Pupils who have been “spoon fed” at school have been hardest hit by school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has warned.

Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills, said today that school closures would “absolutely” have long-term impacts on education.

“If young people know how to learn and had good support, maybe they felt liberated [by closures],” he said.

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“But many people who were spoon fed by their teachers, who learned in chunks and who may never have been motivated by their school have been left behind.”

Mr Schleicher, who oversees the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), made the remarks while speaking as part of a webinar on the OECD’s report on schooling worldwide, Education at a Glance.

Mr Schleicher has previously suggested that England’s pupils are held back through a reliance on rote-learning.

In 2018, he said that Britain “comes out on top” when it comes to the amount of low-value rote learning taking place in its classrooms, while China’s education system had embraced the “deep learning” of a skills-based approach.

“If you look at ‘deep learning’, what everybody talks about, you can see in China they do some memorisation, but they put a much greater premium on creative skills, on the ability of students to connect up knowledge.

“Actually in the case of the UK and US, there’s a lot to learn, a lot to develop.”

He said he had observed that UK schools were increasingly adopting a “narrowed” approach to learning, and that information which was easy to drill and test students in was also “easy to digitise”.

The report today also found that it may be more difficult to reopen schools safely in the UK because of its larger-than-average primary class sizes. 

“Countries with smaller class sizes may find it easier to comply with new restrictions on social distancing,” the report notes.

“In the United Kingdom, the average class size at primary level is 27 students in public institutions, which is larger than the OECD average of 21,” it continues.