At every age and stage of education, children and young people have missed out this year. For some, the impact of Covid-19 has been minimal; for others, it has been catastrophic. And for many, the experiences they have had - as well as those missed out on - will have long-term implications.

So, what should we do? How about the thing we’re all now very used to doing when a system fails us: turn it off and on again. In other words, we should reboot the 2020-21 academic year, starting it over from scratch.

Rebooting the year would mean that nearly every child, at every stage, would remain in the same academic year next September. For example, my sons, who are now in Years 2 and 5, would be in Years 2 and 5 next year, too. Thereafter, we would simply continue as normal.

Our school starting age would become “rising six”, rather than “rising five”, in line with most of the rest of the world. Instead of happening at age 15-16, GCSEs would be sat when pupils were 16 or 17. And A levels would be sat at 19. Curriculum, exams, schemes of learning and lesson plans could be left much as they are.

This would mean that we could spend the rest of this year focusing on the learning that was lost last year, shoring up foundations and - most critically - addressing the social, emotional and mental health effects of the pandemic upon our young people. We could take our time, go where our students’ curiosity led us a little more and reawaken their joy in learning.

Loss of time, loss of control

This proposal may seem radical and expensive; we would need to fund an additional year of education for 15 year groups. However, failing to act effectively could be even more expensive, consigning much of this generation to long-term challenges and lost earnings over their lifetime. Rebooting the year would not only roll back the disadvantages meted out by the pandemic to children currently in education but set the foundation for a more equitable system. In this new equality, wellbeing and academic achievement would go hand in hand.

Let’s consider the effects and the potential challenges of this proposal on different groups of students, starting with the one that has caused most concern to date: disadvantaged pupils. Following the first national lockdown, the Education Endowment Foundation said that estimates for the widening of the learning gap ranged from 11 per cent to 75 per cent. As we endure another indefinite school closure, the higher figure seems increasingly plausible.

Steps have been taken to address this lost learning. The National Tutoring Programme recognises that disadvantaged students have suffered greater losses than their peers and seeks to address this. But, fundamentally, tweaking at the edges like this doesn’t go far enough. These students, who were in many cases already faring poorly, are now being asked to catch up more than 60 per cent of a year’s worth of learning, according to the Children’s Society - and at the expense of other school activities. Others may end up having to catch up in their spare time while continuing to cover the next year’s curriculum.

This is clearly unrealistic for children who were struggling even under normal circumstances - and it is not a situation that we should be morally comfortable with, either. These children have already lost a year of their childhood to the pandemic - we need to mitigate for this lost time, as well as for the lost learning.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are gifted and talented students, some of whom have been well supported throughout the pandemic. For these children, repeating the year may be unnecessary and undesirable.

Where schools, parents and children agree that it is in the child’s best interest, these students should therefore continue their education with the cohort above. But they should be the exception rather than the rule.

Children who are approaching - or are in - assessment years have been particularly hard hit by lost learning and cancelled exams. They stand to experience long-term harm, either because their grades are called into question throughout their lifetime or because they didn’t attain the grades they deserved as a result of the disruption they faced.

The Children’s Society’s 2020 Life on Hold report highlights high levels of anxiety in British 15-year-olds about assessments and the return to school following the first lockdown. Making provision for these young people to cover the full syllabus before sitting their exams, in the normal amount of time, is clearly in students’ best interests and would lead to fairer assessments.

British adolescents have struggled with loss of control because of the pandemic. We must recognise that students in Years 11-13 are approaching adulthood and should have more of a say in their next steps. The bar for moving on to the next cohort should be somewhat lower for this group: for example, where centre-assessed grades show that a student would have passed their exams and has a path to move on, they should be allowed to do so if they wish. But students would need to be made to understand that they were choosing to make up the learning lost over this year in their own time, or face the consequences of competing with better-educated cohorts above and below them.

University intakes would, of course, be affected by students choosing to repeat Year 13. One solution to the loss of income this would cause for universities would be for the government to offer funding incentives for starting a degree next year to mature students. This would go some way towards filling the gap left by 18-year-olds. And perhaps some of this year’s freshers could choose to repeat the year, too.

