An Education Review Office (ERO) report has found that students across the country are still catching up after the years of disruption with Covid-19, and it’s showing in their grades.

Nationally, NCEA level two results are below where they were before the pandemic; attendance is down; learning levels are worse than expected for this time of year; and writing is a significant area of concern.

Different schools have been affected to varying degrees, with students in poorer areas tending to the furthest behind, ERO said.

At Te Kura o Tititea Mt Aspiring College (MAC), Wānaka’s local high school, principal Nicola Jacobsen said the school was well equipped to address the effects three years of Covid-19 have had.

“I think we are starting to see that the pandemic has impacted each family and whānau in different ways, and an outcome of this is loss of learning,” she told the Wānaka App.

The ERO report, Long Covid: Ongoing impacts of Covid-19 on schools and learning, recommends schools should focus on making up for lost learning opportunities, target learning support for those who have been most affected, and support staff.

That is well underway at MAC.

“I would imagine that at each level of the education sector that it is a similar experience - there is a loss of learning, and by knowing our students and using achievement and attendance data, we can put effective support in place,” Nicola said.

The school has already identified that writing needs to be a “real focus” for junior students, she said, and literacy skills improvements are its primary ERO focus for the next two years. 

MAC offers a number of programmes to support students and provide literacy development for staff, including Literacy Support (customised, intensive support in reading comprehension, word study, and grammar) and Literacy Acceleration (which focuses on writing skills, including sentence and paragraph structure, punctuation, and elaborating on ideas, as well as some work on comprehension strategies).

Meanwhile, senior students at MAC are achieving strong results.

Nicola said based on current data - internal assessments completed so far - senior students’ pass rates are looking similar to previous years.

“Each year level [in the senior school] is tracking at above 90 percent for NCEA,” she said.

ERO’s report, Long Covid: Ongoing impacts of Covid-19 on schools and learning, released in June, was based on interviews with 3,052 students from 98 schools, 1,209 principals and 349 teachers.

Read the full report here.

PHOTO: MAC