Looking Regionally at School-Age Reading After the Pandemic
It’s an unfortunate fact that the measures we’ve had to take as a society to keep us safe from the Covid-19 pandemic have hand an unfortunate effect on learning. Many children and young people have been subject to a widening disparity between their expected reading age and the age that they’re actually reading at, compounded by months of remote education, ongoing stress, and perhaps even digital poverty.
Looking Nationally
In the UK, by the end of Spring Term 2021, the average reading loss for primary school pupils in the UK was over two months. This recovered to around one month by Summer Term, but this loss is still substantial when we consider how swiftly learning progression and skill acquisition moves in children and young people. Bu the story gets even more serious when we switch focus and take a look at our older learners – so what’s the story with secondary?
The story for secondary school students has demonstrated less of a recovery in terms of where students are on average and where they’re supposed to be. In reading, secondary pupils saw losses of 1.5 months in learning, and by the Summer Term, we were still looking at a situation where skills were around 1.2 months behind where we’d have expected them to be in a typical school year.
The narrative becomes even more grim when we split the sample and take a look at learners from this demomgraphic who are specifically from disadvantaged backgrounds and deprived areas. At a national level, by the end of Spring Term, learning losses for disadvantaged pupils were around 2.7 months in reading, recovering to 1.2 months in summer term. The story for secondary school students was, again, less positive in terms of recovery: whilst reading losses sat at approximately 1.9 months in Autumn Term, by the end of Summer Term they’d actually increased to a huge 2.4 months.
There’s more information available on these figures at the UK Department for Education’s Pupil’s Progress Reports for the 2020 – 2-21 Academic Year.
Learning Loss or Learning Recovery?
‘Learning Loss’ is a term that refers to the months of learning that pupils are behind following the pandemic – quite simply, the amount of ground they’ve ‘lost’ in terms of progressing from the start of the school, year to where they’re expected to be at the end of it. It’s one we used before the pandemic, but it was used then to describe the dip in reading and numeracy skills we’d typically witness over the extended summer holiday period. The learning community co-opted it for the pandemic as a microcosm of what’s been happening during periods of extended remote learning.
However there are a lot of educators who find the term ‘Learning Loss’ to be quite loaded, and prefer to speak in terms of ‘Learning Recovery’. There’s a concern in the educator community that using a term like ‘Learning Loss’ might label an entire generation of students as a ‘lost generation’ when it comes to learning; and have a negative impact both on student self-image and drastically up the pressure that educators are currently under.
Some also worry that it actually overlooks the other things that children and young people have learned during the pandemic, such learning how to work with new forms of education, new kinds of assessment, socialise virtually, and simply adapt to living during extended pandemic conditions.
Looking Regionally
The story isn’t the same across the UK, either – it’s actually fairly subjective, depending on region. The Understanding Progress in the 2020/21 Academic Year report from the Department for Education can tell us more.
There are some relatively large disparities in how much learning there is to catch up with dependent on where a sample was taken. Speaking generally, pupils in parts of the North and the Midlands have largely been subject to greater losses to those living in the South, with urban post-industrial areas within these regions displaying the largest losses in both reading and in mathematics. Digital learning inequalities and poverty may play a part in these figures, as these generally tend towards increasing as we move further up the country away from the capital.
The figures suggest that for both primary and secondary aged pupils in reading, the greatest experiences of lost progress are from the North West of England, the West Midlands and Yorkshire and the Humber - in Yorkshire and the Humber, secondary pupils lost 3.6 months of reading, pupils in the West Midlands lost 2.2 months and those in the North West lost 2 months. But Yorkshire and the Humber has also seen the greatest reading recovery between the government data’s two sample points too, with a recovery of 0.9 months, with the East of England coming in just behind it at 0.8 months.
When we look towards the capital, London actually experienced the lowest amount of reading losses from all nine UK sample districts, coming in at just 1.3 months and recovering to 0.7 months between the government data collection points.
Source: Understanding Progress in the 2020/21 Academic Year
So How do we Move Forward?
· The Education Policy Institute UK has called for education recovery funding to be allocated according to geographic deprivation. This means that the government has been entreated to weight funding progressively towards the most deprived areas of England, in the hope that it could stem the damage in those who have lost the most learning progress, however most funding structures remain even across the country.
· There have also been calls from all over UK social media to better support learners who live in digital poverty. When schools can’t provide adequate tech for remote learning to those students who need it, their learning progress can slip drastically – and although we’ve all got our fingers crossed that we may have seen the back of remote educating, pandemics are unpredictable, and contingency plans need to be in place to support students if the worst happens.
· Greater tech provision can also support reading recovery in that it opens up a plethora of options such as text-to-speech functions, screen readers, customisable interfaces and more.
· Reading is a key skill that opens the door to the wider world of education in general, and where there have been losses, skills need to be nurtured and supported in a way that preserves pupil independence, supports skill building, and doesn’t require close contact should we find ourselves in social distancing conditions again.
· Devices such as the ReaderPen can play a key part in this recovery. They’re portable, simple to use, and allow students access to almost every kind of written media regardless of whether they’re in the classroom, learning remotely, or on the go. They work by providing personal audio feedback of words on the page, which has been proven to support reading development in a way that can greatly benefit both students who have literacy differences and those in the process of acquiring and building reading skills.
· You can find out more about the ReaderPen and a whole host of other smart assistive tech solutions for reading at www.scanningpens.com. You can also take a closer look at just what this kind of support can mean for children and young people with literacy issues by taking a look at our some of our study data.