Teachers have raised concerns after discovering that some disadvantaged pupils appear to have been unable to do any school work over the past six months,  as some have turned to drug dealing or become young carers, and others are struggling to hold a pen or even stay awake in class after a total lack of routine during lockdown.

These are the observations of teachers and heads around the UK who have spoken candidly to Tes about their experiences since pupils returned to the classroom en masse earlier this month.

They were interviewed for the latest in a series of investigative articles about the widening of the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their classmates during the pandemic - increasingly recognised as one of the most pressing issues facing the education system.

The teachers expressed fears that some disadvantaged students in Year 7 are displaying “off the wall” behaviour and are “far less secondary-ready” than usual after missing out on the final months of Year 6, while next year’s GCSE candidates are having to go back to the very basics of putting “pen to paper”.

In the worst cases, Year 11s have lost interest in education altogether and turned to drug dealing, or become full-time carers since lockdown, according to teachers.

Yet for some disadvantaged students, it seems lockdown has helped them to realise the value of school - after gaining a sudden reality check of what life could be like if they left without qualifications or a job.  

After an earlier article in this series highlighted concerns about the learning gap among primary headteachers, it is clear that these worries are shared by professionals teaching older students - including those set to take exams within the next two years.

Coronavirus: Students not used to writing

Laura May Rowlands, head of English at Woodlands Community College in Southampton - where more than a third of students are eligible for free school meals - says disadvantaged students without a desk or dining table at home are more likely to be among those who are “completely out of the habit of writing at length in any way”.

And she says students are suffering hand cramps, known as graphospasms, when writing for long periods.

She says: “I’ve been quite taken aback actually by how little a lot of [disadvantaged pupils] did over lockdown for many, many reasons, but, yeah, there’s quite a mountain to climb really... I’m not doing down my school at all in any way - [because] we obviously reached out to as many families as we can, but the fact of the matter is that they are significantly behind and we’ve got quite a lot of work to do.”

She adds: “I’m head of English and for me, when I look at our key stage 4 students… they literally need to catch up on the texts - reread the texts - and they need to build that word power back up.

“I’ve actually been on a bit of a journey this week with my Year 10 group. We discovered that there’s a phrase for when your hand is really cramped up and you can’t write any more - a ‘graphospasm’ - so we’ve been talking about that and how to get back into the habit of putting pen to paper and writing for an extended period of time, because they’re completely out of practice with that.

“I don’t think that’s just disadvantaged students but definitely disadvantaged students have had fewer opportunities to do [writing] maybe through not having enough space at home …[because] if you have no dining table at home or no desk, trying to balance on your bed to try and do things like that is a lot more difficult.”

Disadvantaged Year 7s ‘are off the wall’

Meanwhile, at the other end of the secondary school, disadvantaged Year 7 students are struggling, in some cases, to make the transition from primary to secondary, according to a headteacher in the Midlands.  

“Those that are from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less secondary-ready than they would have been usually,” she says.

“We normally do a lot of work with primary schools through transition in the last three or four months [of Year 6] but they’ve had none of that this year and, because of that, the ones that we were most worried about are really not coping, particularly in terms of behaviour. They’re not used to our rules and expectations and are off the wall. Generally speaking, their reading and spelling ages are not where we would expect them to be.”

Year 11s ‘now want to be drug dealers or carers’

The same headteacher, who does not wish to be named, says around 10 per cent of Year 11 have now “just given up” despite making progress in Year 10.

She says: “Some of our disadvantaged children [in Year 11] were at the point where they were starting to be bothered about their futures but because we haven’t seen them for six months, it’s now going to take us quite a lot of time to get them back to that point.

“And in that time some of them have gone off and done other things. Some of them have developed careers in drug dealing or other things, and some of our very disadvantaged girls have been used as child carers within the family because maybe mum had to go out and work. And now that’s all they want to do and therefore it’s going to dramatically impact on their futures and their aspirations.

“About 10 per cent of my Year 11 have given up. They want to be child carers or drug dealers or they don’t see the point in school any more. A lot of them didn’t see the point anyway but we were working on them.”

Lockdown ‘plunged students into the real world’

However, RE and law teacher Andy McHugh, from County Durham, says some disadvantaged Year 11 students are now ready to work hard - after lockdown helped them to “see the broader picture”.

He says: “Some of the students I’ve spoken to have come back to school knowing that they’ve only got less than a year left until the exams, assuming the exams go ahead, and they’re thinking to themselves, despite perhaps not putting in all of the effort they could have put in in previous years, that they’re really ready to hit the ground running - because they’ve had a taste of what life is like after school, post-16, and some of them have decided they want more from their lives than whatever they’ve been doing for the last six months.

“They want to go on to college and university and go on and get jobs and apprenticeships where, for some of them, certainly not all, but for some, aspiration has been one of the main factors holding them back. And I think plunging them into the real world, in a way, in the last six months has done some of them a little bit of good in terms of helping them to see the broader picture and see themselves as grown up in the world rather than as small-part players.”

How far has the disadvantage gap widened?

A Tes survey this week showed that 93 per cent of teachers thought their pupils had fallen behind since the national lockdown.

And a report last month came to the “devastating” conclusion that the disadvantage-related attainment gap will never close if trends continue - and may have grown during the pandemic.

The government has advised schools to assess pupils to “quickly” gauge where the gaps lie.

But Shabnam Ahmed, English teacher and head of Year 13 at a secondary school in Suffolk, says the only way you can tell how far a student has fallen behind is by talking to them.

She says: “Particularly since the pandemic, we need to have people in schools who will have one-to-one meetings with students to find out what their individual needs and disadvantages are. There’s not a blanket solution; for example, by saying that all the disadvantaged students will have catch-up classes. Not all of them will need that. Some of them will need mental health support and some will need support at home, and we need to think how we can support parents in supporting them.”

Challenges of social distancing

However, social distancing is making it hard to help disadvantaged students on a one-to-one basis, she says.

“[Pre-Covid] you could have a quiet word with them so they weren’t embarrassed about it. We can’t do that now because we’re standing at the front and we’re keeping a two-metre distance. That’s really tough. The other things that’s really tough as a teacher is that because we’re also moving around so much, we’re actually not spending as much time with students as we used to. For example, on a lunch time I might have had five or six students come in and sit in my classroom while I was doing some work and having my lunch. That doesn’t happen any more. There are designated areas [now].

Students struggling to stay awake

But she says one of the biggest factors facing disadvantaged students is the loss of the habits and routines of schools. She adds: “Lots of them are struggling to stay awake. In particular, if we think of some disadvantaged students and the background they might come from, they might not have that parental support where [parents] would wake them up in the morning and where they would have that routine forced on them.”

She adds: “I think if I was a form tutor, you know, you’ve got potentially 30 students with problems that have arisen over lockdown and then you’ve also got to make sure that your disadvantaged students are also getting that extra bit of help.”