement

Finally, enhanced parental engagement: the Stranmillis report on homeschooling during the COVID-19 crisis revealed harrowing experiences by some parents and high levels of stress and exhaustion among others, especially those on the front line employed as Essential or Key Workers. However, many parents also used the survey to comment on how much they had enjoyed spending time home-schooling with their children, and had felt closer than ever before to their learning. This report should make essential reading for schools as they seek to capitalize on some of the positives from the lockdown. While parents often requested more guidance on how to support their children’s learning and how to navigate the complex range of learning platforms available, this shouldn’t disguise the fact that they want to be involved and, coming out of lockdown, I would contend that this is an opportunity for schools to build on, improving communication with home, welcoming dialogue and embracing the notion of parents as learning partners.

A Further Seven Foundations to Bridge the Lockdown Learning Gap

While these are important practical steps to be taken, the figure illustrates a further seven foundations upon which the bridge must be built. Of foremost importance, of course, is the health and safety of the entire school community (pupils, all staff, parents, visitors) and it goes without saying that schools must follow the most recent government guidance on social distancing, PPE, hand sanitizing etc. as there are very real and justifiable concerns that a return to school as part of a broader easement of lockdown restrictions could lead to a rise in the R number, as was briefly the case in Denmark following the re-opening of schools there on 15 April. Throughout this crisis we have seen excellent examples of effective school leadership, with gifted principals taking difficult decisions with little guidance to help them, communicating regularly, informing and reassuring the school community. Given the unique circumstances of each school, school leaders will continue to need to adapt broad-stroke guidance to their individual school circumstances. The underlying principles of pupil voice and inclusion/equality of access remain prime considerations to ensure that pupils are involved meaningfully and have a valuable role to play in their schools, and that no one is left behind or excluded, willfully or by oversight. Regular, clear and consistent communication at and between all levels has also emerged as a much valued element of a school’s response to a crisis. I would argue that this will be particularly important in the approach to the new academic year, when staff and pupils will naturally be feeling anxious about the return to school, though not to school as they knew it. With technological support, it will be possible to communicate directly to pupils and parents, showing them (via photos and/or video) what schools and classrooms will look like, thus alleviating some of the understandable anxiety that is already growing. Adopting a research-informed approach is also more important now than ever for educators. If the current health crisis has shown anything, it is that the scientific community has united as never before, sharing expertise, making research open-access, adapting as new findings emerge and helping to inform those charged with making policy decisions. There is an onus on those of us who are researchers to work hard to disseminate our findings to policy-makers and to those on the front line in schools. All of this requires generous government funding if it is to become a reality rather than an aspiration, at the very time when budgets look to be tighter than ever before. However, this pandemic has demonstrated that there is the potential for additional spending where the need is deemed to be great enough. So why not now?

Is this not the moment to invest in educational recovery, to facilitate the purchase of the latest technology (hardware, software, internet access, printers) to enable effective blended learning, to support the efforts of schools to upskill staff through high-quality professional development, and to provide learning support to those in danger of being educationally as well as socially ‘left behind’? There is no quick fix, no silver bullet. Bridging the lockdown learning gap will require vision, courage, tenacity, skill and investment. It is time to get started.

Bridging the Lockdown Learning Gap (Part One)

Posted on by Andrew McAteer

Dr Noel Purdy is Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement at Stranmillis University College, Belfast.

Last Friday afternoon (5th June 2020) 369 educators from across Northern Ireland took part in a ground-breaking webinar on the theme of ‘Charting the Way: Conversations on education in NI ahead of September 2020’. It was by far the largest and most relevant-to-practice webinar on which I have ever had the privilege of being a panellist, and is a remarkable testament to the innovation of the @Blended_NI team who organised it in less than a week. In its sheer scale, it was also a clear sign of the thirst among dedicated classroom teachers for practical guidance, support and reassurance as they face the challenge of an educational earthquake (revolutions are planned after all) that no one could have predicted even six months ago. The webinar discussion was wide-ranging but one of the key issues to emerge was the likelihood of a ‘lockdown learning gap’ arising from the current pandemic crisis during which the vast majority of children are not being educated at school.

In response I would suggest that there are three key questions to consider: (1) Is there a lockdown learning gap? (2) What does the lockdown learning gap look like? and (3) What steps can we take to bridge the lockdown learning gap?  In the first instalment of this blog I will address questions 1 and 2.  In the second instalment I will consider question 3.

Is there a lockdown learning gap?

