It’s quite hard to pin down the amount of learning that pupils may have lost during the pandemic, but I have recently been involved in an attempt to do just that, along with my colleagues.

Using the Understanding Society study - a longitudinal piece of research capturing life in the 21st century - we (myself, Dr Nic Pensiero and Professor Tony Kelly) analysed data on home learning collected from the families of 1,430 primary and 1,595 secondary pupils in April, one month into lockdown. We compared the average amount of time that children spent learning at home with the average learning time at school.

The reported figures were quite shocking.

For secondary students from the most advantaged families - where the main parent works at a large employer, or in a managerial or professional occupation, and where both parents work from home and the child has their own computer - we calculated that it could take up to six months to catch up on lost learning time. It was worse for the most disadvantaged families: the time required for catch up could increase to a year.

Primary pupils would be even more behind, with the time needed to catch up again being longer for more disadvantaged families.

Diving deeper into the data, children in secondary education with the most advantaged circumstances spent nearly four hours per day on school work, compared with just over two and a half hours for those in disadvantaged circumstances.

At primary level, the most advantaged pupils spent nearly three hours on schoolwork compared with less than two and a half hours for the most disadvantaged pupils.

Parents were another important factor. Those who worked in professional and managerial occupations, which are suitable for home working, seemed better able to assist with their children’s home learning. Such families also had access to more favourable study resources, including suitable learning spaces and computers.

Many of these differences exist during normal schooling but became even more pronounced because of the distinct ways in which schools dealt with school closures.

Of course, it is likely that provisions will have improved over time. Initially, lockdown was a shock, and schools and parents alike will have scrambled to make the best of it. Six months later, we have more experiences to draw upon, the decades of research on online learning will have filtered through and schools will have more robust systems in place. Nevertheless, the study again shows the transition to distance schooling is likely to exacerbate inequalities between socioeconomic groups owing to both the gap in the volume of school work completed, as well as the relative ability or inability of some parents to support their children’s learning.

However, a warning note to finish: we must remember that it is not necessarily the amount of support that children receive that is important, but the quality of the attention.

Christian Bokhove is associate professor in maths education at the University of Southampton

This article originally appeared in the 30 October 2020 issue