TEACHERS REJECT LONGER DAY PLAN
How should education address disruption caused by the pandemic? ‘The inescapable reality is that months of face-to-face learning have been missed,’ warns Siân Thomas from Senedd Research as she analyses the problems and suggests some solutions
EXTENDING the school day or forcing pupils to do extra tuition sessions to help “catch up” after Covid risks putting young children and teenagers off learning, teachers have warned.
The idea is being mooted in England and a reform of the school day and year is also something Welsh Labour promised it would look at in its election manifesto.
Proposals to shorten the summer holiday or run lessons throughout the holiday were rejected by the previous Education Minister, Kirsty Williams, before she stood down at the May elections, although she had been in favour of altering term, holiday and half-term dates to help make up for school closures.
In its manifesto for this May’s elections, Welsh Labour said it would: “explore reform of the school day and the school year to bring both more in line with contemporary patterns of family life and employment”.
Eithne Hughes, director of the Association of School and College Leaders Cymru, said individually targeted help was needed to help education recover, but now was not the time for any more wholesale changes such as extending school hours.
Young people needed to re-engage with friends and teachers, rather than being forced to stay in school for extra lessons or tuition, she said.
In a statement to the Senedd, Education Minister Jeremy Miles said an “extraordinary effort” to address the immediate and longer-term impacts of Covid on education was needed.
“Our aim is to ensure that learners progress to their full potential, no matter where they are right now. And this is not about telling learners that they are ‘behind’ or about packing in hours working on worksheets and tests,” he said.
“We cannot base our recovery from the pandemic on a deficit model.
“Instead, we need to reignite a passion for learning and make sure that all learners – in particular learners who have been most adversely impacted – feel supported every step of the way.”
He said every learner has “had their own Covid experience” and support will reflect that.
The Welsh Government has “invested” £150m in education recovery, but Ms Hughes said any initiatives must be proven to be effective. The first hurdle was ensuring young people were ready to learn and any wellbeing needs were addressed.
“There is a clear need for supporting learners through lost learning. That support is critical and needs to be targeted intervention that is cost effective and evidenced. It can’t be piecemeal,” she added. “If we need learners to catch up, we can’t force-feed them numeracy or literacy lessons. There needs to be recognition that they can’t learn until their mental health and anxiety is addressed.
“As a teacher for 37 years, and a head teacher, you see trauma can last the school lifetime for some children. That’s not being too dark, it needs to be acknowledged.
“People affected could be children who have lost family members or are anxious because they have been bombarded with negative news and fear.
“Their world, all our worlds, have been turned upside down and they have face masks in school – a symbolic reminder that the world is not as it was. That cannot be side-stepped.”
Teacher Katie Davies said children need better pastoral care and a return to the normal school day, rather than extra lessons.
Ms Davies, a humanities teacher at Eastern High in Cardiff, said: “We don’t need extra sessions. Children are burned out, staff are burned out. Children need to go back to some semblance of normalcy. Children like structure and routine. So many feel they have lost out on milestones. They would resent being made to stay longer in school. It sounds an easy fix, but really what we need is more pastoral staff to support them.”
Children’s Commissioner Professor Sally Holland wants free summer holiday activities to help young people learn to be together again after lockdowns and is pressing the Welsh Government to fund that.
“It’s clear that the harm caused by the pandemic is much broader than lost academic progress,” Professor Holland said.
“I’m currently in discussions with Welsh Government and other national organisations to secure funding for an ambitious summer activity programme – Haf o Hwyl/Summer of Fun – which would see every child and young person in Wales be offered free and accessible opportunities for play, sport, arts and other outdoor activities over the summer months.”
But do pupils need to “catch up”? The phrase “catch up” is disliked by teachers and schools, who claim it implies failure and learning loss, which risks alienating pupils, but it is a shorthand many in education use.
Exams have been cancelled for two years in recognition that pupils’ teaching and learning have been affected by school closures, lockdown, self-isolation and remote learning.
Exam board the WJEC is currently changing qualification specifications for next year to reflect continued disruption. Some commentators believe this will continue to be needed beyond next summer’s exams, even if they do take place.
Teachers say some pupils have done better learning remotely, especially those who find going to school difficult. Many have also learned new digital skills.
But latest Welsh Government statistics reveal that one in 10 children are still not attending school in Wales. Head teachers have reported that some pupils are too anxious about the pandemic to return.
Jonathan Keohane, head teacher of Roath Park Primary in Cardiff, said: “At Roath Park we haven’t seen any academic issues we are concerned about. The team, families and children did a super job during lockdown.”
Although the Welsh Government has not yet published a formal recovery plan for education it said it has invested more than £150m and employed more than 1,000 extra staff in education since last summer.
As of March there was an increase of 1,995 full-time-equivalent staff across Wales.
A Welsh Government spokesman said: “We have invested over £150m to support teaching and learning in schools and colleges over the course of the pandemic, including £85m for the current financial year. This is in addition to our support for disadvantaged children, including leading the UK in ensuring free school meals
continue during the school holidays.”
He said the £1.4bn over three years in England is equivalent to £26m a year in Wales on a per-head basis, in comparison to the £85m already announced by the Welsh Government for the current financial year to support teaching and learning.
Menahile, the UK Government’s catch-up tsar last night resigned over England’s £1.4bn fund to help children recover missed lessons, saying the support “does not come close to meeting the scale of the challenge”.
Sir Kevan Collins, the Government’s education recovery commissioner, quit after just four months in the role as he warned that the package “betrays an undervaluation of the importance of education”.
Sir Kevan said in a statement: “After the hardest of years, a comprehensive recovery plan – adequately funded and sustained over multiple years – would rebuild a stronger and fairer system. A half-hearted approach risks failing hundreds of thousands of pupils.”
