School day ‘should be extended’ to make up for lost time in the classroom
School days should be extended by six hours a week to compensate for the lost weeks of education for Scottish children during the coronavirus outbreak, a think tank has said.
The Commission on School Reform, an independent group of education experts set up by the think tank Reform Scotland, has proposed six extra hours per week of catch-up lessons for pupils over the next two years, in order to repair the damage caused by lost education during lockdown.
The Commission’s latest challenge paper - Catching up: the educational losses from
Covid-19 - said it was particularly worried about the damage to children from disadvantaged backgrounds. It estimated the costs of staffing the extra hours would be around £100 million a year.
Professor Lindsay Paterson, professor of education policy at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Commission, said: “The start of the new academic year in August is not only about returning children to school - it must be about ensuring that they catch up on the education which has been lost. While estimates of the loss vary, there is no debate that it exists, and is particularly prevalent amongst the most disadvantaged.”
She added: “Catching up will be difficult and expensive, but not to the degree that it cannot andshouldnotbedone.£100m a year is a huge amount of money, but it will be dwarfed by the personal, social and economic cost of the loss of education during lockdown.”