Lucian Stiopu watches his son cycle round Central Park in Peterborough. Before the government imposed a lockdown, he says, the boy would spend about nine hours a day at primary school, allowing him to go to work in a prison. And now? Stiopu’s son reports that his teachers are setting a bit of work online. It is “easy” and he dashes it off in less than two hours.
Stiopu might be showing off, but probably not much. Two months after schools closed, it is becoming clear that most children of all ages are doing little schoolwork, and even less that is difficult or stimulating. An entire cohort appears to be treading water.
Schools have had a rough time. On March 23, they were given two working days’ notice to close, while remaining open to vulnerable pupils and children of key workers. On May 11, the government asked English schools to restart some classes in June. But teachers’ unions are against that, and it seems likely that few children will return before September. Government schools have had little guidance about what and how to teach the 98 percent supposed to be studying at home.
As a result, school children are largely idle. A poll of parents in April by the Sutton Trust, an education charity, found 50 percent of secondary school pupils and 64 percent of primary school pupils are working three hours a day or less. Teachers, who normally put in long days, have stopped doing so. That is probably because little is expected of them, and not because they are struggling with domestic obligations. Those without children are working as little as those with.
This is probably harming pupils. Studies show that young children — especially poor ones — backslide during the summer holidays, with the poor faring especially badly. Children with learning difficulties may be worst-off. On a Peterborough housing estate, Anna Adams says her autistic son, who loves maths, has been unable to get any work done at all. Worse, he has become so terrified of the virus that she isn’t sure he will ever return to school.
But (as in India) the most striking difference is between state and private schools. The latter have leapt onto Zoom and similar services: 74 percent of private secondary school teachers and 58 percent of private primary school teachers use them on a given day, according to Teacher Tapp. Andrew Gordon-Brown, the head of the private Truro School in Cornwall, says he advised teachers not to push on with the curriculum — but only for the first week of lockdown. Then they charged ahead. His staff claims to be working harder than ever.
It isn’t just private schools. Those who charge for lessons, from music teachers to karate instructors, have often found ways of carrying on more-or-less as normal. Anouska Leckie, a Kumon tutor in Cardiff, switched from in-person group classes to live video lessons a week after the lockdown. She lost several clients at first: many of the children she instructs are from working-class immigrant families, who ran short of money. But some are returning, saying their children are not being taught nearly enough by their schools.
