In light of COVID-19 and the related school closures and missed learning, ensuring universal, early, conceptual and procedural mastery of foundational skills is all the more relevant and important. Many primary-school-aged children will have missed critical foundational learning while out of school. While getting children back to school safely is a top priority, ensuring adequate remedial efforts and streamlining curricula to prioritise foundational learning will be needed when schools reopen to ensure short term learning losses do not compound into larger, long-term cumulative losses (Das et al, 2020; Kaffenberger, 2020).