COVID catch-up: helping disadvantaged students close the equity gap

COVID catch-up: helping disadvantaged students close the equity gap

COVID catch-up: helping disadvantaged students close the equity gap

This report starts with a series of recommendations to government to ensure students disadvantaged by remote learning are able to catch up. It outlines Australia’s educational situation during COVID, and references reports that highlight teachers’ perceptions of reduced learning/progress for students during periods of lockdown. The authors describe the 4 types of disadvantaged students. They outline the at-risk areas of learning and quantify lost learning (whilst emphasising their figures are rough estimates). The authors back up teachers’ perceptions around achievement loss with the systematic review of the literature on school closures led by the UK Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in 2020 which suggested that “school disruptions widen achievement gaps for disadvantaged children”. The authors outline a ‘catch-up strategy’ involving tutoring, emphasis on wellbeing (and including a ‘try later’ strategy of exploring how digital teaching could compliment in person learning once more robust evaluation of digital teaching/learning is available). They show the value of governments funding this catch-up plan against the costs of them not doing so. A series of appendices set out learning loss estimated in different countries, and evidence around the effectiveness of tutoring. It ends with a bibliography.

Sonnemann, J. and Goss, P.

https://grattan.edu.au/report/covid-catch-up/

Grattan Institute

14 Jun 2020

hyperlink

https://grattan.edu.au/report/covid-catch-up/