Last Updated on November 4, 2026 by Karl Thompson
From March 2020 to the summer of 2022, education policy in England was dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Schools closed to most pupils twice, GCSE and A-level exams were cancelled for two years, and the government then spent over £3 billion on ‘education recovery’.
This post covers:
- the school closures, with a timeline
- what happened to exams and grades from 2020 to 2022
- how learning during the closures differed by social class
- the effects on attainment, the disadvantage gap, young children’s language and mental health
- the recovery policies: the catch-up premium, the National Tutoring Programme and the recovery premium
- how to evaluate them.
The other policies of these years (academies, exams reform, school funding, RAAC, teachers’ pay) are covered in my post on Conservative education policy 2015–2024. For the Labour government elected in July 2024, see Labour education policy since 2024.
The policies below apply to England: education is devolved, and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland made their own decisions. Education policy is part of the sociology of education module, examined on AQA Paper 1 (7192/1). For every era of policy on one page, see my education policies summary.
School closures: a timeline
On 18 March 2020 the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, announced that schools, colleges and early years settings in England would close after Friday 20 March ‘until further notice’. They stayed open for the children of key workers and for vulnerable children, such as those with a social worker or an education, health and care plan.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 18 March 2020 | Closure announced. Summer exams and primary assessments cancelled |
| From 23 March 2020 | Schools closed to most pupils (open to key workers’ children and vulnerable children) |
| 1 June 2020 | Reception, Year 1 and Year 6 encouraged back, plus nurseries |
| 15 June 2020 | Some face-to-face time for Year 10 and Year 12 |
| September 2020 | Schools reopened to all pupils for the new school year |
| 4 January 2021 | The Prime Minister announced a move to remote learning from the next day |
| 5 January to 8 March 2021 | Schools closed again to all but vulnerable children and the children of critical workers |
| 8 March 2021 | Most pupils returned to school |
Sources: DfE, 18 March 2020; Prime Minister’s Office, 24 May 2020; House of Commons Library, Coronavirus and schools: FAQs (CBP 8915).
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) put the first closure at 10 weeks and the second at 9 weeks. Taking in the phased returns and the self-isolation that continued after schools reopened, it estimated that the average pupil lost about 20 weeks of in-person schooling between March 2020 and July 2021 (Blundell et al., 2022).
Exams and grades, 2020 to 2022
2020: the algorithm and the U-turn
With exams cancelled, schools submitted ‘centre assessment grades’ for each student, and the exam regulator, Ofqual, used a standardisation model (the ‘algorithm’) to adjust them. When A-level results came out, many students’ grades had been marked down. On 17 August 2020 the government and Ofqual announced that students would receive their centre assessment grades instead, or their calculated grade if that was higher.
Even before results day there were concerns about relying on teachers’ judgements. In March 2020 the Guardian reported fears that predicted grades tend to be lower for Black and minority ethnic students and those from poorer backgrounds, so cancelling exams could hit them hardest. This links to labelling theory: if teachers’ expectations differ by class or ethnicity, so might their grades.
2021: teacher-assessed grades
In January 2021 Williamson told the House of Commons that GCSE, AS and A-level exams would not go ahead that summer: ‘This year we are going to put our trust in teachers rather than algorithms.’ Students received teacher-assessed grades, based on work and assessments their schools chose, with no algorithm.
2022: the return of exams
Exams came back in 2022 with adaptations: advance information about the focus of exam content, a choice of topics in some GCSEs, and study aids in some exams. Ofqual said that 2022 grading would ‘reflect a midway point between 2021 and 2019’, with a return to pre-pandemic grading planned for 2023.
What happened to the results
| Year | A-level entries graded A* or A (UK) | How grades were awarded |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 25.4% | Exams |
| 2021 | 44.8% | Teacher-assessed grades |
| 2022 | 36.4% | Exams, graded at a midway point |
Source: JCQ, A-level results press notice, summer 2022 (the 2021 figure is the 2022 figure plus the 8.4-point fall JCQ reports).
The rise in top grades wasn’t the same everywhere. According to Ofqual’s analysis, the share of A-level grades at A or A* in independent schools rose from 60.8% in 2020 to 70.1% in 2021, while in comprehensives it rose from 33.1% to 39.3%. My post on arguments for and against private schools looks at the possible explanations.
