A major teacher recruitment drive is needed to stem the Covid learning loss crisis, an influential economic think tank has warned.

The report, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, draws on evidence from the Netherlands to show that lost weeks of learning time are “likely to coincide with lost weeks of educational progress”, especially for disadvantaged students.

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It says there is strong evidence that the government’s National Tutoring Programme is expected to have positive results, but that “it is unlikely to be anything like enough to deal with the seismic loss in learning time”.

Coronavirus: A ‘seismic loss of learning time’

The report’s author, IFS research fellow Luke Sibieta, calculates that the ”£250 million in the schools component of the NTP can buy about six hours of tutoring time for each of 1.4 million disadvantaged students. That’s unlikely to be enough”.

It argues that “big and radical ways to increase learning time” need to be considered, such as lengthening the school day, the mass repetition of whole school years or summer schools.

The report adds that a recruitment drive for teachers, as well as drawing on the skills of former teachers and retired teachers, could be a means of boosting teacher supply.

“Teacher training applications were already up last year and continue to increase this year. Reversing cuts to bursaries and increasing places could yield significant extra teachers,” the report says.

“We could seek to engage ex or retired teachers through a wide national campaign. And there are various organisations with huge expertise in this area who could take a significant lead, such as Teach First.” 

In April 2020, Robert Halfon, chair of the Commons Education Select Committee, called for an “army” of retired teachers to help poorer pupils catch up at the end of the first national lockdown.

The report also estimates startling long-term costs of the pandemic for students. It estimates that by the time schools reopen more widely, most students will have lost half a year of schooling, which could lead to a loss of £40,000 on average from lifetime earnings, or £350 billion in total across the 8.7 million students in the UK.

“Even much weaker assumptions about the returns to schooling still result in enormous estimated costs. If by some miracle we managed to mitigate 75 per cent of the long-run effects of learning loss, the total loss would still be nearly £90 billion,” the report says.

As a benchmark, it notes that the usual cost of half a year of schooling would be around £30 billion across the UK, noting that last summer the UK government announced a £1 billion catch-up fund in England with plans of a similar scale in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

“There is much that is good with these plans, and policymakers in England have already announced plans for an additional £300 million for catch-up,” the report says.

“In total, governments across the UK have allocated about £1.5 billion towards catch-up. This is tiny in comparison with the scale of problem.”

The IFS report warns that these losses will be felt disproportionately by disadvantaged children.

“Without significant remedial action, lost learning will translate into reduced productivity, lower incomes, lower tax revenues, higher inequality and potentially expensive social ills,” the report says.

Mr Sibieta said: “A loss of over half a year of normal schooling is likely to have far-reaching long-run consequences.

“We will all be less productive, poorer, have less money to spend on public services, be more unequal and we may be less happy and healthy as a result.

“Standard evidence on the returns to schooling would imply a total loss of £350 billion, or £90 billion under incredibly optimistic assumptions. The inescapable conclusion is that lost learning represents a gigantic long-term risk for future prosperity, the public finances, the future path of inequality and wellbeing.”

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “The government in England is a long way short of the £30 billion benchmark for catch-up support suggested in this report by the IFS.

“It has invested £1 billion this year on a scheme that it has over-complicated through its insistence on channelling some of that money into a subsidised tutoring programme. And it has so far mentioned only £300 million for the next financial year, with little detail over its plans.

“The government will need to put in place much more substantial catch-up funding to repair the damage to education caused by the pandemic, and all of this funding needs to go directly to schools and colleges.”