Pupils in Year 8 appear to have bounced back from learning loss caused by disruption to learning during the coronavirus pandemic, despite disruptively high levels of positive Covid tests, according to new analysis from data experts at No More Marking.
In a recent assessment of 32,000 Year 8 pupils, test score data show students have “rebounded significantly” for the cohort following a significant fall in scores in September 2020, No More Marking said.
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What have we found? The current Y8s have indeed bounced back! They’ve made rapid gains over the past year. They’re not quite back to where we’d expect them to be at the start of Y8, but they’re not far off.
Here’s a graph showing their pre & post pandemic progress from Y5-8. pic.twitter.com/PTENWCK4qm
- Daisy Christodoulou (@daisychristo) October 27, 2021
No More Marking education director Daisy Christodoulou said: “This Year 8 cohort are a particularly interesting one to track over time, as in many ways their education has been most disrupted by the pandemic.
“They were in Year 6 when the pandemic first hit, and started secondary school in September 2020.”
She said that it was hard to say if Year 8‘s recovery takes them back to pre-pandemic levels, as there is no comparable data for Year 8 before Covid.
But she added that “given what data we do have, it does seem as though students have managed to make back a lot of those losses and are around about where we might typically expect them to be”.
Pupils in Year 8 have also been the cohort most badly affected by positive coronavirus tests since the start of this academic year.
In Tes analysis of Office for National Statistics data showing the levels of positive cases by age from the week ending 5 September to the week ending 16 October, those aged 12 had the highest infection rates on average over the term so far.
In modelled daily rates of the percentage of the population testing positive for Covid-19 by age in England, just over 5 per cent of 12-year-olds were testing positive on average over the term, with 8.99 per cent testing positive during the week ending 16 October just before the half-term holiday.
Infection rates were also high for those aged 11 and 13, with 8.77 per cent of 11-year-olds testing positive during the same week, and 8.42 per cent of 13-year-olds testing positive.
But the writing assessment for Year 8 suggests higher levels of positive test cases and absence are not holding this year group back from recovering their writing skills.
In September 2020, Ms Christodoulou wrote that “learning decay” should be discussed instead of “learning loss”.
”‘Loss’ implies that there were some skills and knowledge students had that have now disappeared and that therefore need to be regained from scratch.
“In fact, the evidence on this suggests that skills and knowledge aren’t totally lost in this way. They may become rusty and decay, but often they are not totally lost,” she said.
