Philip Nye, FF Education Data Lab
With many pupils returning to school this week for the first time since March, we will soon get an idea of quite how much learning has been lost.
But, as we all aware, there were sizeable differences in the attainment and progress of different pupil groups even before the pandemic struck.
We know, too, that there can often be an interaction between pupil characteristics. See, for example, Mike Treadaway’s blogposts on the interaction of disadvantage status and ethnicity.
In some cases, concerns we have about educational outcomes might lessen when we focus on a smaller subgroup: the GCSE attainment of black girls as a group is higher than that of black children overall.
In other cases, they increase.
