Understanding progress in the 2020 to 2021 academic year: extension report covering the first half of the autumn term 2021 to 2022

NA (site), NA (city), England, United Kingdom

Abstract:

From the summary: " This report presents the Education Policy Institute and Renaissance Learning’s most recent assessment of the learning loss and recovery experienced by pupils in England as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is based on assessment data from Renaissance Learning’s Star Reading and Star Maths. Star Assessments are computer-adaptive in nature and adapt to the individual, providing an assessment that identifies gaps in learning from the entirety of the curriculum independent of their current year group. Star Assessments also include a standardised measure which takes account of the pupil’s age in years and months.

This data has been linked with data held by the Department for Education in the National Pupil Database which has enabled us to carry out analysis by pupil characteristics. In this report we provide estimates of the overall level of learning loss by the end of the first halfterm of the 2021/22 academic year which is then broken down by various characteristic groups.

In our previous reports we gradually built a picture of how the degree of learning loss changed over the course of the 2020/21 academic year by restricting our analysis to a consistent group of pupils for whom we had assessment data across the academic year.

In this report we analyse the results of all pupils at the start of the 2021/22 academic year for whom we can calculate a learning loss estimate. Not all of these pupils would have been included in previous analyses. This is primarily to ensure sufficient sample sizes but also reflects that we are interested in producing the best estimate of the current situation in schools. However, we know that there is naturally a keen interest in how the situation has changed since the summer, so we present additional analysis of how outcomes have changed during this time using a consistent group of pupils"



The study is available online.

Publication Date:
03/01/2022