EVEN before pupils’ coats are back on their school pegs, the pressure is already on the education system to deliver significantly more.
Concerns that we don’t stigmatise children mean that talk about a “lost generation” needing to “catch up” is already out of favour. Yet the inescapable reality is that months of face-toface learning have been missed.
Our learners have been part of the pandemic’s “collateral damage”. While at this stage there are more questions than answers, the solutions will need to be carefully considered and delivered during the sixth Senedd.
Arguably, Wales was already facing an uphill struggle to secure good educational outcomes for all its learners.
A decade after the then Welsh Government recognised that the education system had showed “evidence of systemic failure”, there was a collective holding of breath when Wales’ 2018 PISA results were announced.
Following extra funding and a national action plan to deliver change, the 2018 PISA scores were seen as a much-needed sign of some progress. Wales’ scores were no longer statistically significantly different from the OECD average in each of three main domains (reading, mathematics and science), although they remained the lowest of the UK nations. Then Education Minister Kirsty Williams described them as “positive, not perfect”.
The most disadvantaged learners have extra challenges which can prevent them from achieving their full potential. Even though the previous Welsh Government invested £585m since 2012 through the Pupil Development Grant (PDG), the attainment gap it was seeking to close didn’t narrow. It also typically widens as learners get older. There’s a stark difference between children eligible for free school meals and their peers at Key Stage 4, the two years where learners usually take GCSEs and other examinations.
Children and young people themselves are well-placed to give their verdict. A 2021 Children’s Commissioner survey of 20,000 children found that 35% didn’t feel confident about their learning, compared to 25% in May 2020; 63% of 12 to 18-year-olds were worried about falling behind.
There are countless reports setting out adults’ views about how missing more than half a year of face-to-face schooling has affected learners. One of the major concerns has been the variation between what schools have been delivering to pupils.
There’s a long list of potential impacts:
“lost learning”, meaning pupils could underperform academically and have their long-term prospects affected;
a loss of confidence in the examination and assessment system;
long-term reductions in school attendance, a factor which we know is key to educational outcomes;
difficult transitions between school years and from primary to secondary;
challenges in re-engaging learners and addressing low motivation;
an unhelpful “catch-up” narrative about lost learning placing unnecessary psychological pressure on children and young people; and
a negative effect on learners’ ability and confidence to communicate in Welsh where they haven’t been able to do so at home.
As well as these obvious educational issues, there are wider predicted effects. Current learners could earn less, with one estimate of up to £40,000 in a lifetime. The harm to children’s physical health and a higher prevalence of mental health issues, including anxiety and depression, are also serious concerns.
The pandemic’s wider economic impact is also likely to increase the number of children living in lowincome families. Again, it’s the most disadvantaged learners who are predicted to bear the brunt in the longer term.
For example, in March 2021, the Child Poverty Action Group found that 35% of low-income families responding to its UK-wide survey were still without essential resources for learning, with laptops and devices most commonly missing. The fifth Senedd’s Children, Young People and Education (CYPE) Committee heard that there is “plenty of evidence” that ”there are striking differences between families in terms of their ability to support young people in their learning – the resources they have around them, the enthusiasm, the engagement, the commitment”.
There may also be work to be done to rebuild relationships which have been under significant strain during the past 12 months. Those between teaching unions and the decisionmakers within the education system; between parents/carers and schools; and perhaps, most importantly, reestablishing the relationship between learners and their teachers.
Some of the immediate solutions which are already on the table or up for discussion are more money, including the Recruit, Recover and Raise Standards funding; more teachers and learning assistants on the ground; changing term times; and setting up summer schools, holiday clubs and home tuition.
However, in the longer term, there may be more questions than answers about the way forward, such as:
How to ditch the “deficit model” by placing the onus on the education system to support learners rather than pressurising learners to catch up.
Whether a long-term strategy is needed to co-ordinate the range of possible solutions.
What’s the future role of schools, local authorities, regional consortia and the Welsh Government in this? Who should be in charge of this long-term approach? Should Wales appoint an education tsar, as in England?
Are schools being properly funded? One estimate places the cost of Wales’ journey back from Covid-19 at £1.4bn.
Can international examples and historic experiences help identify ways of dealing with such major interruptions to education? One academic has already suggested that “disruption can lead to positive change if you’re willing to make the effort”.
To what extent is the current education system fit for purpose? Is now the watershed moment and time for a complete rethink?
Children and young people’s return to the classroom has been heralded as the big chance to put their wellbeing at the heart of education. As well as having a positive impact on wellbeing, put simply, mentally healthy children are much more likely to learn.
Following pressure from the fifth Senedd’s CYPE Committee and its stakeholders, Wales has already made a significant shift towards establishing a whole-school approach to mental health. The challenge during the sixth Senedd will be to deliver it.
The potential sting in the tail is that, at the exact same time the education system is getting children back to school, it also has to contend with major legislative reform. This is in the form of wholesale changes to both the school curriculum and support for learners with additional learning needs.
Some may argue that there’s been no better time to have such significant changes. If the education system can successfully implement these three major reforms, then arguably Wales has done some significant legwork to be on a firmer footing to meet the challenges that Covid-19 has presented.
At this stage there may be many more questions than answers for the education system. The world into which learners will move has changed forever. Not only has the pandemic interrupted their schooling, but the future journeys they were expected to make into the workplace or further and higher education may be unrecognisable. The skills and aptitudes needed in the “new normal” are only now beginning to be identified and are likely to be different from those needed before the pandemic began.
Covid-19 has made its unforgettable mark on the world. Perhaps the biggest question of all is how radical the response of Wales’ education system should be.
Senedd Research provides impartial research and analysis to Members of the Senedd and committees. It helps members answer constituents’ questions and scrutinise the Welsh Government’s legislation and policy.