Five-year-olds with special educational needs in England are lagging a record 20 months behind their peers, according to a report that says the country’s youngest learners face a “deepening crisis”, five years after the pandemic.

Since Covid closed schools, disrupting learning and triggering falls in attendance, there has been widespread concern about the growing attainment gap that leaves disadvantaged pupils and those with special educational needs significantly behind their peers.

According to the Education Policy Institute’s (EPI) annual report, published on Tuesday, there have been “precious few signs of recovery”.

Though the disadvantage gap at primary and secondary schools narrowed marginally between 2023 and 2024, it says disadvantaged pupils remain significantly behind their peers, with the gap up to a month wider than before the pandemic.

The gap has grown yet wider among children in reception class right at the start of their education, with pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) the most severely affected, the EPI analysis shows.

In 2024, five-year-olds with education, health and care plans (EHCPs) – legally binding documents that outline the additional support required – were 20.1 months behind their peers, the widest gap on record since EPI analysis began more than a decade earlier.

Five-year-olds from lower-income families than their peers are also falling further behind, prompting warnings that the impact of the pandemic has had “long-lasting effects on infants’ development”.

Natalie Perera, EPI’s chief executive, said the report showed that five years on from the pandemic the education system had yet to recover.

“Our youngest and most vulnerable learners are still paying the price. This should be a significant concern for policymakers,” she said. “Without swift action, we are baking lifelong disadvantage into the system. Higher levels of funding for disadvantage, addressing student absence, and fixing the Send system, which is at crisis point, are urgent priorities.”

The EPI report compares pupil attainment in 2024 with the previous year and with 2019, the year immediately before the Covid-19 pandemic, based on economic disadvantage, Send, gender, ethnicity, English as an additional language (EAL) and geography.

It finds that fewer disadvantaged young people are participating in education post-16 than at any point since 2019, resulting in more than one in five disadvantaged 16-year-olds out of education or training.

At key stage 4, which culminates in GCSEs and in education for 16-19-year-olds, the attainment of white British pupils has declined since 2019 relative to all other ethnic groups and girls have “made consistently less progress than boys across secondary school once their attainment at age 11 is taken into account”.

John Barneby, the chief executive of Oasis Community Learning multi-academy trust, said: “The growing inequalities facing our youngest and most vulnerable children – particularly those with Send – are deeply concerning and risk entrenching disadvantage for a lifetime.

“Addressing these challenges requires bold investment and a shared commitment across society to give every child the opportunity to flourish and find their place in the world.”

Pepe Di’Iasio, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “From a government whose mission is that background should not be a determining factor in success, we need to see more purpose and positive action.

“The gap identified between five-year-olds with special educational needs and disabilities and their peers is particularly alarming, and emphasises how important it is for the government to get right its planned reform of a system that is under unsustainable pressure and is not working well for anyone.”

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “This report lays bare the widening disadvantage gap this government inherited, and which we are working flat out to solve through the plan for change.

“From next year we will be investing £9bn per year in a revitalised early-education system that helps get children ready for school, with working parents receiving 30 funded childcare hours a week, an almost 50% increase in early years disadvantage funding, and a strong new focus on improving the quality of reception-year education.”