School disruption and pupil academic outcomes - evidence from the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic in England

Cook, William ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3833-9256 (2020) School disruption and pupil academic outcomes - evidence from the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic in England. In: Covid Economics. Working Paper. CEPR.

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Abstract

The Covid-19 crisis has led to disruption to schooling across the world. Though it is recognized that pupils are suffering immediate learning loss, there exists a lack of understanding as to how this disruption might affect longer-term educational outcomes. This study considers this issue by examining the effect of school disruption in England due to restrictions put in place to manage the Foot and Mouth Disease epidemic in cattle in 2001. Using a difference in difference approach, I analyze whether primary schools that had been significantly disrupted by the epidemic experienced lower performance in standardized tests for pupils aged 11 in English, maths and science in the year of the outbreak and in subsequent years. I find that primary schools that had been significantly disrupted by the measures to contain the epidemic exhibited achievement falls in the year immediately after the outbreak, driven by sizeable falls in maths performance. The negative effects weaken in subsequent years suggesting that the effects of school disruption had faded out to some extent by the time that cohorts that were younger at the time of exposure took the age 11 tests.