The author is executive chair of the Education Policy Institute think tank. He was UK Education Minister from 2012 to 2015.
Inflation. Small boats. Economic growth. Government debt. The NHS. The prime minister clearly defined his five priorities for about a year until the general election.
Notably missing from this list is education, an issue political leaders usually claim to be at the center of attention. It is true that Rishi Sunak has repeatedly raised the idea of teaching mathematics beyond GCSE level, but even here his government seems to lack a clear plan for implementation.
In fairness to the Prime Minister, the low priority of education appears to reflect public opinion. Perhaps the whole country has been lulled into a false sense of security by the inflated exam scores of two years of pandemic-related disruption. In 2020 and 2021, “record” grades masked significant learning losses.
Understanding the true impact of the Covid-19 disruption over the past three years should lead us to place a much higher priority on education. During this time, our researchers worked with experts from assessment provider Renaissance to measure “real” achievements in reading and math. We monitored the ratings taken by children during this period and compared them to the results of similar groups of children before the pandemic. The beauty of this is that results are not skewed by the ‘teacher graded’ grades that have inflated results in English GCSEs, A-Levels and other national exams.
At the start of the pandemic, we were commissioned by the Department of Education to undertake this analysis – over a two-year period it became the government’s best available measure of learning loss. The analysis highlighted significant problems in reading and mathematics, and learning losses were greatest in the most deprived schools and (typically) in the North of England and the Midlands.
This week we published our latest discoveries, using data from late 2022. They show that despite the prime minister’s aspiration for better maths, the country has seen “real” results deteriorate. Our analysis suggests that, on average, primary school children are about 1.5 months behind in mathematics what they would have been in pre-pandemic cohorts. This figure appears to have remained fairly stable over the past year, suggesting that we cannot assume that reopening schools automatically means catching up.
Our research highlights another cause for concern: that the poorest children fared worst during the pandemic, and that this effect persists.
Before the pandemic, we found that children in the schools with the most disadvantaged intakes were about 11.7 months behind in reading those with the richest at the end of primary school. This rose to 13 months at the start of the pandemic and even now it is 12.3 months. So this measure of the “disadvantage gap” has surged since the pandemic, confirming a troubling broader trend: Department exam data from 2022 shows that progress in closing the disadvantage gap over the past decade has been wiped out.
There are some encouraging features of our analysis: at the national average, it now appears that we have made up for the learning losses in primary school reading. But perhaps reading was always going to be easier to maintain while learning at home, unlike math, writing, and some other subjects.
And there is no room for complacency. Educational attainment for the third of the lowest achieving children in England was already very poor before the pandemic. Since then, we’ve backtracked in key subjects crucial to life’s chances, including mathematics. The educational gaps between the poorest students and the rest, already as large as 1.5 years of learning at age 16, have widened further. And, based on our previous analysis, some of the biggest learning losses have occurred in the very areas of ‘leveling up’ that ministers say they want to prioritize.
The prime minister should worry that maths performance is getting worse rather than better, and far further down the school system than his sixth grade pledge acknowledges. As for his priority of growing the economy and creating “better-paying jobs,” he needs to pay far more attention to education as an engine of productivity.
The government cannot turn a blind eye to the negative impacts of Covid. With an election on the horizon, it must be tempting for Sunak and his team to focus on short-term, high-profile engagements. But politicians have to convince a skeptical electorate that they are also focused on the big long-term problems facing our country. Our findings should serve as a reminder that the UK’s educational performance is one of those great challenges that need to be addressed and without which our economic growth and social harmony will rest on shaky foundations.
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