The Observer view on GCSE results: this widening gap will blight children’s lives | Observer editorial

August is always an anxious month for young people awaiting exam results. But this year brought an added stress: Ofqual, the exams regulator, had indicated that this year grade distributions would return to pre-pandemic standards, meaning pupils would be subject to tougher grade boundaries than a year ago. A-level and GCSE results are now in, and together they confirm what a growing body of evidence has already indicated: that the pandemic has resulted in significant amounts of learning loss, particularly for children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. And as Prof Sir Kevan Collins, the government’s former education recovery tsar, tells the Observer today, these results are the product of ministers failing to invest sufficiently in support for children to help them make up ground they lost during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.

The headline results are lower than last year, as expected: after A-level and GCSE results were unavoidably inflated as a result of moving to teacher-assessed grades in 2020 and 2021, Ofqual was always going to need to reverse towards the 2019 grade distribution; the question was simply how fast it would get there. Ofqual ultimately decided on a two-year pathway back, arguably the right decision in that it is better overall for young people, universities and employers to have maximum consistency in terms of what a certain grade means year to year; as a result, there will be three years of results that should be interpreted differently to what came before and after the pandemic, not four or five.

But the results are also showing worrying signs of pandemic learning loss and a growing gap in attainment between young people from more and less affluent backgrounds. Ofqual released the results of the National Reference Test at the same time as GCSE results last week; this is a test in English and mathematics taken by a nationally representative sample of year 11 students that gives an indication of absolute standards and how they are changing over time. It shows there has been no decline in average standards in English among 16-year-olds since March 2020, but that there has been a significant drop in average maths performance.

There has also been a widening gap in results between London and the rest of the country for A-levels and GCSEs. For GCSEs, almost three in 10 entries were awarded a grade 7 or above in London; in the north-east, that figure was fewer than one in five. We do not yet have results data broken down by socioeconomic background, but these large regional disparities indicate a widening gap between children from less affluent backgrounds and their peers compared with the start of the pandemic. This is in line with research by the Education Policy Institute, which has highlighted that in primary schools the socioeconomic gap in attainment has grown by about 6% since 2020.

This growing gap will have a profound impact on young people’s lives. The UK already had a long tail of underachievement before the pandemic, with internationally high numbers of young people leaving school without basic qualifications in literacy and numeracy. And the socioeconomic gap in attainment had started to open up again in early years, primary schools and secondary schools before Covid hit. The legacy of the pandemic is that children’s education, employment and economic wellbeing will be further affected, and long into the future.

It didn’t have to be like this. While Collins was advising the government, he recommended an ambitious £15bn programme of catch-up support to address the impact of pandemic school closures on learning. He resigned when this was watered down to a £1.4bn tutoring package by the government, amounting to a measly £22 per primary school pupil per year. Meanwhile, support for children such as family support, social and mental health services remain desperately underfunded even as need has risen; waiting lists for mental health services have lengthened and the thresholds to access them have risen. This will be feeding into the worryingly high absence rates schools are seeing post-pandemic, which again particularly affect children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and those with special educational needs. These high absence rates in turn have an impact on educational outcomes and feed the attainment gap.

As Collins argues, the data suggests that many children have proved resilient in the wake of the pandemic, but there is a group who have been much more profoundly affected who would have needed much greater support from their schools and other services. But the funding for intensive tutoring, after-school enrichment activities and mental health services and wellbeing support simply did not materialise sufficiently. Added to that, schools had been struggling for a decade in the run-up to 2020 with falling real-terms budgets, and a teacher recruitment and retention crisis that persists to this day.

The result of all this inaction is a growing socioeconomic and regional divide in education outcomes that could have been avoided had the government invested sufficient time and energy. Instead, ministers have pushed out headline-grabbing announcements that have no hope of significant impact, such as the launch of 15 free schools across the country, including one run by Eton. The sad but simple truth is that minimising the impact of the pandemic on children and young people has never been a priority for this government.