In an effort to counter the impact of children being out of school, the government has proposed a number of options, including summer schools.

Summer school seems such a common-sense solution. The challenges for families, schools and the government are stark. Recent evidence from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has found that school closures are likely to reverse progress made to close the gap between disadvantaged pupils and their advantaged peers in the past decade since 2011.

Many pupils simply aren’t engaged with remote learning and will no doubt be struggling. Those pupils, without basic access to technology or even books, lose out most when they don’t, or cannot, access the expertise of a teacher.

Let’s get the pupils who need support to join a well-organised summer programme, we might think. And yet, this seeming solution is much harder than we may at first consider.

Here are four challenges that mean that summer schools will be hard to do well.

1. Attendance is essential

We know from ample evidence that a key issue with summer schools is that the pupils who you really want to attend don’t turn up. Ensuring attendance and engagement is hard. With Covid-related uncertainty, this challenge is even more marked. Significant efforts would be required to overcome this challenge.

2. Secure settings

One key challenge for any school or summer club are the new challenges that attend social distancing and resourcing any such programme. This requires additional planning, which demands time and money. So, we are left with questions of when, where and how?

3. All about academic progress?

Typically, summer schools that are successful have strong academic components. Given there is very little time to plan a well-resourced academic programme, it may actually prove counterproductive. A summer-school programme could instead carefully target outcomes that are about social wellbeing and confidence. Indeed, supporting pupils in this way is probably more important than ever.

4. The issue of summer staffing

Many teachers are on their knees after the workload driven by the lockdown. How many trained teachers can deliver an intensive, well-planned summer programme? Training matters. There are a wealth of seasoned summer-school professionals related to sports and other social experiences that could be a boon, but these aren’t teachers, so it would be unlikely to address issues with academic struggles.

Put simply, for summer schools to be done well this summer, the bar is very high.

Summer schools could have a positive impact - the EEF toolkit indicates an average of 2+ months gain - but it would cost time and money. At this time more than ever, both of these commodities are incredibly precious.

Summer schools could prove a solution for reconnecting pupils with school, and help in some way to mitigate the effects of school absence, but they need to be to be handled with great care.