Catch-up is a very simple name for a very complicated thing. It’s complicated because to talk about catch-up in any depth, we first have to answer a number of questions: what do we mean by ‘catching up’? Catching up with what? Catching up with whom? And then there’s the thorny question of how to measure the extent to which someone has caught up. And perhaps the thorniest question of all: how best to go about catching up?
So, catching up with what? And how to measure it? Schools and colleges use a host of measures designed to describe what they mean by a high-quality education but, for me, chief amongst them should be measures of the quality and quantity of what learners know, in terms of their literacy and numeracy, and in the discrete subjects – English, Maths, Science, History, Geography, Music, Art, French and so on. Focusing on this notion of knowledge catch-up, making specific catch-up plans involves determining 1) Where students are at the point of measurement and 2) Where they ought to be by that point – the difference between those two things is, clearly, what needs to be made good. If we have a battery of good-quality diagnostic tests for learners to do, and a set of curriculum-related expectations against which to measure where they are, we could make a good fist of doing this.
But there are problems with taking that methodical, diagnostic approach: first, since learning only happens over time (I wrote about this in my last blog), it would be logical to say that if people have ‘lost’ a year of learning, it will take them around a year, or a very long time at least, to catch up.
Second, since learners tend, almost invariably, to have different starting points, what it means to ‘catch up’ will be different for different people. Some people may, for example, have actually learned more during lockdown than they might have done had it not occurred, whilst others may have started lockdown even further behind than they are now etc…
The other big complication with catch-up is when it might happen. Say I have a Year 10 Science class returning from lockdown: they will hopefully sit their Science GCSE next summer; we still have a lot of content to study between now and then. If I stop and try to plug all of the varied gaps in my students’ knowledge before moving on, I will run out of time to cover the curriculum by the time the exams start in the summer of Year 11. In this cases, my best bet is probably to try to weave in revision of key lockdown learning whilst at the same time moving ahead with the curriculum, through frequent retrieval practice.
Short-term fixes tend not to work long-term. Initiatives such as Saturday-Morning School, extending the school day for some students, and holiday programmes such as Easter School and Summer School may have some short-term benefit for some people but they don’t feel like sustainable long-term approaches to addressing the gaps in knowledge between individual learners and groups of learners. The students who are most likely to attend these extra sessions are those well-motivated learners who probably need them least, and those with the most to catch up are probably the least likely to attend. Let’s think about an imaginary learner called Mark: Mark is a Year 10 ‘Disadvantaged’ student; he has always struggled a bit with literacy and numeracy; his reading age is two years below his chronological age; he left Primary school well behind the majority of his peers; his typical attendance is below 90% and he gets into the odd scrape at school; he doesn’t particularly like school but he does enjoy a few of the subjects, including sport and DT. Mark is looking forward to the point when he can leave school and get a job and earn some money. Try telling Mark that he now needs to stay behind after school most days to catch up, and he needs to give up his some of his Easter and Summer holidays, too. I can guess what Mark might think about that proposal, but it may not be printable and the likelihood is that Mark will simply not attend the catch-up sessions; or, he will attend a few of them and then stop.
The most sustainable long-term model for addressing gaps in learners’ knowledge – catching up – is a knowledge-based curriculum that spells out exactly what all learners should know by each point in the curriculum; explicit teaching of the content that includes frequent retrieval practice; and ongoing targeted intervention, from as early as possible, for those individual learners who are well behind their peers (especially in literacy). To exemplify this last point: say we have Macramé as one of the subjects on our KS3 curriculum that all students should have the opportunity to do, it just doesn’t make sense for Johnny to do Macramé for a double period per week when he has joined Year 7 with a reading age of six and a half years. To help people catch up and indeed to help them learn well, we need to think long-term about the best curriculum for the learners. A carefully-sequenced curriculum, set out so it spirals upward through the years, explicitly taught, that includes ongoing provision for those who are behind, is surely the most sustainable one for everyone.
