By Gavin Mackintosh
Addressing lost learning is the “single biggest priority now for the government”, and requires flat-out work as a country and as a society to remedy the issue, British prime minister Boris Johnson has said.
The prime minister pointed to the existing £1 billion catch-up investment pledged last year and £300 million extra for the National Tutoring Programme announced on January to provide assurance that the government would do all it could to help school pupils catch up on lost learning.
Mr Johnson said education secretary Gavin Williamson would be “setting out in more detail exactly what we want to do to help kids catch up and bounce back from this pandemic, because it’s going to take a while to do that”.
New education commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins, the former head of the Education Endowment Foundation has also recommended asking teachers to increase learning time for children when they return to schools, in an attempt to make up for the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The increase in learning time is a good idea, but will not guarantee the willingness of stubborn children in certain schools to respond to that provision by actually learning.
The new commissioner also suggested that alterations to exam content next year may be needed to reflect the loss in learning time.
He told BBC news that new opportunities for children to catch up would be essential, stating that the government would need to “act quite quickly around things like summer and summer schools for example, which I do think have promise”.
He also said it was important that extra time was given to other activities children had missed out on, besides learning. It comes amid growing concerns about pupils’ mental health.
“I think we need to think about the extra hours, not only for learning, but for children to be together, to play, to engage in competitive sport, for music, for drama, because these are critical areas of learning, not just the academics but these vital areas that have been I think missed by many children and will be missed in their growth and development,” Collins said.
“We need to make sure that whatever we offer children is broad, is rich and doesn’t completely stifle all the other things in life that matter. It’s going to be a broad I think and balanced offer that we need to make to children. But we do need to recover the lost time in some of the critical areas.”
In relation to adjusting GCSE content in 2022 should be slimmed down, Collins appeared to admit that some consideration would be necessary.
He said: “The year 11s as well, as they go onto A-levels or the year 13s go onto university, the teachers, the lecturers, those that are receiving and are going to support those children, are going to have to ask the question, ‘how do we think about the curriculum we are offering, to make sure we are giving those children the chance to go back perhaps and cover some of the stuff that might be vital in the subject but wasn’t perhaps completely covered because of lockdown’.”
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