Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, said: “This report shows the scale of the challenge in helping children recover lost learning during the pandemic.

“The good news is that it shows strong progress made by educators once children returned to schools in the 2021 summer term. Educators know what they are doing, and it is important that schools are allowed to focus on the strategies and programmes they know work best for the children in their schools.

“But schools are still suffering from huge disruption, with high levels of Covid-related absence for both pupils and staff. This needs to be recognised and more needs to be done to help bring the situation under control to allow schools to concentrate on the excellent recovery work they are doing.

"The additional pressures of the return of all statutory tests this year is a distraction from the work on recovery, both academic and pastoral, which schools are prioritising. It would be impossible to use any data generated by those assessments for accountability purposes either.  So we question why they are going ahead at all."