We're publishing a guest post by Daily Sceptic regular Dr. Sinéad Murphy, an an academic philosopher. She returns to the subject of Joseph, her autistic son, who's missed almost a year-and-a-half of schooling.
U.K. school closures lasted longer than in any other European country bar one, new analysis has found, with children here spending more than double the amount of time out of school than in 14 countries on the Continent.
There is ample evidence that school closures have hurt student achievement. And the World Bank estimates that “a school shutdown of 5 months could generate learning losses that have a present value of $10 trillion”.
According to The Education Endowment Foundation, research on the impact of school closures on students’ learning "shows a consistent pattern". Students have made "less academic progress" than in previous years.
Researchers found that remote learning was associated with large increases in school dropout and learning losses in Brazil. They conclude that "the societal costs of keeping schools closed ... are very large".
The Department for Education has been "surprisingly resistant" to investigating the shortfalls in its Covid response, including its failure to set standards for remote learning during lockdown, according to a new report.
Some schools are ignoring the change in the Government's guidelines and will continue to instruct children to wear face masks in the classroom, despite the Department for Education saying they have no right to do so.
What effect did school closures have on children's learning? A recent study found that Dutch students made considerably less progress in 2020 than in each of the three preceding years.
Schools remain closed or are only offering a mix of remote and in-person learning in at least 90 countries, according to Unicef. This means that 800 million children across the world are still not fully back in classes.
Julia Whitaker, a freelance Health Play Specialist, has written a furious letter to UsForThem Scotland about compulsory face masks in Scottish secondary schools. We have republished it in full.
