AIBU to think that the attainment gap will widen further.

[mountainhighenough]

I've not looked deeply into facts and figures, however, on the surface, it seems that Covid-19 is spreading in the more deprived areas of the country. Possibly because of multigenerational households, overcrowding, the type of employment, etc. This means that children in these areas are more likely to have their schools closed or just their bubbles.

Two weeks is obviously a long time when it comes to education.
Meanwhile, children in more leafy more rural locations may find that they don't have to isolate and their education for the year may remain undisrupted. This isn't a guarantee, of course, but it may be the case.

If, for example, a child has to isolate 3 times over the course of the academic year, that is 6 weeks of education they may miss.

Surely there will be a huge difference in the education that children receive depending on where a child lives and if it is a hotspot. Do you think that eventually there will be more investment into plugging these gaps for the worse impacted children?

I think I already know the answer to this but interested to hear other views.

Not necessarily OP, in Scotland East Renfrewshire and West Dunbartonshire were two of the first places to be put back into a 'mini lockdown' and both are very affluent areas.

The first city to be locked down again was Aberdeen which is fairly wealthy due to its Oil links.

There will be differences in attainment as per the usual postcode lottery. People with money can afford tutors, not everyone is so lucky.

I would love to see this being an opportunity for our education system to make lasting change. The current measures and methods are so flawed. Give teachers back some creative input and less form filling.

I think its more complicated than that. I live near Hull, which generally comes close to the top on Most Deprived Cities lists, and Covid has largely passed the city by. Likewise its pretty much bypassed the seen-better-days seaside towns along the coast here. Weirdly I think high levels of poverty have 'protected' some particular communities at least in the short term - a combination of being insular socially & economically (plenty of poorer people in my area never venture far) and being out on a limb geographically. More affluent areas - like the affluent London commuter built down I used to live in - took much more of a hit in the spring because their populations are just much more mobile. My guess as someone from a very disadvantaged background myself is that many poor communities will be hit hardest not so much by Covid but by the fallout, in particular the fact that the government will basically have no money for the next ten years.

I live in an area of high deprivation. Over four thousand children have dropped off the primary school radar altogether, five hundred in one city. They just haven’t come back to school and no one official knows Where they are. It’s a social disaster.