This summary paper by the Education Policy Institute examines how to ensure education recovery is accessible to all children and young people. It explores how the post-pandemic education recovery supports all students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds and focuses on two of the crucial issues facing the recovery – system-level disparities and school-level inclusion.
The summary paper is based on a series of private roundtables held by the the EPI, in partnership with the Publishers Association, policymakers, school leaders and sector experts.
It found the pandemic’s disruption had impacted pupils and schools in a myriad of ways. From pupils falling behind, to increasingly difficult family circumstances that schools were having to adapt to, necessitating wide-ranging and tailored approaches to educational catch up.
It was the most disadvantaged pupils that had fallen further behind as a result of the pandemic. Those from disadvantaged backgrounds consistently lost more learning than their more affluent peers over the course of the pandemic.
Whilst the geographical divide was somewhat more nuanced, the pandemic’s impact on pupils’ learning broadly followed the north-south divide in England.