Hours of lost learning time
Lockdown saw teachers transform the way they teach, going above and beyond for their pupils. Yet the implications of four months without face-to-face learning are inescapable.
- Children on average have spent 2.5 hours a day doing schoolwork during lockdown.
- Only 17% have put in more than four hours a day.
- Over two million have done no schoolwork, or less than an hour a day.
When you think that a typical school day is between six and seven hours, combine this with the fact that lockdown lasted for months, the reality hits of just how much learning time has been lost.
With the switch to home-learning comes the risk of widening the attainment gap, exacerbating existing inequalities as access to resources, home set-up, and level of family support all have a role to play in children’s home learning experience.
So, the question is now, what can be done to ensure this impact is not felt long-term?
What uPlay Sports are doing? Lockdown has also had a huge impact on children’s physical activity levels. During lockdown 1:
- The number of children getting the recommended 60 minutes of activity a day dropped from 47% to 19%.
- 36% of children said they had less opportunity to be active because they were not at school.
It is clear that schools play an important role in providing a range of opportunities for their pupils so engage in physical activity within the school day, usually through PE lessons and extracurricular clubs. We want to take this a step further and support schools by providing innovative solutions that will have an even bigger impact on their pupils.
Enter the concept of Physically Active Learning (PAL). As well as the numerous physical benefits, research has shown that physical activity can also boost cognitive performance by improving attention, motivation, and enjoyment.
Maths on the Move is a maths-based intervention that uses PAL as a driving force for boosting pupils’ confidence and attainment in maths. Not only does MOTM help your pupils reach their 30/30 targets by fitting more activity into the school day, but it is an evidence-based tool for improving academic performance.
What the government is doing:
The government has announced a one-off universal £650 million catch-up premium for the 2020 to 2021 academic year.
A guide for schools has been published by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), providing evidence-based approaches that effectively support pupils when it comes to the task of catching up. A suggested use of the catch-up premium is intervention programmes that:
- Meet a specific need
- Can be delivered to small groups
- Include regular sessions, maintained over a sustained period
- Carefully timetabled
- Allow for the monitoring of pupil progress.
The Maths on the Move program checks all of the boxes for the suggested use of the catch-up premium, and it has been newly refreshed to adhere to new COVID-19 guidance.
Designed in 3 term blocks of 12 weeks of lessons, each lesson objective mirrors that of the maths curriculum enabling MOTM to run alongside classroom teaching. So, there’s your well-targeted, regular sessions over a sustained period of time.
Experienced educators, learning materials, and an online platform are all part of the MOTM programme with each child receiving a termly progress report. Monitoring of pupils’ progress: check. Accountability and justification for Ofsted: check and check.
We can discuss timetables with you and create risk assessments that are specific to your setting and in line with your policies. There’s that required careful timetabling.
What we can do together:
We can deliver MOTM in your school and help your pupils get the most out of a Physically Active Learning environment.
Your safety, pupils’ safety, and our team’s safety is top priority. We can work with your specific COVID guidelines in addition to the adjustments that have already been made to the programme.
- Resources required for each lesson are reduced to only those that are essential. Meaning? Sessions can take place outside where possible.
- Each child will also be given a personal whiteboard and pen in order to limit the sharing of resources (and the debates over who gets to write…).
We may all still be shrouded by lots of uncertainty in this global situation, but the need for action to prevent long-term consequences of lost lockdown learning hours remains one certainty we still hold.
If you would like to chat through how we can collaborate to best support you and your pupils, send us an email at firstname.lastname@example.org to arrange a convenient time.