Children and COVID-19 Research Library

This policy brief proposes reforms in primary and secondary education as developing Asia copes with the impact of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). It explores blended learning modalities that can be applied beyond the pandemic.

As we enter 2021, the world continues to grapple with containing the deadly spread of the COVID-19 virus. And education continues to be the silent victim of this pandemic. Save Our Education Now sets out five, evidence-based actions that governments should prioritize to ensure that children whose education has been disrupted by the pandemic can safely return to school and catch up on the learning they have missed out on. Our new analysis suggests that just over US$50 billion is needed from donors to implement these actions and protect the futures of the most marginalized children from the pandemic. 

Understanding severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection and transmission in educational settings is crucial for ensuring the safety of staff and children during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study estimated he rate of SARS-CoV-2 infection and outbreaks among staff and students in educational settings during the summer half-term (June–July, 2020) in England. In this prospective, cross-sectional analysis, Public Health England initiated enhanced national surveillance in educational settings in England that had reopened after the first national lockdown, from June 1 to July 17, 2020.

The COVID-19 outbreak has ravaged all societal domains, including education. Home confinement, school closures, and distance learning impacted students, teachers, and parents’ lives worldwide. In this study, we aimed to examine the impact of COVID19-related restrictions on Italian and Portuguese students’ academic motivation as well as investigate the possible buffering role of extracurricular activities.

Indigenous communities continue to be under-resourced, under-funded, and overly managed and policed (Greenwood et al., 2012), which has only been exacerbated by COVID-19. Our ability to choose our own path has been gated, leaving only a singular paved road toward the center; toward assimilation. For many, this is not a choice at all.

Families and school districts face challenges balancing COVID-19 mitigation and school reopening. Among parents of school-aged children who participated in an Internet panel survey, racial and ethnic minority parents were more concerned about some aspects of school reopening, such as compliance with mitigation measures, safety, and their child contracting or bringing home COVID-19, than were non-Hispanic White parents. Understanding racial/ethnic differences in parental attitudes and concerns about school reopening can inform communication and mitigation strategies and highlights the importance of considering risks for severe COVID-19 and family resource needs when developing options for school attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The outbreaks of Covid-19 influence the Indonesian education nationally, including early childhood education (PAUD). Since the school closures in March, the teachers have attempted to implement the distance learning. This study is conducted in a school in Kendal. The teacher shared her experiences in conducting the learning based on the emergency curriculum. It is found that the government has given the support by publishing the twelve books for the learning at home policy and providing the internet data. Most of the books are about playing with children and positive communication. Parents’ roles in distance learning have greater proportion than the teachers. Parents in this situation have the duties to supervise the learning, to conduct the learning, and to assist teachers in assessment. The teachers construct the weekly lesson plan, communicate the steps of learning process, and evaluate the students’ progress. However, both teachers and parents experience barriers due to the lack of skills in using technology and inability to provide learning materials to support six aspects of child development.

 

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has disrupted and posed great challenges for kindergarten-grade12 education systems. Initial studies on education and COVID-19 often focus on technology use, student learning, and school reopening plans. However, debates on the form of instruction become futile when stakeholders are unclear about what the competing values, issues, and priorities are. Using exploratory data analysis of a representative sample of US teachers and school leaders, this paper highlights key organisational issues and priorities in terms of addressing academic achievement gaps, students’ online engagement, and teachers’ and students’ health. More fundamentally, deeper issues are uncovered like equity for those doubly disadvantaged by the pandemic, student engagement in the face of more pressing concerns, and health both physical and mental. More theoretically, the research contributes to understanding schools’ responses to societal crises and the need to clarify competing values during decision-making in the face of such crises.

In 2020, Norwegian society was in lockdown for seven weeks due to the rapid spread of the corona virus. During this period, young people (YP) aged 13–20 years participated in a survey investigating risk perception and experiences related to COVID-19. Participants (n ¼ 244) were recruited from a popular website for youths in Norway. YP’s experience of risk was related to their concern about spreading the virus to close loved ones. They worried about their future with regards to education and social life. They called for more information directed at young people. Being informed and trusting the information received, decreased anxiety.

Emergency situations render children vulnerable; hence, this study reviewed child-related policies and services in South Korea during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus far, the government has proposed online health promotion programmes for children, emergency care services and allowances, and school meal delivery services. Based on these findings, we recommend the establishment of mental health, sexual abuse, and child abuse online messaging services, allocation of additional financial and educational support to lowincome families, and prioritisation of childcare services.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has brought about many changes to our society, which will have long-term effects for our youth and adolescents. Due to social isolation and adverse childhood experiences, there are concerns of suicidality, technology addiction, and school safety as schools attempt to transition to a state of normalcy in the months to come. This crisis will require coordinated efforts to assist students in not only getting back on track academically but also in helping students cope with the trauma they have and are continuing to experience. As a result, insights from school counselors can be used to obtain a better understanding of the social and emotional effects of COVID-19 by collaborating with administrators to emphasize using school counselors as a mental health provider in schools. The authors highlight school counselors’ mental health training and their role in combating this issue and provide practical applications that can employed to create a systemic approach for social and emotional prevention and intervention during and after the pandemic.

As COVID-19 dramatically alters the museum sector, museums and archives are implementing collection initiatives that will have tremendous influence over how the pandemic is understood and remembered. As collections experts, museums are leading the charge to document, collect, and interpret our current circumstances as they unfold in real time, relying more than ever on public participation and crowdsourcing. A key development in such rapid-response collecting has been the interest in and solicitation of contributions that document the current crisis. Yet, initiatives that target young people remain few and far between, and often reproduce romanticized and reified understandings of children and childhood that reflect a longer history of excluding children’s voices from museum collections and society at large. This paper will explore museums’ collection of children’s culture in various forms with attention to the epistemological and ethical challenges that such initiatives entail.

Care in the early years entails more than childcare. This paper has three major sections. In the first section, I begin with an introduction and a quick overview of the ECEC system in Australia. This snapshot of the Australian ECEC system presents a messy map of the care and education system for young children under a neoliberal political economy to elucidate what this may mean in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. With this contextual background of the ECEC system in Australia, in the second section I discuss my theoretical, ethical, political, ontological, and epistemological positioning when re-imagining and reconceptualizing what a socially just ECEC landscape might look like through the lens of a feminism approach. This onto-epistemological discussion explains the shift toward a feminist approach and how this enables me to (re)think about care and education in the early years differently. Taking up this different set of analytical tools with a post-structural sensibility of the politics of caring, in the third section, I continue on to critical analyses and discussions, highlighting the paradoxes of care and education in the early years. A key aim of this paper is to un-settle the taken-for-granted ways of thinking and talking about ECEC in Australia.

The briefing note examines the impediments of access to learning caused by the COVID-19 outbreak in northwest Syria, further compounding issues caused by conflict and years of underinvestment in the education sector in Syria. Save the Children surveyed 489 teachers in northern Syria to try and understand what they see and believe when it comes to the reasons that lead children to drop out of education and what would it take to bring them back.

This brief summarizes the results of simulations estimating the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in learning poverty. Of 720 million primary school age children, 382 million are learning poor, either out of school or below the minimum proficiency level in reading. COVID-19 could boost that number by an additional 72 million to 454 million. In a post-COVID-19 scenario of no remediation and low mitigation effectiveness for the effects of school closures, simulations show learning poverty increasing from 53 percent of primary-school-age children to 63 percent.