The pandemic is the largest disruption to education in history. But research has identified ways to help children make up lost ground. Will they work in classrooms around the world?

By October last year, Meg Brydon could see the terrible toll the pandemic had taken on children at her school. Brydon was a teacher at Ashwood High School, in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia — the city that has spent more time in COVID-19 lockdowns than any other in the world. The school had been closed, on and off, for about seven months.

Before the pandemic, around 10% of children who joined Ashwood at the age of 12 would be below the expected national standard. But in the latest cohort, Brydon could see that a shocking 30% of them were behind. And the damage ran even deeper. So many children had behavioural or psychological problems after lockdowns that some were getting violent, and the school hired a full-time psychologist to help. “The number of referrals to her was astronomical,” Brydon says.

Similar scenarios have played out in classrooms around the world. By February this year, schools globally had been closed because of COVID-19 for an average of 4.5 months, affecting an estimated 1.6 billion students and creating what the United Nations has called the largest disruption to education in history. Even 2 years into the pandemic, 48 countries had not yet fully reopened their schools, according to the UN cultural organization UNESCO.

The consequences of these closures follow a sad but predictable course. In rich countries, disadvantaged and vulnerable children have fallen behind the most. Those in poorer countries have been the hardest hit, and millions will never go back to school at all. UNESCO estimates that today’s generation of students could lose US$17 trillion in lifetime earnings at current values because of missed learning and skills. “We’re really talking about a generational loss,” says Margarete Sachs-Israel, who leads the Inclusive Quality Education Section at UNESCO in Bangkok...

...Tough Sell

The concept of using research in education has been a long, tough sell. “The fundamental issue is that many practitioners do not believe it will ever be a science,” says Andreas Schleicher, who heads the directorate for education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. Teachers are not expected to browse academic journals, and educational policies are often set by the ideology of bureaucrats rather than by research showing what actually works. “Many of them use evidence to confirm what they want to do,” Schleicher says.

Some researchers and educators have been trying to change that view for decades. They want education to operate more like medicine, where a drug typically has to be proven effective in randomized controlled trials before it’s used. Advocates of evidence-informed education argue that teaching and learning methods should also be shown to work by research — rather than being used because of tradition, opinion or the latest fad. But they acknowledge that testing whether a method improves educational outcomes is often more complex than testing whether a drug improves health...

...Dismantling dogma

The crown jewel at the EEF is its Teaching and Learning Toolkit, which is based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of studies, such as randomized controlled trials, that have tested 30 educational approaches. The toolkit translates findings into an easy-to-understand metric: the number of months of additional progress achieved over a year, on average, by children who receive an intervention, compared with similar children who do not. It also displays the strength of the underlying evidence and the intervention’s cost (see ‘Which educational techniques get top grades?’ and go.nature.com/3nbhdzm)...