Theoni Bosman Quarshie has been cramped into a two-bedroom London public housing apartment with her mother and younger sister since the UK went into coronavirus lockdown in mid-March.
Like many 16-year-olds around the world, Bosman Quarshie’s education has moved online. But the drive she once had to study fizzled out when her upcoming high school exams were canceled due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
“It’s really stressful,” she told CNN of the year she spent revising for now what seems like nothing. “I wanted to prove to myself and to others that I could push my grades up.”
The inequality gap between rich and poor, present in education systems at the best of times, is being exacerbated by school closures worldwide, experts say. Poorer students are facing increased obstacles to achieving good grades as they contend with a lack of space to work, problems reaching online resources and psychological challenges.
In England, teachers and exam boards will now predict grades for the GCSE exams by taking “performance on mock exams and non-exam assessment” into account as well as “other relevant data, including prior attainment,” the UK Department of Education wrote in a statement.
Bosman Quarshie’s mother, Valerie, says the economic conditions during lockdown have put the family on the poverty line. On top of that, research shows that disadvantaged children have a greater chance of their grades being under-assessed compared to their richer peers.
A 2017 study by education charity the Sutton Trust found that “high attaining disadvantaged students are more likely to have their grades under-predicted than their richer counterparts.”
“When I go to bed, I’m in tears, sobbing, because it’s all been taken away from her,” Valerie told CNN, “because let’s be honest, the system doesn’t work in our favor as black minority ethnics.”
Source: 90% of the world’s students are in lockdown. It’s going to hit poor kids much harder than rich ones
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