This report by the Education Endowment Foundation follows a group of the youngest school-aged children during the Covid-19 pandemic to understand the long-term impact of Covid and school closures on pupils’ attainment and social skills.
This research aims to estimate the ‘Covid-19 gap’ and the ‘disadvantage attainment gap’ and track these changes over time to gain an understanding of how quickly pupils’ attainment catches up to where it might be expected to be, had the pandemic not happened.
Attainment outcomes of pupils in Year 2 and Year 3 in spring 2022, measured by NFER assessments of reading and maths, are compared with attainment outcomes for a representative sample of pupils assessed in 2019 and 2017 for Year 2 and Year 3, respectively—before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The results of the study indicate that the negative impact of school closures on Year 2 pupils’ learning is still evident in relation to reading.
The report shows that a significant disadvantage gap remains despite both disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged pupils increasing their scores significantly when compared to the 2021 cohort. While this progress is encouraging, it is clear that disadvantaged pupils have been the worst affected by the disruption caused by the pandemic.