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Lost learning: £1.5bn for Covid recovery? More like £30bn says IFS

The £1.5bn so far allocated to lost learning recovery during the Covid-19 pandemic is “highly unlikely to be sufficient” – with a more realistic figure being £30bn.

While government funding to support so-called “catch-up” learning have been unprecedented, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says it is nowhere near enough.

In a commentary, published on Monday (February 1), Luke Sibieta, a research fellow at the IFS, sets out a clear argument for much higher investment in Covid recovery for education and floats a number of radical solutions to increase learning time, such as extending the school day or academic year, summer schools, or mass repetition of whole school years.

He points out that by the February half-term, a majority of children will have lost at least half a year of normal, in-person schooling – which amounts to five per cent of their total schooling.

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