FEATURE FOCUS: SUMMER LEARNING LOSS
Why are we so obsessed with the summer slide?
and the USA all have around 12 weeks, twice as long for children to forget what they have learnt. Are we being melodramatic and creating a story where none exists?
Paul T. von Hippel *, an associate professor at the University of Texas, now believes that poverty is a much bigger factor: ‘Early-childhood scholars believe that nearly all of the gaps between children’s skills form before the age of five, or even before the age of three. According to their research, the gaps that we observe in ninth grade were already present, and almost the same size, as they were when those children started kindergarten. Where does summer learning loss fit into that picture?’
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n our final look this month at summer learning loss, journalist and regular Education Today contributor Sal McKeown explores the debate around summer learning loss and wonders if we’re not making more of it than we need to.
Go back a few years and we were advising children to make the most of their break, spending more time outdoors, visiting grandparents and extended family, trying new things and learning new skills. Now, we bombard parents and pupils with warnings that a child’s knowledge can regress as much as two months in the six-week break and that the loss of mathematical skills can be even more dramatic. The UK has among the shortest summer holidays of any country in the world. Russia, Spain
Students can even improve over the summer break. I have known learners with disappointing end of year results who take themselves in hand, with stunning results. In term time many children are time poor but, come the summer, their time is their own. Many families report that a child who has struggled with reading, sounding out individual words and ‘barking at print’ all year, suddenly discovers a series of books they like and becomes a confident reader almost overnight. Mairead, an A level student, had dreadful spelling but spent the summer making a list of nearly 250 words she regularly misspelt. This was time well spent because not only did she learn to spell those words, but she freed up memory to focus on content, so she produced more fluent and detailed work when she returned to school. Some parents use the summer holiday to enrol their child in Kip McGrath, Kumon, Atom and other tutoring services. With an hour’s tuition costing over £30, you might assume these are middle class families with a disposable income,
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but this is not necessarily so. Parents take on extra shifts, forgo holidays, dig into savings to make sure their child improves their educational chances. While the focus is predominantly on English and maths, some centres offer science and preparation for GCSE year and A levels. Many children benefit from extra tuition in literacy and numeracy. It is a good way to clear up misconceptions, to build skills and confidence and give them a flying start to the new term. The downside is that it is all about remediation and it eats into the time available for children to have new experiences and discover fresh talents.
* Von Hippel, P.T. (2019). Is Summer Learning Loss Real? How I lost faith in one of education research’s classic results. https://www.
educationnext.org/is-summer-learning-loss-real- how-i-lost-faith-education-research-results/
July/August 2023
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