Poor children face home schooling class divide

Demands for more help for working-class pupils as it emerges only one in four studies for five hours a day

JUST a quarter of working-class children are doing five hours of schoolwork a day, a study by the Sutton Trust has found.

Research by the social mobility charity has shown only 59 per cent of youngsters from low-income households have access to a laptop or device for online learning, compared with 87 per cent of those from wealthier families.

A Yougov poll of 877 parents, commissioned by the Sutton Trust, found 26 per cent of youngsters from disadvantaged households completed five hours a day of school work compared with 40 per cent of those from middle-class families. The research, published today, is the first indication of how much learning children are doing during lockdown.

It also revealed that over the past academic year, parents were so concerned about the loss of schooling that one in 10 turned to private tutors.

Middle-class parents were twice as likely to hire a tutor as working-class parents. The research has led to calls for ministers to address the lack of digital learning devices among disadvantaged children. The Government promised to provide them with a million laptops and tablets and has so far delivered 800,000.

Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said there was “no excuse” for the Government’s rollout of devices being “so slow and inefficient”.

Sir Peter Lampl, founder and chairman of the Sutton Trust, said: “The immediate priority has to be to address the gap in digital provision between rich and poor. The Government has made good progress, but it needs to do more.

“There also has to be substantial additional funding for schools when they reopen, focused on students from low-income backgrounds who have fallen even further behind.”

He said that the first period of school closures last spring had a huge impact on all young people, particularly those from lower-income backgrounds.

“The repercussions of these months of lost learning are devastating and will be felt for years,” Sir Peter said.

“It’s imperative that we don’t let this happen again.”

Compared with last spring, children have doubled the amount of school work at home during this period of closures.

The proportion of primary pupils doing more than five hours of learning a day rose from 11 to 23 per cent and for secondary students it increased from 19 to 45 per cent.

But there were still vast differences in teachers’ expectations, as well as the type of remote education on offer – 55 per cent of teachers at the least affluent state schools said they expected pupils to produce lower standards of work, compared with 41 per cent at the most affluent state schools and just under a third at private schools.

A Teacher Tapp poll of 6,000 teachers found 54 per cent of teachers delivered live lessons online, compared with just 4 per cent last March.

However, the gap between private and state schools had widened, with 86 per cent of teachers in private schools now using online live lessons, compared with 50 per cent in state schools.