Faith, left, with some of her fellow pupils Julia, Nana, Yaw, Alexandra, Leandra, and Amariah, right play on a rope swing at the Holy Family Catholic Primary School during a break, in Greenwich, London, Wednesday, May 19, 2021. Holy Family, like schools across Britain, is racing to offset the disruption caused by COVID-19, which has hit kids from low-income and ethnic minority families hardest.
Students across England lost an average of 115 days of in-school instruction to the pandemic, curtailing academic progress and hampering the social and emotional development of students from all backgrounds. But children stuck inside cramped apartments without easy access to computers suffered the most, fueling concerns about rising inequality in a country where 800,000 people have lost their jobs and food bank use is soaring.
“It is going to create a kind of set of knock-on effects that will continue in the years to come, because it will be these kids who had very different experiences and different amounts of learning,” Advani said. “There will be kids who just are further behind.’’ Her sidekick was Sarah Hancock, who had 22 years of experience in nearby Bexleyheath. But then Hancock died on the first day of lockdown in March 2020. Though it was not COVID-19, the bereavement shook them all.
The Education Policy Institute estimates that schools in England need an extra 10 billion to 15 billion pounds . So far, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government has authorized 1.7 billion pounds, or about 250 pounds per student.The Times of London, citing a leaked report, said Tuesday that the U.K. government is planning a 15 billion-pound education recovery program focused on extra class time, teaching and tutoring.
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