Younger generations will pay a heavy price for the policy response to coronavirus: missed school means lost skills and reduced earnings potential. One way to repair some of the educational damage would be to use small group tutoring, a method with widely proven effectiveness (with four months of extra learning) at a modest cost (less than 1% of the current budget for schools) and on a rapid but feasible timescale (starting in October and finishing by Easter 2021).<\/p>\n
The cumulative nature of skill formation \u2013 and skill loss \u2013 means that this needs to be tackled now. Many details would need to be decided, but the basic structure is here to make a start.<\/p>\n
The costs of doing nothing are huge (Burgess and Vignoles<\/a>, 2020). At a personal level, this is manifested in lower earnings potential for the affected cohorts of young people (Portes<\/a>, 2020). This is reflected at the national level in lower skills: from the mid-2030s and for the following 50 years, about a quarter of the labour force will have lower skills, implying a 50-year period of lower growth (Burgess and Sievertsen<\/a>, 2020).<\/p>\n As well as a fall in income, all the evidence to date points to a widening of inequality. A number of very recent studies suggest that the attainment gap between poor and non-poor students might widen by 36% (Education Endowment Foundation<\/a>, EEF, 2020).<\/p>\n Related question:<\/strong> How might the crisis affect children from poorer backgrounds?<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The policy intervention must come soon. We cannot wait and do this slowly over the next few years. Still less can we wait and \u2018sort it out at GCSE\u2019.<\/p>\n The process through which skills are formed is dynamic: knowledge builds on knowledge \u2013 or as economics Nobel laureate James Heckman and colleagues put it, \u2018skills beget skills<\/a>\u2019. The skill complementarity over time means that if we invest in a 10 year old today, it will cost less than if we invest when that child is 15 years old to get to the same outcome at the age of 16.<\/p>\nHow should we choose a policy?<\/h3>\n