Five years since lockdown: 5 ways children’s education is still being impacted - in numbers

• Last weekend marked five years since the first lockdown was announced
• Many children had to transition to online learning, while others experienced personal losses
• Attendance, suspension and expulsion rates have all seen shifts since the pandemic
• Expert reports and studies suggest mental health and attainment may continue to take a beating in the years to come

Whether it be performance figures or reasons children are getting suspended, anyone with the faintest interest in school data will find it impossible to navigate Government websites - without constant reminders of the lingering impact of Covid-19.

This past Sunday (March 23) marked the 5th anniversary of then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson announcing the first UK-wide lockdown, in response to the growing threat of the Covid-19 pandemic. The world ground to a halt for many, and the whole country had to adapt to a new normal - and new ways of living, working, and even going to school.

Five years on, the effects are still being felt. Education is no exception, with the pandemic shaping a large part of most young people’s childhoods. In some ways, the system appears to have returned mostly to normal. But many educators believe it will continue to have an impact for years to come too, as these very same young people transition from primary to secondary school, GCSEs to A Levels, and beyond.

Here are five of the changes you might notice in official education statistics since the pandemic, as well as some of the other ongoing issues experts have noticed:

How the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted education

1. Absences

Last week, the Government released absence and attendance figures for the full 2023/24 school year. The overall absence rate - or the percentage of half-days missed for all pupils - for the 2023/24 school year was 7.1%, a small drop on the previous year’s figure of 7.4%.

However, this overall absence rate for any reason remains notably higher than it did before the pandemic. In the 2018/19 school year, the overall absence rate was just 4.7%.

The amount of ‘persistently absent’ pupils, or those missing at least 10% of these half-day sessions, also remains incredibly high. In the 2023/24 school year, one in five children (20%) were deemed persistently absent, down from 21.2% in 2022/23. But this figure is still almost double the amount of children chronically absent from class before the pandemic - which sat at just 10.9%.

2. Future GCSE Results

The height of the pandemic saw the traditional summer GCSE and A Level exam season cancelled in 2020 and 2021. In the years that followed, students sitting these important qualifications had a raft of special measures in place to help them cope with the ongoing disruption.

For the most part, things have since returned to normal when it comes to secondary school exams in England. Most of the special measures are now gone, and both the number of top grades and the overall pass rate in last year’s GCSE season were actually a little better than they were in 2019.

Unfortunately, the results of a major 2024 study by the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Exeter and the University of Strathclyde suggests the true impacts of this will still be felt in the years to come - and may last well into the 2030s.

The research attempted to chart how school closures during Covid-19 hindered children’s socio-emotional and cognitive skills at ages 5, 11, and 14, and used this to predict how it may impact their future GCSE prospects. The researchers’ review of international data found that children lost about six months of learning during the pandemic - rising to eight months for children from lower-income backgrounds.

They predicted that boys who were aged 5 at the time of Covid school closures were up to 4.4 percentage points less likely to achieve 5 good GCSEs, while girls were 4.8 percentage points less likely to do so.

“We predict for example that less than four in ten pupils in 2030 will achieve grade 5 or above in English and mathematics GCSEs,” they wrote. In 2022/23, 45.3% of pupils in England achieved this benchmark.

3. Suspensions and expulsions

The latest government data on exclusions and suspensions at state-funded schools - covering the 2023/24 autumn term - have noted an increase in suspensions of nearly 40% on the same term the year before, while permanent exclusions shot up nearly 35%.

This is an alarming leap in itself, but both figures were also much higher than the pre-pandemic autumn term. In autumn 2023, there were a total of 346,279 suspensions. But in autumn 2019, there were just 178,412 - representing a huge 94% increase.

The most commonly cited reason for both suspensions and permanent exclusions was persistent disruptive behaviour, the data showed. A Department for Education behaviour advisor recently told the Guardian it was possible that “the experience of home schooling during lockdown may well be responsible for the deterioration of some social skills, which, like truancy, will be disproportionately concentrated in sub-groups who were already most at risk of misbehaving”.

“But it doesn’t guarantee that they will remain so chaotic forever,” he continued. “They could, for instance, readjust to the socialising effect of being back at school. It may be that these effects don’t persist in an environment of structure and boundaries. On the other hand, the effect may well be sustainable, and we may well see a bubble move up and create, with the effects of adolescence, a perfect storm.”

4. Mental health

According to mental health charities, the pandemic has had a significant impact on young people’s mental health. A Parliamentary report published in November 2024 found that the evidence suggests that psychological wellbeing has been declining in schools - and this was accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

A mental health survey of nearly 13 thousand young Britons - part of the COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities (COSMO) study - found that in 2022, 44% of people aged 16-17 said they had experienced high psychological distress, compared to 23% in 2007. This figure was especially high among young people who had suffered a severe Covid-19 infection, had to shield, had experienced food insecurity, or had experienced a personal loss during the pandemic.

The COSMO study also found that those who reported high feelings of distress were almost 85% more likely to say they were less motivated to learn, than those with average or low psychological distress (68% compared to 37%).

But delivering mental health support through schools (a priority for the current Labour Government) also posed its own challenges, the report noted, with students with poor mental health more likely to have low attendance. Possible solutions mentioned included schools working to create a culture of connection, belonging, inclusion and psychological safety among students - and staff being supported to develop mental health support skills.

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5. Readiness for school

Children in England often enter Reception as young as four years old. While they’re certainly not expected to have any in-depth knowledge on everything about school life at first, there are certain social, health and hygiene skills that teachers would generally prefer they had a basic grasp on before they arrive in the classroom.

One of these is the ability to use the toilet by themselves, without an adult’s help. But late last year, a report by early years charity Kindred found that 1 in 4 children were starting school not knowing how - meaning staff were losing teaching time in order to help.

Children's Bowel & Bladder Charity ERIC told the BBC that it had been a growing issue over the last few years, one chief executive Juliette Rayner attributed, in part, to the pandemic. She said the issue was linked with the fact children starting school last year were born during or near the start of the pandemic, “so in quite a lot of their early years they haven't had as much attention on their social development”.

A Bristol City Council early years consultant, Beth Osborne, agreed, telling the broadcaster: “We've seen, over the years, Covid having an impact on children and potty training, and more children starting reception in nappies… It's really important that children and families are given support to make this happen a little bit earlier so that when they start school they're ready for their learning, so that they can make friends and they can engage and develop to the next stages.”

What impact did the pandemic or lockdown have on the young people in your life? Share your story and make your voice heard by leaving a comment below.