The short answer to this is that we can’t know yet for sure, as we don’t have reliable evidence from large-scale assessment tests to tell us the long-term impact. That will doubtless come over the coming months. In the meantime, we can however look at likely indicators from a number of recent studies: for instance, the pre-lockdown Ofcom survey revealed that online access is mediated by family background and that children in working class homes are less likely than those in middle class homes to access the internet via either a tablet (59% vs. 72%) or a mobile phone (49% vs. 62%); the early-lockdown Sutton Trust Report in April confirmed what I had predicted in an earlier blog that the lockdown has exacerbated existing inequalities in our education system with children from poorer backgrounds having less access to online resources and parental support, spending less time learning, and submitting less work than their less disadvantaged peers and those attending private schools. A month later, a report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies found that children from better-off families are spending 30% more time on home learning each week (amounting to more than two additional school weeks in total, assuming schools re-open here in late August/September) and have more access to individualised online resources than those from poorer families.

On 20 May our own Stranmillis report on Home-Schooling in Northern Ireland during the COVID-19 Crisis reported on a survey of over 2000 parents and found wide disparities in parental experiences of home-schooling, often mediated by their level of education and employment status. Experiences ranged from, on the one hand, confident, highly educated parents relishing the opportunity to spend more time learning alongside their children, safely cocooned from the pandemic threat, to, on the other hand, highly stressed working parents struggling to access resources, lacking confidence in their own abilities and battling to motivate their children to engage in learning during the ‘nightmare’ of lockdown. Based on these robust research reports, it is clear that there will undoubtedly be a lockdown learning gap. I would further suggest that the gap is likely to be wider than the traditional loss of learning experienced during the summer months, because unlike the normal two-month summer vacation, there will not have been such widely divergent experiences between children who have effectively been home-tutored by degree-educated parents and children who, through no fault of their own, have engaged in little or no learning at all.

What does the lockdown learning gap look like?

A report published earlier this month by the Education Endowment Foundation has attempted to predict the impact of school closures on the attainment gap, based on a rapid evidence assessment of a total of 11 previous studies of learning loss carried out since 1995. The EEF predictions suggest that the current closures will widen the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers by a median estimate of 36% (with a range between 11% and 75%). The authors acknowledge the limitations of their review which (inevitably) is based on studies of summer learning gaps rather than the experiences of previous current pandemic crises. The report notes that sustained effort will be required over the coming months to help disadvantaged pupils catch up.

There has been much general discussion of learning needs but little specific about the particular learning needs of pupils on their return to school. Consequently, I have developed a typology of learning needs (see below), beginning with the need for teachers to address pre-lockdown learning which may be lost (and needs reteaching) or rusty (and needs refreshing) as might be expected after a lengthy break from traditional schooling of 5 months. This experience is similar to what might normally be expected following the summer vacation, and teachers are already skilled at recapping and refreshing knowledge and skills in September before moving on to new learning material.

A typology of lockdown learning needs

While this might represent relatively familiar ground for teachers, the particular features of lockdown learning loss are different: based on the studies cited above, we can also expect many children to have missed lockdown learning where there was little or no engagement at all with learning activities since March (through no fault of their own) and where catch-up teaching is required; shaky lockdown learning (requiring consolidation) where lockdown learning has been partial, incomplete or insecure, the result of a range of possible factors including poor or miscomprehension, lack of pupil motivation, inadequate parental support, and limited opportunities for individualised teaching and/or feedback; and minimal lockdown learning (needing extension) where learning has been rudimentary, covering minimum content but falling short of the wealth of differentiated extension activities that would normally have been provided in school.

Typology of Lockdown Learning Needs

The fundamental consequence of this is that additional time and investment will undoubtedly be required to identify and address the various learning needs of individual pupils over the coming months. So let’s not imagine for a moment that this is going to be ‘business as usual’ in August/September.  With the prospect of widely divergent attainment levels following more than three months of widely divergent home learning experiences, teachers will need to draw on all of their professional expertise to meet the challenges ahead.

So, I would argue that there will undoubtedly be a lockdown learning gap come August/September, and that it will be wider than what might be experienced after the customary two-month summer vacation. Furthermore, I would contend that the nature of the learning deficit will be more varied and differentiated than ever before, including lost, rusty, missed, shaky and minimal learning, all of which need to be addressed by professional, dedicated and compassionate teachers. In the second instalment of this blog, I will consider the third and most significant key question: what steps can we take to bridge the lockdown learning gap?