This week, I wanted to share with you something I found to be a very helpful summary of available research on the impact of COVID on student attainment from the EEF.
Objectives: To understand the impact of COVID-19 on student attainment broadly, but also on disadvantaged students from a range of existing studies.
Summary:
The key overall themes are:
- Students have made less progress compared to previous year groups
- The attainment gap between disadvantaged students and their non-disadvantaged peers has grown
How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflection questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:
How can I use this information to support identifying gaps in knowledge and looking to redress them?
What classroom or school strategies might best enable rapid progress to be made to ‘catch up’?
Do I know who my disadvantaged students are? What are their current barriers to learning? How can I use available resources to support them as much as possible?
If anyone would like to discuss this further with me - please let me know! I’d be delighted to open up these discussions and conversations.
WA online no doubt helped reduce the academic impacts of the pandemic for our students, compared to other students in England. It would clearly be unfair to expect students to make the same progress as in other years and it would be unfair to expect them to close any significant academic gaps in a short time. I am hoping that the government plan in this area will be multi-year and I am confident that whatever new academic expectations are established, WA students will be very well positioned to meet them, thanks to the great efforts of the WA teachers and staff over the past 12 months.
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