Catering for children of mixed abilities in large classes has long been a challenge for UK teachers, where class sizes are among the largest in Europe – the average primary school class size in the Britain is 27, compared with 20 in primary schools on the continent, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s latest Education at a Glance study.
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the government’s ruling that primary school children should be taught in classes no larger than 15, teachers face a myriad of new challenges. But while smaller class sizes may prove to be a positive legacy of the health crisis, the question of how to re-engage children who have missed months of education remains unanswered. News that the government plans to fund a year-long national tutoring programme to help pupils in England catch up surprised many in the sector.
Technology is still a largely underused tool for engaging children – both for those falling behind and those in need of a greater challenge – despite families embracing learning via technology during lockdown. So could technology hold the key to getting the nation’s children back on track post-Covid-19?
You might expect Bill Mills to think so. He’s the founder and CEO of Explore Learning, which provides maths and English tuition to children aged four to 14 years old. Before the pandemic, Explore Learning delivered tuition to 37,000 members via 143 physical learning centres located all over the UK. But as lockdown took hold, members began freezing their accounts or cancelling their subscriptions, mainly due to financial worries. This prompted Explore Learning to pivot its entire business model. Within two weeks, the business began delivering tuition exclusively online. It currently has 23,000 members and a backlog of several hundred new enquiries.
Father of two Ben Lopez froze his Explore Learning account at the beginning of the pandemic but, having recently resumed it for his daughter, who is in year 4, wishes he’d kept it going. “We are very pleased with the service and how great the experience has been. The online platform is so simple and easy to use,” he says.
“We have parent-teacher meetings with her tutor to discuss Ella’s progress and she can now hopefully do more work each week, which should advance her at a faster pace.”
Explore Learning is close to completion on its own digital learning software, Compass. Mills hopes Compass could help close the attainment gap between children who’ve fared well with home schooling during lockdown and the millions whose education has ground to a halt.
“Technology is never a solution in and of itself, and a lot of education technology just isn’t that good or engaging – it doesn’t hold a child’s attention sustainably,” he says.
“What’s needed is the right combination of technological tools – well-mapped to the curriculum – and face-to-face teaching input within an appropriate delivery model. When those three elements come together, we’ll be closer to re-engaging children who are getting left behind.”
Caroline Maccherini joined Explore Learning as a tutor at 16 and now project manages Compass. She says a key advantage of education technology is its capacity to remove much of the “admin burden” from teachers.
“Compass is a maths and English software tool, which is mapped to the National Curriculum,” she says. “It is adaptive, meaning that each child works on different questions depending on how they are performing. It is also engaging as it allows tutors to award points when children display good learning behaviours.
“No one wants to get rid of teachers and have everyone learning in silos,” she continues. “Instead we should be using technology that enables children to do different types of learning in a more fluid way and allows educators to spend their time more effectively.”
Compass responds to the individual using it, enabling children of different abilities to work through the same material at their own pace. “It can also quickly pinpoint areas where a learner needs more support, so it’ll automatically put more of that content into their sessions,” says Maccherini.
The right technology tools mean children can be presented with work pitched at the right level of complexity. This is important because a child will often conclude they “hate” a particular subject when in fact the level of work presented to them is wrong.
“It’s vital work is pitched at the right level – if it’s too easy it’s boring and if it’s too hard it can overload a learner and diminish their confidence,” says Maccherini. “Teachers have had to become really skilful at differentiating work so it’s accessible for ever bigger classes of children, but technology can support and automate that process so a child gets a good level of challenge to keep them motivated without overwhelming them.”
What role might one-to-one distance tutoring play in the future of education? Maccherini is evangelistic about its potential. “Developing our own tech tool means we can give parents and children a much better idea of how a child is actually progressing with learning,” she says. “Children and parents can easily access meaningful data about their own learning, which is important because understanding where you’re succeeding or why you’re struggling is really key to engagement in the classroom.”
Mills is unequivocal about the role of technology in the future of education. “As long as tutoring is one-to-one, it’s always going to be too expensive to be a meaningful part of the solution,” he says. “That’s why we’ve designed our own tool to allow us to deliver tutoring that’s highly personalised to the needs of each child, but deliverable at a ratio of one-to-three.”
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