As part of The Herald’s coverage of 2024 exam results, which showed pass rates falling while attainment gaps increase, EIS General Secretary Andrea Bradley explains the impact of Covid on Scottish education and calls for “significantly greater investment” from the Scottish Government and local councils.

Despite the colossal commitment and effort of the teaching workforce, the impact of the Covid pandemic on young people’s learning experience was profound, and the consequences continue to impact on young people today.

The stresses placed on young people during the pandemic, throughout each lockdown period and beyond, are immeasurable. The consequences will be long-lasting and have the potential to impact on young people for many years to come. The impact on young people from less affluent backgrounds has been particularly painful, with serious consequences for educational equity and the drive to tackle the attainment gap which, as we saw this week, continues to persist and actually grew based on this year’s SQA results.

Most of this year’s National 5 candidates experienced severe disruption to their final primary year and first year in secondary. Every teacher knows that this transitional stage is absolutely critical, but it is even more so for young people who are from disadvantaged backgrounds and for those with additional support needs.

Ordinarily, schools work tirelessly and with stretched resources to seek to ensure enhanced and seamless transitions for these children and young people, with school visits, transfer of information and teacher liaison to make sure teachers know their pupils and can give them the best chance of success.  This was unquantifiably harder during the early stages of the pandemic and we should not underestimate the lingering impacts of this disruption, despite the best efforts of schools and families to overcome it.

In the switch to remote learning,  EIS members highlighted, at an early stage, significant levels of non-engagement, particularly amongst children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.  In large part, this was due to digital poverty, where many households had limited or no connectivity and lack of access to devices.  Shockingly, when teachers would plan their daily check-ins with their classes, some learners could not call in as they either had no device or had to wait their turn on the family’s only device.

The EIS has long highlighted issues around digital inequity in education; it is deeply concerning that it took a pandemic to reveal its true extent, and it is equally concerning that it continues. The EIS is also concerned that the experience of the pandemic is being cited in some quarters of Scottish Education as justification for attempts to increase virtual learning provision for young people in lieu of human-centred, face-to face learning and teaching, and we would caution strongly against this.

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The aftershocks of the pandemic are also seen in the alarming drop in school attendance rates to 90.2%, a trend which is more pronounced among children and young people from poorer economic backgrounds and those with additional support needs.  Whilst the reasons for this require to be fully investigated, EIS members report that since the pandemic, increasing numbers of pupils do not attend school due to school-related anxiety, whilst many more who do attend experience poor mental health and cannot get adequate support because it simply is not available on the scale that it needs to be.  It is hard to see how this cannot have an adverse impact on attainment of the least advantaged children and young people who have lived their entire lives under austerity, and suffered more recently the ravages of the pandemic and an unprecedented cost of living crisis.

Further, we should never forget the fact that Covid impacted poorer communities harder, and that teachers have had to support many children from those backgrounds who disproportionately suffered isolation, trauma and bereavement.

Schools were promised additional funding, staffing and resources to aid educational recovery in the wake of Covid. Sadly, this has proven to be both too short-term and wholly insufficient to allow schools to provide the additional support that young people need to overcome the complex challenges that they continue to face. It is a cruel irony that in the full wake of Covid, local authorities were being urged and some were trying to recruit every single GTCS-registered teacher, including those long-retired; whereas now, with huge challenges before us, we have some local authorities slashing teacher jobs, increasing class sizes and forcing recently qualified teachers to seek careers elsewhere and other, more rural, local authorities struggling to recruit teachers at all.

The reality is that, far from having additional resources, 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.

In order for these issues to be tackled, Scottish education needs significantly greater investment and a renewed commitment from the Scottish Government and local authorities to support schools in getting it right for every young person. If the Covid 19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that there’s a very high price to pay, both in the immediate and the longer term, for the political choices that result in underinvestment in public services, not least our education system.