Learning through disruption: rebuilding primary education using local knowledge

This project is intended to inform public debate on how the monies committed to the Education Recovery fund (so far £1.3 billion) can best be used to support pupils in primary schools in the aftermath of the pandemic. The Education Recovery Commissioner is working to an open brief with the declared intention that "decisions on catch-up should be locally-led, but supported by the evidence" (Schools Week, 2021). Although the need to invest in education is clear (Sibieta, 2021; EEF, 2020), quantitative studies cannot yet advise on exactly where and how recovery monies should be spent. Early evidence includes reports of bounce-back and unexpected gains for some pupils (Kuhfeld et al 2020); while interventions designed to "catch-up" small target groups of students performing below expected levels in normal times may not be appropriate or easy to scale-up in these exceptional circumstances (NAO, 2021). This project will bring new evidence to bear on the local dimensions to recovery planning through context-sensitive case studies, using a purposive sample to explore how the most pressing issues in recovery are identified in a diversity of schools and the responses they lead to. Our previous research on COVID demonstrates that school catchments influence schools' actions during a period of disruption (Moss et al, 2020). By purposively sampling primary schools working with different social catchments that faced a range of challenges during COVID, we will explore the local and multidimensional aspects of the pandemic's effects on education and their implications for the broader policy discussion on planning for recovery. We will do so by focusing on what each section of these diverse school communities has made of the experience of learning during the pandemic and assessing how this affects their priorities as schools return to something more like normal functioning. This matters as to date local dimensions to recovery planning have been largely overlooked in favour of very different forms of research which have garnered more publicity. In particular, media coverage has focused on large scale quantitative modelling of potential impacts that must at this stage remain speculative (EEF, 2020) and indeed, are prone to inciting moral panics (Forsyth, 2021). This may only distort government planning and distract from what schools might more sensibly do now. Policy driven in this way risks leading to a poor fit between "solutions" imposed from above, with too little regard for the supporting evidence (CCT, 2021), and actual conditions on the ground. Without sufficient fine-grained attention being paid to what is really appropriate locally, a great deal of money may in effect be wasted. To refocus attention on the local dimensions to post-COVID planning for recovery as schools reopen more fully, this project will: 1. explore schools' strategies for supporting pupil learning post-disruption, in response to their local circumstances and in dialogue with their immediate support networks 2. take account of the diversity of voices within the school community (staff, parents and pupils); the extent to which they converge or diverge on thinking about the consequences of this period of disruption for individual pupils; and whether they are reciprocally understood. 3. through comparison of similarities and differences in individual schools' priorities and strategies for the future, identify the role local knowledge should play in determining how recovery funding ought to be allocated and spent. In this way, the context-sensitive case studies planned for this project will bring evidence to bear on how local knowledge can contribute to a national strategy for rebuilding education, at a point when national decisions are still to be reached over how any recovery funds are spent. Findings will clarify how much discretion schools should be able to exercise in order to successfully meet local priorities and needs.