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Secondary schools in England are now open and the focus has turned to present Year 10s.

Exams may not be taking place this year, but next year’s Year 11 cohort may not be so fortunate. Therefore pressure is on Year 10s to get caught up quickly.

This blog post takes a look at the effects of the educational gap on GCSE students and what can be done to help students catch up.

Pupils return to classrooms

Secondary school pupils began a gradual return to the classroom this week.

This has started with Year 10 students. The Government has said these pupils “should have face-to-face support ahead of their exams next summer.“

This study reported that 20% of pupils have done less than one hour a day of schoolwork since schools closed in March.

This could mean children fall through the educational gap if GCSE and A Level exams go ahead as normal.

Heads warn on impact on Year 10s

 Current Government guidance has limited class sizes to 15 so only a fraction of Year 10s can attend.

Michael Ferry, Headteacher at St Wilfrid’s Catholic School in Crawley warned:

As long as there’s social distancing, it means numbers are restricted quite alarmingly.

We talk about the exams for next year. There is a fear factor about sending students back to school, about the risk. It’s impractical to maintain social distancing for large numbers.

And then you factor in the extra anxiety when we’ve heard no news about what exams look like next year.

  There’s a lot of students who have been disadvantaged over the course of these last few months, there families have as well.

If we were to go ahead and run exams as we normally would next year, we’ll be reinforcing the levels of disadvantage we’ve got across the whole of society at the moment.

Is there a plan to get students caught up

The Government has announced a £1bn fund to help students get caught up.

£650 million of this will be for one-to-one or tuition groups for pupils they think will need it. £350 million will be for disadvantaged pupils to give them access to teachers.

With a  large range of accessible lessons – more than 11,000 in total – EDLounge Group Ltd can help support students who have lost learning. Designed originally for pupils in alternative provision, the system is a range of support for pupils, from different types of lessons, assessments, quizzes and exams built into the system to tailor directly to pupils needs; to access to teachers who have all been enhanced DBS checked.

For more information, call 01909 568 338.