Education and skills: Reflections and hopes for the future

Background 

The coronavirus pandemic has caused unprecedented disruption to education on levels never seen before, and will affect longer term outcomes in ways we won’t be fully aware of for some time. 

The Education Policy Institute predicts a loss of lifetime earnings for pupils between 1% and 3.4%, meaning pupils could each see a loss in future income of between £8,000 and £50,000, equating to a total long-run cost between £60bn and £420bn. 

During this time, there have been calls from across the educational media for a fundamental rethink of education. The pandemic has shed new light on the digital divide and educational inequality as well as the purpose of exams and their role in the education system.

The Main Event 

The cancellation of exams last summer resulted in chaos due to the use of an algorithm that skewed the grades of many GCSE and A-Level pupils. The findings of a report by Afzal Khan MP and the Equality Act Review showed that 76.7% of respondents had predicted grades that were not only an under-estimate of their abilities, but also lower than what teachers had predicted for them, with 64.6% missing out on their university offers. Of the 2091 respondents, 57.9% were from households below the national average income, 53.6% belonged to minority religions, and almost 60% were female.

This week, students receive their exam grades for this year. Although a different approach has been taken this summer with teacher and external assessments playing a key role in determining exam grades, the social, educational and long term economic consequences of the pandemic will ripple throughout society for years to come, affecting thousands of children and young people.

With decades of stagnated investment, including a 70% reduction in local authority expenditure on youth services since 2010, the system was, at best, fragile before the pandemic, broken at worst. As the Education Policy Institute points out, the educational attainment gap between disadvantaged students and their peers was already substantial 18 months before the pandemic, not to mention the plight of the forgotten third. 

Several lockdowns meant pupils lost out on a third of the school year and more families have become reliant on food banks. As the educational recovery gets underway, attempts to recover from the pandemic must run deep and be for the long term.

Thanks to the campaigning of organisations such as the Fair Education Alliance, policy-makers have placed tutoring at the forefront of the recovery, presenting an opportunity to embed it more deeply into mainstream education so that disadvantaged pupils can access high quality tutors, for example through the National Tutoring Programme. However, as highlighted by Get Further’s Sarah Waite in Tes, post-16 pupils were not eligible for catch up support provided through the NTP in its first year and more must be going forwards, as well as including early years. Short term thinking and an obsession with results must be left behind in the pre-covid era.

There are encouraging signs that the pandemic provided impetus for universities to accelerate access and participation programmes as well as providing the financial support for disadvantaged students to access the institutions, just like their wealthier peers, once they get there. For example, the University of Cambridge has announced a foundation year for disadvantaged students, opening options for a wider range of students.

As pointed out in The Sunday Times, returns to higher education are not what they once were, but there is still an “education arms race” in which middle class families participate fiercely. At the same time, there are also important initiatives to boost apprenticeships and training. For example, Multiverse is amongst others who are changing the future of work and transforming the narrative around apprenticeships and traineeships. 

Evidently, the pandemic has brought attention several issues that need addressing, including a shift in expectations away from higher education as the only route to meaningful employment and improved job prospects. We need a renewed focus on building vocational and life skills (as highlighted by Camilla Cavendish in Financial Times) with a focus on mental health and wellbeing as much as academic attainment. The Digital Divide must also be bridged to ensure online learning and digital skills for all.

Equal Education’s tutoring interventions aim to increase academic achievement as well as wellbeing. Findings from pupil and parent/carer surveys suggest an increase in self- confidence around learning (75% parents agreed), improved academic engagement (90% pupils agreed) and attainment (70% pupils agreed) to some extent. We have also set up a Technology Supply to provide managed devices suitable for remote learning.

Targeted support: Never been more needed

Throughout the pandemic, our tutors have worked tirelessly with some of the most vulnerable students and helped them achieve qualifications that otherwise would not have been possible. We have expanded our summer tuition programmes to sustain the work that has been put in. As one parent commented: “[Your tutor] gave my daughter the confidence to do her functional skills; English and Maths and then on to GCSEs If it would not have been for [the tutor]’s help and support I don’t believe my daughter would have gotten any GCSEs this year she would’ve simply fallen through the cracks in the system.” 

This week’s exam results this will demonstrate what can be achieved in high levels of adversity. For those who are not in the mainstream system, we are working with Local Authority partners to enter students to sit their GCSE and Functional Skills exams, and will continue to support them and push for careers training and guidance and for the vital funding to support the longer term outcomes that their hard work deserves.