The education time bomb we should really be worried about
Schools are due to open in two weeks. But after almost six months at home, how classroom-ready are our teens? Leah Hardy reports
On March 20, schools around the country abruptly shut their doors to most children. Ordered to stay home in the face of a terrifying global pandemic, young people saw their lives changed overnight. Some were happy to be at home – possibly escaping bullying or unbearable academic pressure. But for others, just about to take exams that would define their futures, it was a shattering blow. For those who lost loved ones, or with tumultuous home lives, it will have been deeply traumatic.
A survey from Young Minds showed that 80 per cent of young people with an existing mental health problem felt their mental health had worsened during the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.
As the weeks and months passed, many children felt abandoned, as the pubs, shops and theme parks apparently took precedence over education. While some schools switched seamlessly to online teaching, others struggled to provide more than the bare minimum. A Government promise to supply laptops and free broadband to the students most in need was never fully met. Exams were abandoned. Summer schools didn’t materialise. Some students have had no contact with their teachers for weeks now.
Around the country, parents despaired as their children disengaged with learning, preferring to spend their time on TikTok than on Teams. With regular summer activities, holidays and social lives cancelled or curtailed, some bored teens turned to gaming by night and sleeping by day. Parents who struggled to combine home education and caring for their children with full-time work felt guilt and stress at failing at both.
Recent A-level results protests have shown that pupils are angry at the system that they feel has failed them. Others may have forgotten about the system altogether. It is a known fact many schools in deprived areas act in loco parentis – providing not only education but warmth, food, shelter and the discipline of firm boundaries for those from chaotic and challenging homes. With the domestic violence charity Refuge reporting a 700 per cent increase in calls to their helpline and 900 counselling calls to ChildLine about coronavirus made before mid-March, who knows what some children have been living through since schools have been shut? The Mental Health Foundation has sounded the alarm. “The scale of the challenge isn’t yet clear,” it says. “But it is likely that significantly increased pastoral care resources will be required well beyond the initial return to school process.” And there will be challenges for teens from relatively stable homes, too, many of whom will have experienced significant disruption to any semblance of a normal routine.
Teachers already know that they have to often refresh students’ knowledge that has been lost during a normal six-week summer break.
In the US, they call this the “summer slide” and some studies show that children can lose a month’s learning during extended holidays, with falls steepest in maths and in children from low-income families.
Even more worryingly, research emerging from the US and reported in The New York Times has found that some children will have lost an entire year’s worth of learning by September. So what state will today’s teens be in when they arrive at school, bleary-eyed in their new uniforms?
Dr Angharad Rudkin is a clinical psychologist and consultant on Tanith Carey’s new book What’s My Teenager Thinking? Practical Child Psychology for Modern Parents. She says: “Teens will be anxious or even panicking about how on earth they can catch up with missed work in time for GSCE or A-levels. They will be worried about how they will fit in with peers. They may feel angry that a system they had come to view as broadly stable and predictable no longer feels that way.”
One parent says: “My son goes into Year 11 in September and is resentful that he will have it tougher than the group who got their results this year. He’s missed so much work, it is unfair that he will have to sit exams and they didn’t.” Another parent says: “The jump from GCSE to A-level is always a shock and I’m worried it’s going to be much worse after so long out of the classroom, now all those good habits of discipline, homework and concentrated learning have gone out the window. If my son had to sit an A-level in gaming he’d get an A*, as that is all he has done since his GCSEs were cancelled in March.”
Another alarming aspect of the return to school is the gulf that has developed between the most and least disadvantaged students. One teacher describes it as a “chasm”. Natalie Perera is executive director and head of research at the Education Policy Institute. She says that even before lockdown, the very worst-off pupils were almost two years behind all other pupils by the time they finished their GCSEs. Research by the Education Endowment Foundation suggests this gap is likely to have now widened by a staggering 36 per cent.
The Government has allocated £650 million for school catch-up work. But David Laws, executive chairman of the Education Policy Institute, has described this as “badly targeted”. Schools in affluent areas are getting as much money as schools where children are in poverty. This means the fund is “unlikely to prevent a widening of the learning gap between children from poor backgrounds and other pupils”.
A teacher at an inner city comprehensive says: “After so long, we don’t expect children to pick up where they left off. Instead, they will have a recovery curriculum to ease in gently.” Another teacher adds: “I am anxious about all the new rules there will be to impose on the kids, such as social distancing. Children tend to ignore the rules. They want to hug each other after being apart for so long. This means there will be a whole other level of discipline we’ll have to be on top of.”
Astonishingly, teachers still haven’t been told about changes to some of next year’s GCSE exams. One teacher says: “Learning is all about relationships. If a kid likes, trusts and respects you, they will go the extra mile. Yet we are going to walk into the classroom and say: ‘No, we don’t know what the paper will look like. We don’t know what the mark scheme will be.’ How can we tell them that everyone has their best interests at heart?”
Some parents fear that teens may resist teachers’ demands to complete work or do homework when, since March, they have been able to do very little, without any sanctions. Research during the pandemic found that a fifth of children did no work or less than an hour a day at home. On average only 20 per cent of children were given four or more pieces of schoolwork a day. There was no consistent approach or even any monitoring of what was offered.
Uta Frith, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London, has written that the lack of schooling since March may have affected teenagers’ growing brains. “Structure influences the development of frontal brain regions during primary and secondary school and, if lacking, leads to impulsive and disruptive behaviour. The ability to be with peers and being outside the family is another beneficial side-effect of universal schooling and considered essential for the development of social belonging and identity.”
However, there is some hope. Former teacher Tom Bennett now advises the Department for Education on how to improve behaviour in schools and says worries that feral teens will find it impossible to adjust to classroom discipline may be misplaced. “We have seen from the experience of other countries that most children really enjoy going back to school and engage well when they get there,” he says. “We underestimate how much they like familiarity, learning and being with their peers.” Bennett continues: “There is justifiable concern that children will have lost the habit of being in school, but good schools will be aware of this. They will specifically teach what standards of behaviour they want to see right from the start, not just respond to bad behaviour.”
Many parents may still dread trying to wake their nocturnal teens and believe it will be hard to convince young people that lateness or missing a day of school matters much. After all, they’ve already missed so much. However, Bennett says: “I think the vast majority of young people recognise that Covid was like a meteor coming from space. The damage done to their education will make every minute of learning more precious. It could even make attendance and punctuality an even easier sell.”