This NFER interim report funded by the Education Endowment Foundation assesses the extent to which Year 2 pupils’ attainment in reading and maths were impacted by partial school closures during the first national Covid-19 lockdown, to identify common patterns, misconceptions and errors.
The research finds that whilst on average all children achieved less well than the 2017 cohort, disadvantaged children performed worse on all questions across both subjects, and were less likely to attempt those towards the end of the assessments than their classmates.
The analysis of reading assessment data indicates that disruption to schooling appears to have had the greatest effect on pupils still in the early stages of learning to read, with children across the cohort misinterpreting question words, struggling to make specific inferences, and failing to understand sequences of events in stories.
The pupil performance in maths suggests that, in general, curriculum areas that children found challenging in 2020, such as money and fractions, were the same as those that pupils struggled with in 2017. The 2020 cohort also found multiplication and division calculations more difficult, especially when they were required to recall facts from multiplication tables. However, pupils mostly performed well on questions derived from the prior Year 1 curriculum material, such as number, addition, and subtraction— average performance in these topic areas was often at least as good as in 2017. This may be a result of consolidation in the autumn term of 2020 rather than the introduction of new material.
As well as providing a detailed commentary of Key Stage 1 assessment data, this publication also considers potential implications for teacher practice, intended to complement and work in partnership with broader school efforts to support pupil wellbeing and ensure positive outcomes for children.