By Gavin Mackintosh-
The Uk’s Government’s former education catch-up tsar has said one of the “great legacies” of coronavirus could be growing inequality if ministers do not shake an “obsession” with exams.
Sir Kevan Collins quit his post last month after the amount ministers were prepared to invest in helping children catch up on their education post-pandemic fell so far short of what he considered necessary.
Sir Collins put forward a recovery package which amounted to £15 billion while the Treasury had allocated just £1.4 billion.
Speaking on the BBC’s Newsnight programme on Thursday, he said inequality was something “we’ve never really managed to crack” and was “the deep scar in our system”
He said: “It looks like what has happened in this Covid period is the work we’ve done has pretty much been wiped out, in the last decade, and that’s got to be the huge focus of the recovery work, not the obsession every year with just the exams, but actually the deeper inequality that we see growing in our education system.”
His comments comes amid concern about inflated grades caused by exams being cancelled during the pandemic, and students instead being able to rely on teacher-assessed grades.
Sir Kevan told Newsnight: “I think one of the most difficult challenges for all of us is that it’s been hugely variable.
“One of the most difficult things to face in Covid is how children from different communities, different schools, different levels of support, have just had a completely variable experience.
“So having a consistent fair exam at the end of that becomes very, very challenging and schools have been left in an invidious position really trying to work out how do you examine every child fairly, when the experience that many of them had has been so different.”
When sked whether he thought enough was being done, he added: “I’m afraid I’m not confident enough has been done, because although – quite rightly – the focus is on this year’s exams, I think this is a long-term problem, it’s going to take us a number of years to recover from this huge disruption to children’s education.
He said: “I wanted a recovery plan or recovery approach which was comprehensive, which was broad, and long term. And I’m afraid I don’t … it doesn’t look like we’re getting that at the moment.”
The British government has promised tuition for families whose children have fallen way behind in their academics, and whose school and parents agree that they need the tuition, and whose parents take up the offer. No current statistics about the number of pupils who have taken up the offer has been made public.
School pupils in the Uk returned to school in January and have had six months of education this year, despite the lost time in teaching during the pandemic
Many of the Uks good schools have done their best to help pupils catch up, using assistant staff and assigning homework for children, many of whom are supervised by parents or tutors to do their assignments.
It is common for pupils who attend school without completing their homework to be held back in detentions to do so.
The main concern is for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds attending failing schools who have inadequate support to make up for lost time.
The government has also promised summer classes for families who opt to include their children in the programme, but too often, neither parents nor children are committed enough to take up the government’s offer of extra classes.