The Lockdown Knockdown- Aisha Zaffar- The Langley Academy

“550 school lessons were lost during the pandemic”

The past two years have been detrimental towards an average student’s life in the UK. With GCSEs creeping around the corner and the rising tension of many students, lockdown had only added to the burden of many students due to the many gaps of knowledge introduced from quarantine.

Researchers analysed that the classroom days lost between March 2020 and March 2021 in England was a maximum of 110 days-that’s a whopping 550 lessons lost during the pandemic- this would, of course, have had an adverse effect on learning and would have resulted in a disrupted school curriculum throughout schools in the UK. You may be thinking, how on earth can children miss approximately 110 days of school, and still manage to keep their grades up? The answer is simple, to account for the level of disruptions in education, GCSE and A-level examiners in 2022 were asked to be more generous with marking test papers than in years before the pandemic, and 2021 examinations underwent dramatic changes to be made much easier. This would have helped many students in passing their exams, as well as bringing down their stress levels.

A year 10 student that was interviewed about lockdown states “I was stressed out, as my performance was brought down in school, I had a lot of spare time during it which I used to teach my younger brother and myself the learning we missed, I studied most hours of the day every day to catch up with the schoolwork.” It is important to note that stress from students can not only demotivate them from doing the work, but can also reduce overall performance and academic achievement, which is the opposite of what a teacher would want to see from a student.

The same student also stated “lockdown taught me an essential skill, which is how to be independent.” This shows that through the dark time of the virus, there are still many bright sides to be looked at, and acknowledged, and we must think positively throughout.  The years preceding the virus, GCSE pass rates were averaging 67% and below, however, in 2021, that percentage had surged to 77.1%, which was the highest past rate in the past two decades.