Where this solution reaps the most benefits, however, is in early years. The plight of the youngest members of our education system has not seen much coverage, with the focus largely on those sitting exams.

But the impact on children in the early years has been truly profound. The very youngest in this year’s Reception cohort had lived 14 per cent of their life under the shadow of the pandemic when they started school in September.

Teachers report that between 46 and 70 per cent of their pupils were not school ready, leading to significant emotional and financial costs for children, teachers and schools. In November, the early years education charity Kindred2 reported that as much as £300 million worth of teacher and teaching-assistant time had already been lost from other priorities in order to get these children school ready.

It is probable that something like the summer-born effect, in which children born in June, July and August struggle to keep up with their older classmates throughout their school career, will apply to far more children in this cohort, with long-term negative effects.

For those children who missed four or five months of preschool last year and are likely to miss at least a term of Reception, the leap to Year 1 will seem insurmountable. It is wildly unrealistic and quite simply unreasonable to expect these children to face the same key stage 1 assessments as their predecessors.

The outlook is even worse for the children due to start Reception in September, who will have lived between 32 per cent and 40 per cent of their lives under the shadow of the pandemic by the time they start school. Although preschools remain open for the time being, the changes that have been necessary have unavoidably detracted from this phase of education - and these children have also suffered the impact of time lost with grandparents, friends, family and communities.

We underestimate the value of the early years phase of play-based learning at our peril. David Whitebread, developmental psychologist and early years specialist at the University of Cambridge, has long called for an extension to the provision of play-based learning and a delay to the start of formal education in this country. He argues that missing out on this critical phase will have a disproportionate impact on disadvantaged students and has expressed enthusiastic support for a reboot of this school year.

It must be recognised that giving children currently in preschool another year in that setting, in addition to taking in the next cohort of preschool children, poses some considerable logistical challenges. But they are not insurmountable. If we can build the Nightingale hospitals, we can solve this problem, too.

Happily, this proposal makes as much sense economically as ethically. Nobel prizewinning economist James Heckman has demonstrated that money invested in good-quality early years education ultimately pays for itself (although some have questioned the data he used to reach his conclusions).

The increased capacity required in preschools can be created in several ways. First, we could recruit and retain quality teachers by paying preschool practitioners more and offering financial incentives to train. And we could reduce the number of babies in nursery “baby rooms” by increasing the amount of paid parental leave.

The UK currently offers full-income-equivalent maternity leave for only 12 weeks, meaning that taking the full entitlement of one year’s maternity leave is a privilege available only to financially secure families. Resolving this inequality would make space in preschools and improve outcomes for these infants, owing to the positive impact of secure attachment to their caregiving parent. This would have long-term mental health benefits for mothers and babies.

Downward trend

The Children’s Society’s annual Good Childhood Report highlights a steady downward trend in British children’s happiness in general and with school in particular. The UK performs poorly compared with our international peers in terms of children’s wellbeing and academic performance across a number of measures. Our pre-pandemic education system performed poorly on the international stage, sitting between Slovakia and Latvia in the bottom third of Unicef’s Report Card 16.

We know that adverse childhood experiences result in increased negative outcomes in later life. And evidence from epidemics shows that quarantined children may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, to say nothing of the drop in referrals and support for pre-existing conditions. The World Bank estimates that, as a result of a five-month school closure - a landmark we have already passed - governments across the globe will lose 16 per cent of what they have invested in this cohort unless effective policies are undertaken to mitigate the pandemic’s impact on children and young people.

It is clear that we have nothing to lose and much to gain by taking radical remedial action to protect this generation from further harm. Much as Attlee and Bevan built the NHS out of the ashes of the Second World War, this government has the opportunity to build a fairer, better and more effective education system out of the ashes of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Judith Boyd is a secondary modern foreign languages teacher in Hampshire

This article originally appeared in the 12 February 2021 issue under the headline “Virus alert: reboot the system”