School closures have created substantial inequalities

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has reported that primary school closures in the UK have created substantial inequality in time spent learning between pupils from poorer and better-off families.

By the time children return to school in September, most will have spent more than a staggering five months out of school. Such prolonged time out of school risks setting back children’s learning and development.

A number of studies have argued that children from different backgrounds have had a very unequal experience of home learning. The IFS has now surveyed around 5,500 parents of school-aged children in England, asking how they and their children spent each hour of what would have been a normal school day. The data was then compared with data from before the crisis.

It found that learning time was dramatically lower during the lockdown than prior to it, with primary school students spending 4.5 hours learning on a typical school day during the lockdown, down from six hours before the lockdown. For secondary schools, the absolute and proportionate drops are even larger, from 6.6 hours a day before the lockdown to 4.5 hours a day during the lockdown - representing a 32 per cent reduction.

However, of more concern, the lockdown has created new inequalities in learning time. Before the pandemic, there was essentially no difference between the time that primary school children from the poorest and richest households spent on educational activities. But, during the lockdown, learning time fell by less among primary school children from the richest families than among their less well-off peers. The end result is that, during the lockdown, the richest students spent 75 minutes a day longer on educational activities than their peers in the poorest families – an extra 31 per cent of learning time.  

At secondary school level, this inequality has much deeper roots; even before the lockdown, secondary school pupils from the richest fifth of families spent almost an hour a day more time on education than their worst-off peers. And, unlike at primary school, the inequalities between the middle and the bottom are just as pronounced as those between the middle and the top.