Pre-pandemic school standards won’t return as quickly as we’d like

The fact that schools are feeling the strain won’t come as a surprise to many people. But quite how much of a strain?

That’s the question we answer in our new performance tracker report, produced with CIPFA.

It assesses the state of nine public services including schools, looking at demands on the service, the funding and staffing picture, and the impact that Covid has had.

On staffing, we entered the pandemic having had recruitment and retention problems for much of the previous decade.

Teacher numbers were increasing, but there were a number of subjects – physics, design and technology, languages – where shortages were both severe and persistent.

Recruitment improved at the start of the pandemic (as did retention) – but this was only temporary.

We calculate what we refer to as the ‘underlying shortfall’ in secondary post-graduate trainee numbers – effectively, the total gap between numbers recruited and the government’s subject-level targets, ignoring over-recruitment in other subjects (because a PE teacher isn’t the same as a physics teacher).

This hit 29 per cent in 2021-22 – that is, recruitment targets were missed by nearly a third.

The government has put more money into schools in both the 2019 spending round and the 2021 spending review.

And, while this won’t be true of all schools, DfE figures suggest that, on average, the finances of schools improved in the first year of the pandemic.

Fewer schools and academy trusts had negative financial reserves, which the DfE puts down to schools spending less on supply teachers, learning resources and exam fees, among other areas.

‘Schools are having to deal with soaring inflation’

But as with other public services, as well as businesses and individuals, schools are now having to deal with soaring inflation.

Added to that is a pay settlement that presents a challenge to school budgets – even while representing a real-terms pay cut for teachers.

Schools face this challenge while still trying to make up for lost learning during Covid.

This summer’s key stage 2 assessments have provided confirmation of the scale of this learning loss at primary level, with the share of pupils at the expected standard in reading, writing and maths falling from 65 per cent in 2019 to 59 per cent this year.

Interestingly the national reference test, taken by a sample of year 11 students, suggests a more mixed picture, with a statistically significant fall in maths results between 2020 and 2022, but no significant fall in English results.

But away from these headline results, few would deny that the pandemic has had a considerable impact on young people’s efforts to learn over the past two and a half years.

With the disruption to in-person teaching seen in 2020 and 2021 this was always going to be the case, and is the reason the then-education recovery commissioner, Kevan Collins, called for roughly £15 billion of catch-up support.

To date, catch-up funding of £4.9bn has been committed by the DfE.

‘We don’t know if tutoring is having the intended effect’

Since the emphasis of the National Tutoring Programme has moved from a centralised approach to one in which schools recruit their own tutors the scheme has started reaching large numbers of pupils.

We don’t have figures for the entirety of the 2021-22 academic year, but the programme was probably going to reach 2 million course starts for the year.

But all we really know is that pupils are starting courses – not whether they’re having the intended effect.

An evaluation of the NTP’s first year, 2020-21, still hasn’t been published, meaning we’re flying blind in terms of knowing whether it’s working.

Overall, then, this leads us to conclude in performance tracker that while schools are weathering the events that have come their way in the past few years better than some other public services, the conditions aren’t in place to get things back to pre-pandemic levels by 2025.

Principally funding: with a £10 billion gap between what Kevan Collins said would be necessary for catch-up and what the Department for Education has made available, we’re unlikely to get back to pre-pandemic standards as quickly as we’d all like.