- add-style
- lp-body-content
The global COVID-19 pandemic closed schools around the world, leaving more than 1.6 billion children out of school in the early months of the pandemic. According to a recent UNICEF calculation, around 214 million children – or 1 in 7 globally – have missed more than three-quarters of their in-person learning. The learning loss associated with these school closures is predicted to cost the equivalent of $10 trillion in these children’s future earnings.
Presently schools in 141 countries have reopened for some in-person instruction, but students in two-thirds of countries are not fully back in school. While some countries have been able to organize remote instruction, children learn more when they are in school. Schools also provide a place for many students to interact with their peers, receive nutritious meals and vaccinations, and get psychosocial support. A return to in-person operations in the middle of a global health pandemic, however, will require considerations of both what is in the best interests of students and teachers, as well as the risks to public health.
To aid in reopening schools and stemming learning losses, UNICEF, UNESCO, the World Bank, the World Food Programme, and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) published a joint framework for reopening schools that provides high-level guidance around safe operations, stemming learning loss, ensuring the wellbeing of students and teachers, and reaching the most marginalized children.
How exactly should countries implement these recommendations? How can they move from high-level guidance to specific investments and activities? How much will these additional activities cost and which specific resources will be required? Is there any evidence on the effectiveness of approaches that countries and education systems have been using to support children’s learning inside and outside of school?
To tackle these sorts of questions, the World Bank’s Education Global Practice has (i) created short notes to curate evidence and examples and provide links to materials that countries have used to support various stakeholders (students, teachers, parents, school management) during both remote and in-person instruction, (ii) developed excel-based costing tools to identify the resources required for delivering remote instruction, including social-emotional learning, and for implementing the activities implied by the joint framework, and (iii) invested in randomized control trials around the world to test different approaches that employ digital technologies to support learning at home or to assist educators in the classroom.
The short notes are meant to be “living documents” that offer a start point for implementing recommendations related to health and safety, modifications that might be required in education systems’ pedagogical approach to get children back to learning, and the management of all these activities.
Health and Safety
School reopening decisions should reflect evidence-based estimates of the risks associated with reopening and the risks associated with school closures. Experiences from countries around the world where schools have reopened suggest that with adequate mitigation strategies, schools pose low risk for disease transmission for students, teachers, and communities. Available evidence suggests that children are both less likely to get COVID-19 and less likely to transmit the disease to others. Transmission within school has been low, particularly for preprimary and primary schools, and teachers are more likely to get the virus from other staff, not from students. Given the safe reopening experiences in countries prior to vaccine development, often in the midst of high community transmission, education systems do not need to wait for widespread vaccination for teachers or other adults in the community before reopening, although prioritizing teachers for vaccination may allay their fears of returning to classrooms for in-person instruction. Keeping schools closed will eliminate the risk of disease transmission happening at school but may also imperil children’s learning and psychosocial health.
Minimizing disease transmission in schools (English | French | Spanish)
