Essential experiences in science: addressing the gap in primary enquiry-based practical science created by lockdown and aiding school recovery.

Focusing on gaps in practical science that have arisen in primary school education, we will design, refine and disseminate strategies to enable UK schools and organisations to increase resilience and counter the impacts of lockdown. This involves working with upper primary and lower secondary school students and their teachers to rebuild momentum for students who have missed out during the pandemic. Our strategies are designed to recognise and address the particular pressures and issues encountered by disadvantaged students.
The Epistemic Insight Curriculum Framework underpins research by hundreds of practitioners in schools and Initial Teacher Education (see www.epistemicinsight.com). Designed to raise teacher confidence and expertise in science education and action research, it summarises UK curriculum expectations for scientific enquiry and literacy and provides tools to track children's progress. Accompanying resources and CPD embed these objectives and tools into hands-on science activities, cross-disciplinary investigations and real-world problem-solving. These established tools and methods will be used here to discover best practice and to test the efficacy of interventions on children's enquiry skills, scientific literacy, science capital, academic self-concept and attitudes to learning. Validated questionnaires will be used in quasi-experimental studies focusing on core variables of interest and pre-post surveys (Gopalan, et al., 2020). We describe and interpret naturally occurring variations in the baseline data and also changes over time where subjects act as their own controls. As the interventions will be tailored for multiple settings, we use linear multilevel models to model these differences as a random factor (Goldstein, 2003). Based on effect sizes established in our previous studies, we believe that our target sample sizes will be more than adequate to detect the effect sizes of interest, even if we face modest dropout. Qualitative work will analyse survey comments and interview studies with children, parents and teachers.
The Llakes working paper (2020) indicates that around one fifth of school children have not engaged in formal education since lockdown, thus amplifying recognised inequalities in children's education (Andrew et al., 2020) and science capital (Canovan and Fallon 2020). Experiences of practical work in science have reduced and varied widely. When schools return, scientific enquiry will continue to be missing for many children to meet demands of reduced or redirected curriculum and constraints around equipment use. Yet practical science remains a cherished goal, due to its unmatched power to teach curriculum objectives and its positive impact on attitudes to learning, academic self-concept and science capital.
Our project will deliver a UK strategy, helping children aged 8-12 and their families and teachers via:
Flexible, personalised school support - with learning activities that transfer between school and home, thus increasing resilience in the event of local lockdowns in line with recent guidance (DfE, July 2020).
Immediate and long-term benefits - by establishing more effective partnerships between teachers, children and parents/carers and by prioritising disadvantaged areas with support extending to parents as well as teachers, thus providing coherent and consistent messages for the child. Thus we can address (i) the issue identified recently by The Sutton Trust: only 42% of British parents feel confident about teaching their children at home and (ii) the issue of teachers unable to access external CPD: Wellcome's Primary Science campaign research findings (2019) found that only 49% have dedicated release time and 54% had undertaken external CPD.