Children lost third of a year’s learning during Covid pandemic

Children missed more than a third of a year’s schooling during the Covid pandemic and still have not caught up, scientists have said.

Researchers at Sciences Po, in Paris, examined 42 studies across 15 countries and found that learning delays linked to school closures have persisted for at least two and a half years.

British primary and secondary school youngsters were found to have lost roughly the equivalent of four months of education, similar to the global average.

The delays were worse for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and for mathematics more than reading, which experts said may be linked to parents being better equipped to help their children with English.

Assistant professor Bastian Betthauser, the main study author, said: “Children lost out on about one third of what they would have learned in a normal school year.

“Children still haven’t recovered the learning they lost at the start of the pandemic. Government programmes seem to have avoided further losses, but did not succeed in recovering the deficits. Deficits tend to stick once they are there, and are hard to recover.

“This is going to be a problem for this generation. We have to brace for serious downstream effects.”

An estimated 95 per cent of the world’s student population were affected by school closures during the pandemic. Researchers said the inability to reverse the damage was similar to what would be seen following a major crisis or natural disaster.

Countries that did not shut down schools to such a degree, such as Sweden, were found to have no significant learning deficits.

Denmark had few learning losses despite school closures, which researchers believe may be linked to a highly functioning welfare state that protected against some of the stressors of the pandemic, such as parents losing their jobs – something that can have a knock-on impact on children’s attainment.

The study authors said governments needed to do more than just “going back to normal” and suggested tutoring schemes, dedicated television channels or summer learning programmes to help youngsters catch up.

“There is still the potential to use really long summer breaks to try and catch up on some of that learning,” said Dr Betthauser.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.