A research methods point: reliability
The 2020 and 2021 results make a good example of reliability for Methods in Context. In 2019 every student sat the same exams, at the same time, marked by trained examiners and moderated. In 2021 each school set and marked its own assessments, with no common papers. Because the method of measurement changed, the 2021 results can’t be directly compared with 2019’s: some of the ‘rise’ reflects how grades were produced, not just how much students knew. Supporters of teacher assessment argued that it could be more valid in another sense, because it draws on a wider range of a student’s work than a few hours in an exam hall.
Learning during the closures: the class gap
School closures took away one of the things schools do best: giving every pupil the same lessons in the same kind of environment. Learning moved into homes, which differ hugely in space, equipment and how much help parents can give. Several studies found that this widened class inequalities.
The Sutton Trust (April 2020)
A Sutton Trust survey a few weeks into the first closure found that private schools were far ahead with online teaching. In independent schools 51% of primary pupils and 57% of secondary pupils were taking part in online lessons every day, compared with 19% and 22% in state schools. 50% of teachers in independent schools said they were getting more than three quarters of work back, against 8% in the least advantaged state schools.
COSMO (October 2022)
The COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities study (COSMO), run by UCL and the Sutton Trust, surveyed 12,828 young people about their schooling during the pandemic (Cullinane et al., 2022). Its findings on ‘lockdown learning’ include:
- 96% of independent school pupils had live online lessons in the first lockdown, compared with 65% of state school pupils.
- By the third lockdown (January to March 2021) state schools had caught up a lot, but not fully: 95% of pupils at comprehensives with the most affluent intakes had live online lessons, against 80% at those with the most deprived intakes.
- In the first lockdown 24% of pupils at the most deprived comprehensives lacked a suitable device for learning, compared with 6% at the least deprived comprehensives and less than 2% at independent schools.
- Devices mattered: pupils without one did about 8 hours of schoolwork a week in the first lockdown, those with just a mobile phone 10 hours, and those with a laptop or tablet 14 hours.
- By the end of the third lockdown, 53% of those who had lacked a device at the start of the pandemic still hadn’t received one.
The COSMO team argued that ‘educational disadvantage does not end at age 16, so targeted funding should not end there either’, and called for the pupil premium to be extended to 16–19 education.
The IFS
An IFS study (Blundell et al., 2022) found that in the first lockdown, learning time fell by 7 to 8 hours a week more for the most disadvantaged pupils than for their better-off peers. Better-off secondary pupils spent 80 minutes a day more in online classes and private tutoring than the poorest fifth. The gap in hours had closed by the second closure, but the difference in the kind of learning remained.
The same study found the pandemic hit routes into work for less advantaged young people: new apprenticeship starts fell by 45% year on year in the first four months after the first lockdown, and by 66% for 17- to 19-year-olds.
Teachers’ estimates (September 2020)
When schools reopened in September 2020, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) surveyed almost 3,000 school leaders and teachers in over 2,200 schools in England. Teachers estimated that their pupils were, on average, three months behind. Teachers in the most deprived schools were over three times more likely than those in the least deprived schools to say their pupils were four months or more behind. They estimated that 44% of pupils needed intensive catch-up support.
All of this is evidence for the role of material deprivation (devices, space, a quiet place to work) and cultural capital (parents’ confidence and ability to help) in educational achievement.
Effects on attainment and the disadvantage gap
The Education Policy Institute (EPI) tracks the ‘disadvantage gap’: how far disadvantaged pupils are behind their peers, measured in months of learning. Its 2024 annual report found that by the end of secondary school in 2023, disadvantaged pupils were 19.2 months behind, 1.1 months more than in 2019 and the widest gap since 2012. For persistently disadvantaged pupils (those eligible for free school meals for most of their school lives) the gap was 22.9 months, almost two years.
The pandemic isn’t the only possible cause of the wider gap after 2019, but the timing fits the evidence above. The pupil premium post looks at what this means for policies aimed at disadvantaged pupils.
Young children’s language
In November 2022 a BBC analysis of government data found that the number of Reception and Year 1 pupils needing speech and language support at school had risen by 10%, a bigger rise than in previous years. The rise was linked partly to lockdowns, when young children had fewer chances to talk and play with others.
One recovery policy aimed directly at this. In February 2021 the government gave £8 million to the Nuffield Foundation to expand the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) for Reception children. Over 6,500 schools registered in the first year and a further 4,000 in the next two. An NFER evaluation (September 2023) found that children who took part made four months’ additional progress in language, and children eligible for free school meals about seven months.
