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Summary

This paper analyses changes in attainment among primary pupils in England following the school closures and suspension of most in-person teaching during the spring and summer of 2020. The analysis is based on the test results from over 250,000 primary school pupils who sat an RS Assessment from Hodder Education assessment in 2020. These tests include:

• Progress in Understanding Mathematics Assessment (PUMA)
• Progress in Reading Assessment (PiRA)
• Progress in Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling Assessment (GAPS).

Key findings include:

• There were substantial drops in attainment between 2019 and 2020 across all subjects and year groups.
• Not all pupils appear to have been affected equally. Younger year groups generally showed bigger reductions in attainment than older year groups, and children eligible for the Pupil Premium showed larger average declines than those who are not.
• There were also considerable differences by school type. Those with higher levels of deprivation, situated in urban areas or located in the north or midlands, tended to show greater declines.
• Differences were also seen between topics within the same subject. For example, Fractions scores were affected more than Number, while Punctuation fared worse than Spelling.
• These results are consistent with increases in various well-established educational attainment gaps, particularly those related to poverty.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in national lockdowns across the UK during the spring of 2020, including the suspension of in-person teaching for most pupils for the latter part of the spring term and almost the whole of the summer term. Pupils returned to school in September, but an urgent question for educators and policymakers is the size and nature of the effect that this disruption has had on children’s learning.

During the first half of the autumn term 2020, many schools have taken the opportunity to have their Year 1 to 6 pupils sit the Summer Papers that they missed at the end of the previous year. This provides attainment benchmarks to inform priorities and interventions for individual schools and pupils. In addition, it creates a valuable opportunity to understand the effects of recent educational disruptions at a wider national level.

Throughout this report we refer to the Summer Papers from Paper R to Paper 5 which are test papers designed to be taken at the end of the summer term, for year groups Reception to Year 5. In summer 2019 the papers were taken by the correct year group, whereas in September and October 2020, pupils had moved up a year group meaning, for example, those sitting Paper 2 in 2020 had just started Year 3, and those sitting Paper 5 were now in Year 6. For this reason, results for Paper 6 are not shown because most of those pupils have progressed to secondary school.

This paper analyses aggregate, anonymised results from Summer Papers sat by primary pupils at mainstream state schools in England during the 2020 autumn term, and compares these with the results obtained from the previous cohort in summer 2019. As we are not comparing two identical test windows, any differences can therefore be attributed to a combination of:

• higher pupil age (by around 4 months)
• the replacement of in-person teaching with remote learning and home schooling
• the effects of ‘normal’ learning loss during the school summer holiday.

Throughout the paper, primary teaching experts have given their reflections on the findings. 

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