Report: It's Time to Get the 'COVID Generation' Back in School
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 12/01/21
A team of education
specialists at UNICEF,
the children's representative at the United Nations, is making a big
push for measures that can help kids get back to school. A new essay
shared results of a World
Bank study that estimated a schooling loss of between
0.3 and 0.9 years for students, with requisite learning loss and
increased dropout rates. As a result, UNICEF researchers stated, this
"COVID generation" of students faces diminished economic
opportunities.
While 100% of North
American schools are back in action, delivering in-person education,
the same isn't true for other parts of the world. Just 17% of the
Middle East and North Africa are doing exclusively in-person
instruction; it's about 29% for South Asian regions; and 32% for East
Asia and Pacific. Globally, about 64% of students have the
opportunity to attend school in person.
Interestingly, the
regions with the least number of new cases of COVID weren't
necessarily the same ones that had resumed in-person teaching. For
instance, parts of Asia and North Africa had fewer cases than North
America and Europe in proportion to their populations, yet countries
in those regions hadn't returned to full-time in-person teaching for
all students.
Nor is lack of
access to vaccination necessarily the reason for wide disparity.
Teachers in most countries were being offered the chance to be
vaccinated as a priority group or as eligible adults -- more than 80%
worldwide. The exception to this was Sub-Saharan Africa, where just
slightly more than half of teachers (54%) were offered the
possibility of being vaccinated.
Yes, the pandemic
has exposed a "silver lining," the authors wrote, in the
form of digital solutions that have expanded "classroom
boundaries to reach more children," enabled kids with
disabilities to take advantage of assistive technology, and engaged
parents more deeply with their children's schooling. At the same
time, the pandemic also exposed the digital gap, with poorer
countries and households struggling the most with a lack of internet
connectivity. Some 463 million children -- the largest share living
in Sub-Saharan Africa -- were unable to participate in digital
learning, the report stated.
What's needed to
make a return to school possible, the report explained, were
investments in remedial education, "alongside prioritizing
teacher vaccination, physical distancing by reducing class- or
cohort-sizes, improving ventilation and water sanitation and hygiene
facilities in schools, and promoting compliance to hand hygiene and
masks guidelines."
"Children and
young people need to be able to resume in-person schooling as soon as
possible," the report urged. And when they return to school,
they must get access to support services, "including
complimentary world-class digital learning," that will help them
get back on track.
The full essay is
openly available on
the COVID-19 Global Education Recovery Tracker, a
joint program of UNICEF, the World Bank Group and Johns
Hopkins University.
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.