A generation at risk: rebalancing education in the post-pandemic era
Lee Elliot Major, Andrew Eyles, Esme Lillywhite and Stephen Machin
We present for the first time a model of children's evolving socio-emotional and cognitive skills to assess how the educational and lifetime prospects of children of different ages, genders and socio-economic backgrounds were affected by mass school closures in England during the Covid pandemic.
Our results highlight a double whammy to the educational progress for successive Covid cohorts: they are on course for the biggest overall decline in basic GCSE achievement for at least two decades, and an unprecedented widening of the socioeconomic gap in GCSE prospects. This will impact on children taking GCSEs well into the 2030s. Boys at age 5 at the time of Covid school closures are up to 4.4 percentage points less likely to achieve 5 good GCSEs and females 4.8 percentage points less likely to do so. We predict for example that less than four in ten pupils in 2030 will achieve grade 5 or above in English and mathematics GCSEs. In 2022/23, 45.3% of pupils in England achieved this benchmark.
24 April 2024
Nuffield Foundation
A generation at risk: rebalancing education in the post-pandemic era
This External report is part of the centre's Education programme.
This publication comes under the following theme: Inequality and social mobility