Students sometimes link this to Bernstein’s restricted code: see my post on cultural deprivation. Be careful, though. Bernstein’s codes are about class differences in how language is used, not about delayed speech, so the link is an analogy rather than evidence for his theory.
Mental health
A systematic review by University College London (UCL) for the government’s scientific advisers (SAGE), dated 11 February 2021, looked at 72 studies from 20 countries on the effects of school closures on children’s health. It found ‘considerable impacts’ on emotional and behavioural problems, with 18–60% of children and young people in the studies scoring above risk thresholds for distress, especially anxiety and depression. Among the findings it reports: 53.3% of girls and 44.0% of boys aged 13–18 had symptoms of anxiety and trauma above the population threshold.
The review’s authors warned that the data were short-term, that ‘longer-term harms are likely to be magnified by further school closures’, and that better-designed research on longer-term effects was urgently needed. The review wasn’t peer-reviewed.
Recovery policy
The government announced three main rounds of ‘catch-up’ or ‘recovery’ funding:
| Announced | Package | Main parts |
|---|---|---|
| 19 June 2020 | £1 billion | £650 million catch-up premium for all state schools in 2020–21 (£80 per pupil, Reception to Year 11; £240 per place in special and alternative provision); £350 million National Tutoring Programme for the most disadvantaged pupils |
| 24 February 2021 | £700 million | £302 million recovery premium (a one-off payment building on the pupil premium); £200 million for secondary summer schools; £200 million for tutoring, including £18 million for early language (NELI) |
| 2 June 2021 | £1.4 billion | £1 billion for up to 6 million 15-hour tutoring courses; £400 million for training teachers and early years staff. The DfE said this took total recovery investment to ‘over £3 billion’ |
Sources: DfE press releases of those dates; catch-up premium guidance.
The National Tutoring Programme
The National Tutoring Programme (NTP) paid for small-group tutoring. By 2022–23, its third year, schools could choose three routes:
- Tuition partners: tutors from organisations approved by the DfE
- Academic mentors: staff employed by the school to tutor full-time
- School-led tutoring: the school’s own teachers or other staff
In 2022–23 the DfE paid 60% of the cost, with schools finding the other 40%, and gave mainstream schools at least £162 for each pupil eligible for the pupil premium. Tutoring was for Years 1 to 11, ideally in groups of three (six at most), in courses of 12 to 15 hours, in English, maths and science (plus humanities and languages in secondary schools). Schools were told to prioritise pupils eligible for the pupil premium.
The resignation of the recovery commissioner
The government’s Education Recovery Commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins, resigned when the £1.4 billion package was announced in June 2021, saying it ‘falls far short of what is needed. It is too narrow, too small and will be delivered too slowly.’ His own proposals were reported to cost around £15 billion, including funding schools to extend the school day by 30 minutes for three years.
The government said instead that it would review time spent in school. Its March 2022 schools white paper set an expectation that all mainstream state schools offer a school week of at least 32.5 hours by September 2023 at the latest. That was a minimum for all schools, not extra catch-up time.
A worked example: what did the catch-up premium buy?
Try the arithmetic. At £80 per pupil, a secondary school with 1,000 pupils got £80,000 for 2020–21. If it spent all of it on its disadvantaged pupils, say 350 of them, that is about £229 each. Using the NTP’s 2022–23 cap of £18 an hour for tutoring (a later year, so only a rough guide), that buys about 12 to 13 hours of tutoring for each of those pupils, and nothing for anyone else.
Students can use this to evaluate: is 12 or 13 hours enough to make up for about 20 weeks of lost schooling? And is it fair to target some pupils and not others?
Evaluating pandemic education policy
The closures
School closures were part of a wider public health response at a time of great uncertainty about the virus. Whether they were the right decision depends on weighing the risks of transmission against the costs to children, and that is a judgement about public health as much as education. What sociologists can do is look at the costs: the evidence above shows those costs fell unequally, with disadvantaged pupils losing more learning, more access to teachers and more chances to get into work.
Was the recovery funding enough?
