Effects of Education Endowment Foundation interventions on protection from COVID-19 learning loss

This project investigates whether and to what extent Education Endowment Foundation interventions had protective effects against learning loss due to COVID-19 disruption.

We know that COVID-19 disrupted teaching and learning for children and schools in England, but less is known about how and why the effects of this disruption may have varied. This project considers whether and how much participating in educational interventions, originally intended to support improved children’s educational outcomes such as literacy or mathematics achievement, may have also reduced learning loss due to COVID-19 disruption.

The project uses secondary data obtained from the Education Endowment Foundation Data Archive for interventions conducted between 2015/16 and 2018/19 (pre-COVID-19) and data from the National Pupil Database (which contains data for all children and young people in maintained schools in England). From those data, the research team compares predicted educational outcomes after COVID-19 (e.g. in Key Stage 4/GCSE) for pupils who participated in Educational Endowment Foundation trials (experimental studies involving a control and intervention group) before COVID-19 to their actual outcomes to understand learning loss, and then compares that loss across pupils who were in intervention or control groups to understand whether being in an intervention group was associated with a different amount of learning loss after the period of COVID-19 disruption.

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