A study on learning loss in exam year groups has revealed that in nearly a third of schools surveyed, GCSE and A-level students have lost more than half of their teaching time over the course.
Exam board OCR asked teachers in 311 schools to estimate how much learning loss students had faced throughout their courses.
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The board said the survey was not intended to be representative but would guide them as to what support was needed for students in the future.
However, the sample includes a wide cross-section of state and independent schools.
A total of 96 schools reported that Year 11 and Year 13 students had lost between 51 and 100 per cent of their learning time.
Just 18 schools - 6 per cent of those surveyed - said that Years 11 and 13 had lost 10 per cent or less of their learning time.
Schools were most likely to estimate that pupils had lost 31 to 40 per cent of their course learning time, with 65 schools estimating this amount.
An OCR spokesperson said: “We know that there’s been significant disruption to learning and we’d already responded by supporting schools and colleges with online resources, and making adaptations to assessments, before exams were cancelled earlier this year.
“Collecting this feedback is part of our ongoing monitoring, which includes talking to schools and colleges, and to stakeholders on all our forums. This will help us to understand what might be needed for 2022.”
There are growing concerns over how students in exam-year groups will make up for lost learning time. While teachers will assign grades to students in summer 2021, based on a range of evidence, some students may have missed out on so much schooling during the pandemic that it has been suggested it would be hard to give them any grade.
Earlier this month, OCR chief executive Jill Duffy warned that some students would have “have lost so much learning that it will be difficult to award them a grade at all”.
She said: “This may seem harsh, but it would be very wrong to place someone on a course for which they are ill prepared, where they will struggle to keep up with their peers and which they may not complete,” she told the Westminster Education Forum.
And in November last year, headteachers described “dramatic“ levels of learning loss among exam years.
One headteacher reported that, having completed assessments for Year 11 across all subjects, their view was that “grades are almost a grade down on where we were at this time last year” - or 0.7 of a grade on average.