Most of the evidence here comes from people who said it wasn’t. Kevan Collins said the June 2021 package fell ‘far short’. Sir Peter Lampl of the Sutton Trust called catch-up funding ‘a drop in the ocean’. COSMO found that almost half of young people hadn’t accessed any catch-up learning, and that 46% of comprehensive pupils felt they hadn’t caught up, against 27% at independent schools. The EPI’s figures show the disadvantage gap was wider in 2023 than before the pandemic.
Against that, the government could point to the sums involved (over £3 billion), the NTP’s focus on pupil premium pupils, and programmes such as NELI, which an independent evaluation found worked, especially for the poorest children.
Compensatory education
Much of the recovery money is an example of compensatory education: extra resources aimed at disadvantaged pupils to make up for what their homes can’t provide. The standard criticisms apply. It treats the symptoms (lost learning) rather than the causes (poverty and unequal resources at home), and it can’t easily make up for long-term inequalities in a few months of tutoring.
Inequality and the role of the school
The pandemic acted as a kind of natural experiment. With schools closed, attainment depended more on families, and class gaps widened. That supports the view that schools, for all their faults, reduce inequality as well as reproduce it. Functionalists and social democrats can use it as evidence for the value of universal state education; Marxists would point out that the gaps were there before, and that the closures exposed them rather than created them.
How this comes up in the exam
Pandemic policy is useful contemporary evidence in Paper 1 questions on education policy and equality of opportunity, and on class differences in achievement. For example:
- For a practice essay, see assess the view that education policies since 1988 have improved equality of educational opportunity. The recovery policies are good evaluation material.
- The 2021 grades and the COSMO and NFER surveys work well as Methods in Context examples: reliability, self-report surveys and the difficulty of measuring ‘lost learning’.
Sociology of Education Revision Bundle
If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my sociology of education revision notes bundle, written by Karl Thompson, who taught A-level sociology for eighteen years and spent twelve as an AQA examiner, marking all three papers on the current specification.
Signposting and Related Posts
This post has been written for students studying the education module as part of AQA A-level sociology. Education policy is usually taught in historical order:
- Before and around the pandemic: Conservative education policy 2015–2024.
- Since July 2024: Labour education policy since 2024.
- For every era on one page: education policies: a summary.
Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com
Sources
- Blundell, R., Costa Dias, M., Cribb, J., Joyce, R., Waters, T., Wernham, T. and Xu, X. (2022) ‘Inequality and the COVID-19 crisis in the United Kingdom’, Annual Review of Economics 14: 607–636 (also IFS Working Paper 22/01).
- Cullinane, C., Anders, J., De Gennaro, A., Early, E., Holt-White, E., Montacute, R., Shao, X. and Yarde, J. (2022) Wave 1 Initial Findings – Briefing No. 1: Lockdown Learning, COSMO study, UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities and the Sutton Trust, October 2022.
- Department for Education (2020) ‘Schools, colleges and early years settings to close’, 18 March 2020; ‘Billion pound Covid catch-up plan to tackle impact of lost teaching time’, 19 June 2020; ‘GCSE and A level students to receive centre assessment grades’, 17 August 2020; Catch-up premium guidance.
- Department for Education (2021) ‘New education recovery package for children and young people’, 24 February 2021; ‘Huge expansion of tutoring in next step of education recovery’, 2 June 2021.
- Department for Education (2022) National Tutoring Programme: guidance for schools, 2022 to 2023; Minimum expectation for length of school week, information note, March 2022.
- Education Policy Institute (2024) Annual Report 2024.
- House of Commons Library, Coronavirus and schools: FAQs, CBP 8915 (29 April 2021).
- JCQ (2022) A-level results press notice, summer 2022.
- NFER (2020) press release on schools’ responses to Covid-19, 1 September 2020; NFER (2023) ‘National roll-out of Covid recovery programme boosted young children’s language skills by four months’, 14 September 2023.
- Ofqual (2021) ‘Ofqual’s approach to grading exams and assessments in summer 2022 and autumn 2021’, 30 September 2021.
- Prime Minister’s Office (2020) ‘PM confirms schools, colleges and nurseries on track to begin phased reopening’, 24 May 2020.
- Sutton Trust (2020) ‘Independent school pupils twice as likely to get online lessons every day’, 20 April 2020.
- UCL (2021) Impacts of school closures on physical and mental health of children and young people: a systematic review, paper for SAGE, 11 February 2021 (published on gov.uk 2 July 2021).
- UCL (2022) ‘Four-fifths of school students say pandemic harmed their education’, 13 October 2022 (COSMO).