Covid-19 impact on schools: Documents warn of significant risk to learning

Newly released official documents provide a strongly worded warning about the damage Covid-19 has done to the school system.

The Cabinet paper and Education Ministry briefing papers explain the urgent need for a $43 million package announced in September to recruit more teachers and provide catch-up learning for thousands of teenagers.

The documents said there was a small window of opportunity to head off significant ill-effects to both student achievement and the supply of teachers.

"The impacts of Covid-19 on the education system are significant and ongoing," a September Cabinet paper said.

"Significant risks exist if we fail to act. Many learners are likely to experience poor academic outcomes, particularly those in their final years of schooling. This would also risk teacher supply issues worsening, which could lead to further disruption in access to quality in-person education."

The paper said there was a larger than usual number of non-enrolled learners.

"Some learners will not be re-engaged in schooling or will not make sufficient progress, leading to lower achievement and qualification attainment, potentially embedding poor outcomes and other inequities," it said.

Parts of the paper were redacted and the remaining information did not provide any figures on the scale or nature of under-achievement. However, figures provided to RNZ by the Qualifications Authority showed by the end of November students had recorded fewer NCEA credits on average than at the same time in any of the previous three years.

An August briefing paper showed the ministry considered but ruled out asking schools to focus on key parts of the curriculum or extending the school day.

"Targeting certain curriculum areas, such as mathematics or literacy, could mean learners miss out on other learning areas that they enjoy. Extending the school day is not viable, given the levels of stress and tiredness already being reported among both teachers and learners," the briefing paper said.

It also suggested 20 or 40 percent of students might be eligible for extra tutoring and the most effective approach would be classes with tutors three times a week for an hour at a time for 10 weeks.

The papers said providing money directly to schools would be the most effective way of ensuring schools could help students quickly though there was a risk some might not use it effectively.

They said schools could use retired or relief teachers and university students as tutors.

They also said tutoring companies were geared to higher-income families and might not be a good fit for schools in low socio-economic areas.

Teachers in short supply

A September Cabinet paper indicated the supply of teachers was similar to worst-case scenarios forecast last year.

"Recent data also shows that the outlook for teacher supply in 2023 is materially worse than previous years and in line with the more challenging projections from the annual teacher demand-supply planning exercise in late 2021," it said.

"We consider these issues a priority to both mitigate harms already caused by lost learning, and to proactively address short-term teacher shortages before they become more critical," the paper said.

It said without action, pupils might experience more disruption to their learning, and a shortage of teachers could make teaching harder.

"Fully addressing the impact Covid has had on learning will require sustained focus over several

years," the report said.

The report said more school teachers were leaving their jobs, more vacancies were being advertised, and vacancies were being readvertised nearly twice as much as previous years.

"If the current trends continue, 200 to 800 additional primary teachers and 400 to 1000 secondary teachers may leave regular teaching in 2022 compared to 2021 when the borders were closed," the paper said.

"Although it is not possible to quantify the total size of the shortage in the ECE sector due to limitations in data, the early learning sector report teacher supply as one of the biggest challenges they are facing," it said.

'We never imagined this prolonged impact'

Porirua College principal Ragne Maxwell told Morning Report dropout rates are now much higher than they were before the pandemic.

"Jobs have become widely available for young people and everyone's desperate to hire, but at the same time many of their parents - who of course are higher-paid - have lost work.

"That's been a complex interaction where sometimes parents are at home unable to get jobs, and their kids are having to work to support the family."

But attendance for those still enrolled remains the biggest problem.

"Obviously there's been people getting Covid, people having to self-isolate, but there's also been schools having to roster home, having to close early because we simply can't get the teachers and we can't cope with the teacher absences due to illness either.

"Students over these last three years have missed so much school time, and for the seniors - the year 13 who are leaving now - that has been their entire NCEA experience."

For some students, not going to school has become the norm. Maxwell said it's been much worse "than we ever imagined".

"We thought it was going to be worse in terms of losses in the beginning, but we never imagined this prolonged impact on breaking kind of normal habits of school life, such as attendance, over years."

Papatoetoe High School principal and Secondary Principals Association president Vaughan Couillault told Morning Report disruption " came at us from all angles", particularly in the first half of 2022, but the September funding package helped a lot.

"Schools got an amount of money depending on their roll size and equity index number, so sort of based on need and size, and then have been able to deploy that funding to engage tutoring services, engage any sort of learning tool to plug some of the gaps that may have been created over the last two-and-a-half years."

Porirua College used theirs to help students who were otherwise at risk of failing university entrance.

"We have used that to bring in some courses after the senior classes finished. We had a Manaaki Marae course, we had a health and safety course, we had one of our teachers run a dance course to get final dance credits for year 13s who had done Polyfest, that enabled them to get another UE subject," Maxwell said.

"We had a range of things on offer for students who had just failed too many assessments along the way almost entirely due to attendance."

Teachers who took on extra roles to help individual students also benefited financially, and the school also hired a senior attendance officer to get older students back to school - helping them juggle that with work commitments.