According to the latest exam results, pass rates are now lower than pre-pandemic levels while the attainment gaps are higher. Education writer James McEnaney looks back over the past four years to explore how Covid is still impacting upon schools, teachers and pupils.

We may no longer be wearing masks in the supermarket, LFT-ing every other day, or worrying about being confined to our homes – but that doesn’t mean that the pandemic is now in the past. For young people, especially those currently in senior phase of secondary school, the effects of Covid are still very much a part of the present.

The pupils who have just completed S4 were in primary 7 when Covid emerged. The first lockdown meant they missed the end of their time at primary school, and that their transition to secondary education – a period well known to be particularly difficult for young people – was massively disrupted.

They then missed a significant chunk of that first year in secondary school during the second lockdown. Those who have just completed S5 and S6 were in S1 and S2 respectively, and also missed out on months of school across 2020 and 2021.

During these periods of school closures learning moved online, but this was not a universal experience for all pupils. In some homes, young people had the space and the support and the resources to fully engage in online learning, and while this couldn’t possibly undo the impact of school closures, it did at least mitigate the problems to a degree; but for those without the right tools and environment to learn at home, the problems were instead being magnified.

Think for a moment about two very different experiences.

On the one hand, a middle class teenager sits at a desk in her own bedroom, opens up her own laptop, connects to the fast and reliable internet in her home, logs into Teams or Zoom, and joins her online English class. Her camera is switched on because she doesn’t mind people seeing where she lives, and she fully participates in the lesson, answering questions and taking part in discussions.

Once some work has been set, she goes downstairs to complete it at the dining room table, asking for assistance from her mum and dad (both of whom are working from home) when necessary. She completes the assignment while the class is still fresh in her mind and submits it to her teacher, who is able to see her progress and offer some feedback on what she has produced. It’s all a long way from ideal, but things could be a lot worse.

A few streets away, they are. Here, another member of the class is trying to join the lesson, but he has to share a laptop with two siblings, and one of them is in fifth year attempting to complete Highers, so they’re generally the priority. When he does manage to join the lesson he is late, and struggles to follow exactly what is going on – a problem not helped by the fact that the video call keeps stuttering. He doesn’t want people to see the cramped room he shares with his brother, so he keeps his camera off and doesn’t actively participate. The work that is set confuses him, but he doesn’t have the confidence to ask for help, so he takes a note of what he is supposed to do in the hope it will make sense once he gets started.

He can’t get going right away, however, because his brother and sister both need the laptop, so he'll have to wait until later, by which time he’ll understand the task even less. His parents want to help, but they are both ‘key workers’ – his dad is a social care assistant and his mum does deliveries for a supermarket – so they’re still going out to work while others are staying at home, and aren’t available right now. When he does manage to submit some work it is both incomplete and late, and his teacher struggles to provide as much meaningful feedback as they would like.

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When you take the time to think it through, it’s not hard to see how these wildly different lockdown experiences could still be having an effect now, years after the last one ended.

But it’s not just the time they lost, the lessons they missed, or the knowledge and skills they didn’t gain that have an impact – we also need to remember that for this particular generation of young people, their entire time at secondary school has been blighted by Covid-related disruptions.

Attendance rates have been a concern – both in Scotland and further afield – ever since schools returned. There are likely to be various reasons for this phenomenon, including parents being more likely to keep sick pupils at home, increased incidences of anxiety and other mental health problems (which have an effect even when pupils are at school), the consequences of long-Covid for the young people affected, and – according to many teachers – noticeable changes in some young people’s motivation levels and attitudes towards education.

Even so, there is also a clear link between social class and going to school, with more affluent secondary school pupils recording attendance levels several percentage points above those from more deprived backgrounds.

All of this has also been magnified by the state of the school system, which over the last few years – and despite the heroic efforts of the teaching profession – has struggled to meet the increasing, and increasingly complex, needs of young people while coping with funding cuts, falling teacher numbers, and an ever-widening range of social issues that has included the worst cost-of-living crisis in living memory. Schools have also had to deal with increasing levels of violence and disruption in classrooms, a phenomenon that is itself driven by the ongoing impact, and trauma, of Covid.

Add to that the immense pressure of supporting exam-level students through assessment arrangements that changed each year, and the government’s failure to deliver on promises around supporting Covid recovery, and it’s not hard to see why many secondary school teachers in particular talk about the last few years as being the most difficult of their careers.

And then, having been forced to navigate all of that, all while coping with all the usual troubles and anxieties that come with being a teenager, the current cohort of senior phase students became the first group to have full assessment arrangements reintroduced with no additional Covid support. Despite all those promises during the pandemic, we did indeed just go ‘back to normal’, fully restoring an exam system that is systemically weighted against those from the most deprived backgrounds.

In that context, falling pass rates and ballooning attainment gaps aren’t really a huge surprise, are they?

For Leanne McGuire, chair of the Glasgow City Parents Group, the most recent exam results only serve to highlight “the significant disruptions that have shaped the educational experiences of young people over the past few years, particularly those who were starting high school when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.”

“The sudden shift to online learning, coupled with prolonged periods of isolation and uncertainty, has left a lasting impact on these learners. Now, as they navigate the current education landscape, they face new challenges, including resource shortages and budget cuts, which further hinder their ability to succeed.

“As the education system attempts to return to pre-pandemic norms, it is becoming increasingly clear that this shift has not been smooth or equitable. The rollback of pandemic-era support measures has disproportionately affected pupils from less privileged backgrounds. These students, who often lacked the resources necessary to fully engage in remote learning, are now at a disadvantage in a system that seems to have moved on without them.”

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The Scottish Government claims to understand this too, and although the education secretary would not comment herself, a spokesperson said that those who received their exam results this week “experienced significant disruption to their learning due to Covid at the end of their primary school and start of their secondary school journey,” adding that the government knows “that Covid has had a lasting impact on children and young people, particularly those living in poverty.”

They also said that education secretary Jenny Gilruth “has expressed concerns about the impact of Covid on attendance and the issue of increased persistent absence post Covid is an issue for many countries, not just Scotland, but one that must be tackled head on.”

But the EIS, Scotland’s biggest teaching union, is unimpressed by this rhetoric and argues that despite having been promised “additional funding, staffing and resources to aid educational recovery in the wake of Covid”, schools and teachers “continue to struggle with the impact of inadequate funding, reductions in staffing, and a scarcity of the resources needed to support all young people, including those from less affluent backgrounds and the growing number with additional support needs.”

Failure to do so, they add, means that Scotland will pay a 'very high price' both now and in the future.