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Summary

This paper analyses attainment among primary pupils in England after the third national lockdown and suspension of most in-person teaching from January to early to mid-March 2021. It uses aggregate results from 150,000 primary school tests from over 700 schools taken in late March 2021 before the Easter holidays, provided by RS Assessment from Hodder Education. These tests include Progress in Reading Assessment (PiRA), Progress in Understanding Mathematics Assessment (PUMA) and Progress in Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling Assessment (GAPS).

This interim paper follows on from the paper published in February 2021, The impact of school closures on autumn 2020 attainment.

Key findings, spring 2021:

• There were substantial drops in attainment between spring 2020 and 2021 across all subjects and year groups, more than twice the size of the drops seen at the end of autumn 2020.
• Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling (GPS) and maths showed the largest declines, representing a gap of on average three months’ progress across all year groups. Reading, on average, showed a two-month gap.
• Younger year groups, Years 1 and 2 in particular, generally showed bigger reductions in attainment than older year groups.
• Children attending schools in more deprived areas, and schools with higher proportions of children receiving free school meals, tended to show greater declines in attainment than their peers. Schools with a high percentage of children eligible for Free School Meals (FSM) experienced decreases in scores approximately twice as severe as schools with a low percentage of FSM eligible children.
• During the spring term, regional differences showed no consistent patterns across all year groups and subjects. This was in contrast to our previous findings at the end of the autumn term. 

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