It is not only primary school children who are suffering from the loss of learning (Primary schools: pandemic causing ‘significant’ learning loss in England, 28 January). Last Friday, Ofqual’s consultation on how to award qualifications (namely GCSEs, AS and A-levels) closed. Supposedly these awards will allow young people to progress in their education or on to employment.
Who are we kidding? These young people have lost far too much of their current learning to have the building blocks required to move on. Is a medical school really going to take on a student who this year gains three A* A-levels that have been awarded to them on the basis that they are A* ability on what they have been taught, which might only be a quarter of the syllabus?
As adults we are going to be complicit in certificating young people at a level that they have not reached. These certificates will in no way have parity with those issued prior to the pandemic. This is no fault of these young people. Every year of school, college and university has been affected by this. We risk a lost generation.
Why not give every young person in a state-funded school or college the opportunity to repeat the year that they have just lost? In this way we can catch up their lost learning. It would mean that those children expecting to start primary school in September might have to wait, but that would be a small price to pay to ensure that the life opportunities offered through learning are available to all our young people and not just the privileged few whose public school education has ensured that they continue to learn and thrive.
Arlene Clark
Great Wilbraham, Cambridgeshire
• It was no surprise to read that there has been significant learning loss in primary pupils due to Covid. It’s also true for secondary schools. As lockdown drags on, the only consequence I can imagine from online learning (from a teacher’s stance) will be an even further widening of the gaps in opportunities open to children who are born into stable homes with decent incomes, and those who are not.
I suggest that every child should have the option to repeat whatever year they’re in whenever they return to school after the summer holidays. There also needs to be a vast increase in apprenticeships. If we’ve learned no other lesson from this pandemic, I really hope we’ve learned to stop glorifying academic studies over all else (obviously they’re vital for the wellbeing of any nation, but not uniquely so).
Siobhan O’Tierney
Paisley, Renfrewshire
• I am a primary school teacher who has been providing education to children in class and at home throughout the lockdown. I would like to challenge the government to use our experiences during the pandemic as a springboard to improve education for the future. A policy of handing out small amounts of money for catch-up and summer schools will be the equivalent to swatting mosquitos with a sieve.
What our schools need is a long-term injection of major funding to reduce class sizes by half, provide more teachers, stop cutting teaching assistant posts, increase classrooms and equip them with enough technology for children to use in schools for learning.
Only in this way will we all catch up and go on to achieve even greater things in teaching and learning. We don’t need silly initiatives, over-testing and constant inspection, we just need proper provision of resources like our colleagues in the private sector.
Sara Kail-Dyke
Wedmore, Somerset
