FEATURE FOCUS: SUMMER LEARNING LOSS
Tackling the summer learning gap
Is shortening the summer holiday the answer?
We’ve seen calls to shorten the summer holiday, with one study arguing that schools in England should ditch the school calendar ‘stuck in place since Victorian times’ and replace it with shorter summer holidays and longer half-term breaks to improve the lives of pupils and teachers. While this report was focused on tackling post-pandemic education inequalities, it raised a number of important points that are also applicable to the ‘summerslide’.
Firstly, there’s not only the lost learning to consider. There’s also the social-emotional and cognitive impact of being out of school for an extended period of time.
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mma Slater, Head of Education at Access Education, takes a look at one surprisingly simple way to help stop the ‘summer slide’.
For educators, the first few weeks of the autumn term can feel like they’re revisiting topics that learners were more than proficient in only six weeks earlier. This is known as the ‘summer slide’ or the ‘summer learning gap’ and there’s lots of discussion around what can be done to reduce its impact.
Despite children being assessed in exams on their cognitive skills - such as reading and writing, it’s well known that socio-emotional skills are just as important in achieving good GCSE results. This includes an ability to engage in positive social interactions, cooperate with others, show empathy and maintain attention.
Secondly, the report highlighted how calendar reform would help to alleviate the mounting fatigue and pressure that tends to build during the long term before Christmas. However, critics argue that a six week break provides some much needed down-time, as both learners and educators prepare for the new academic year. This is especially important given the ever- increasing number of educators taking time off work due to stress and wellbeing related
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concerns, as well as the fact the number of children in mental health crisis has reached an all time high.
It’s clear that rebalancing the school calendar can only go so far and there are a number of other initiatives that can help to reduce the summer learning loss.
Summer reading programmes Organised in collaboration with libraries across the UK, the Reading Agency’s Summer Reading Challenge has been encouraging young people to continue reading between July and September for 25 years.
Last year, nearly 700,000 children took part in the challenge, committing to reading a set number of books over the summer to win stickers and a goody bag at the end of the programme. While this initiative is aimed at primary school children, promoting the idea that learning can continue outside of the classroom and term time will have a lasting impact on young people as they progress through KS3 and KS4 and onto further education.
Turning on the subtitles
Given that over 56% of children between 8-18 don’t enjoy reading in their free time, and the fact that almost one in five (18.6%) children in England between the ages of five and eight do not have access to books at home, parents might find it challenging to encourage reading for six weeks. This is especially true for those struggling
July/August 2024
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