By Gavin Mackintosh
Twenty percent of pupils who have been at home during the lockdown have been spending no time on schoolwork, according to new research.
The UCL Institute of Education which conducted the study, said that an equivalent of two million children – did no schoolwork at home, or less than an hour a day. While 17 per cent put in more than four hours a day.
The study said that 27 per cent of UK children were given no offline schoolwork or less than one piece by their schools over a two-week period at the end of April.
Professor Francis Green, who led the study, said: “Everyone is losing out in this generation, some much more than others. Better home schoolwork provision, and better still an early safe return to school for as many as possible, should now become a top priority for government.”
The IoE study, based on a survey of more than 4,500 households conducted during the last two weeks of April, again highlighted the disproportionate impact of school closures on the disadvantaged.
The study claims that the proportion of pupils putting in more than four hours each day (17 per cent) slumped to 11 per cent among pupils eligible for free school meals.
It also reveals differences between the amount of work given to state and private pupils. It states that half of pupils at independent schools were set four or more hours of homework per day, 33 percentage points higher than their state peers.
The report also shows regional differences in the amount of work given to pupils in different regions of the UK. In the south east, 28 per cent of pupils received four or more pieces of offline schoolwork per day, compared to just 9 per cent in the north east.
Only 11% of children in receipt of free school meals spent more than four hours a day on schoolwork, compared to nearly a fifth (19%) of pupils who are not eligible for free school meals. Lack of access to a computer or internet was cited as one of the reasons for pupils were doing no homework.
The study also found that nearly a third (31%) of private schools provided four or more online lessons daily, compared with just 6% of state schools.
Green added the new evidence “paints a gloomy picture of lost schooling. The closure of schools, and their only-partial re-opening, constitute a potential threat to the educational development of a generation of children.”
The absence of a computer or internet makes it impossible for pupils on lockdown to do homework, but there is no excuse for pupils not to continue developing themselves by reading books or having books read to them by their parents.
The institute of Education which published the research, were shamefully unavailable on Monday afternoon by phone to answer questions about their own published research.