Children and COVID-19 Research Library

This paper uses the World Bank’s recently developed Country Tool for Simulating COVID-19 Impacts on Learning and Schooling Outcomes and data from the forthcoming Indonesia Education Service Delivery Indicator Survey to simulate and contextualize the potential impact of COVID-19 school closures on learning outcomes, proficiency levels, enrollments and expected earnings for Indonesian students in primary and secondary school.

This article calls for greater cross-sector collaboration among schools, universities, nonprofits, and other organizations that serve children to help meet the needs that already exist and that will arise as the pandemic continues. It describes the work of ALL4SC at the University of South Carolina, which leverages the university’s resources to support children and teachers.

This report provides an overarching framework that focuses on how policymakers as well as educators can support equitable, effective teaching and learning regardless of the medium through which that takes place. This framework provides research, state and local examples, and policy recommendations in 10 key areas that speak both to transforming learning and to closing opportunity and achievement gaps.

Responses to the health emergency arising from the COVID19 pandemic have highlighted the global permanence of an adult vision in which the gaze towards childhood and adolescence is still prevalent as a future value and which is little concerned with hearing them.  What happened to the present of billions of children and adolescents; what represented them to see their daily life interrupted; how it happened for them at least one season of the year, a year that for some presents five or 10% of what they have lived and that reaches for others up to one fifth of their age. Trying to get closer to the answers to these questions is now increasingly relevant when maintaining proper pandemic management requires the establishment of social distance and health measures that will continue to impact the lives of people under 18 years of age in much of the orb.

The education systems in many countries have faced ample of challenges that emerged due to the COVID-19 pandemic as of the beginning of March 2020, which led to lockdown and closure of schools and universities. As a result, 86 million learner in Arab countries schooling were interrupted. As such, Arab countries found themselves forced to choose between two options, either to use distance learning or don’t provide education at all. Majority of countries have headed towards distance learning, to ensure the continuity and management of the teaching and learning. After three months of distance learning, it was necessary to evaluate this experience in its various aspects and to identify the most critical challenges faced, in addition to providing solutions that would advance the process of distance learning and its outcomes. In this regard, the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in the Arab States in Beirut was keen on benefiting from the opinions of all targeted educational stakeholders who have not participated before in similar questionnaires.

In the context of the Global Education Coalition, formed by UNESCO to support governments in their educational response to COVID-19, UNESCO has collaborated with partners to develop a COVID-19 Response Toolkit in Education. The goal of these chapters is to support countries in their educational response to COVID-19 by providing practices and examples, concrete steps for intervention, and tactical action checklists. This particular chapter focuses on the topic of re-enrolment.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was living a learning crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic now threatens to make education outcomes even worse. The pandemic has already had profound impacts on education by closing schools almost everywhere in the planet, in the largest simultaneous shock to all education systems in our lifetimes. The damage will become even more severe as the health emergency translates into a deep global recession.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a massive upsurge in the demand for the e-learning platforms worldwide as children have been instructed to attend classes online from their homes to maintain continuity of formal learning. While neuroplasticity offers opportunity to adapt the sudden change in the modality of classroom transaction from face-to-face interaction to the technology-mediated learning, it may wreak havoc for the growing brain of children.

Is TV-based learning during COVID-19 school closures in Bangladesh reaching students? Most students (86 percent) within our sample of more than 2,000 Grade 9 stipend recipients are aware of government provided TV-based learning programs; yet only half of the students with access to these programs choose to access them. Also, very few students (21 percent) have access to government provided online learning programs, and among those that do, only about 2 percent choose to access them.

This report describes the risk of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission among children in educational settings (preschool and secondary school). Transmission risk of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in schools is unknown. These investigations, especially in preschools, could not detect SARS-CoV-2 transmission despite screening of symptomatic and asymptomatic children. The data suggest that children are not the primary drivers of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in schools and could help inform exit strategies for lifting of lockdowns.

Dan Church Aid (DCA) and UN Women (UNW) carried out an education needs assessment between February 26 and March 19, 2020 with the aim of understanding the priority needs for Rohingya adolescent and youth girls and women living in the refugee camps and makeshift settlements in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. The assessment sought to identify education needs and trends among young women and to develop evidence-based prioritization for a DCA/ UNW project designed to provide second chance education opportunities for Rohingya adolescent girls and women.

School closures due to COVID-19 have left more than a billion students out of school. This paper presents the results of simulations considering three, five and seven months of school closure and different levels of mitigation effectiveness resulting in optimistic, intermediate and pessimistic global scenarios. Globally, a school shutdown of 5 months could generate learning losses that have a present value of $10 trillion. By this measure, the world could stand to lose as much as 16 percent of the investments that governments make in the basic education of this cohort of students. The world could thus face a substantial setback in achieving the goal of halving the percentage of learning poor and be unable to meet the goal by 2030 unless drastic remedial action is taken.

COVID-19 and TC Harold have severely affected Fijians’ short and long-term resilience as many are resorting to the use of detrimental coping strategies such as reduction in food intake, barter of assets, reduction of expenditure on health or education. Social protection schemes for marginalised groups exist but are limited and access was restricted by COVID-19 preventative measures, particularly for people with disabilities.

This report explores lessons from conflict and education in emergencies (EiE) seeking evidence-informed recommendations for policy makers that can help in the global response to Covid-19. The report explores transferability from EiE contexts to non-EiE Covid-19-affected contexts. The issue of how Covid-19 will impact on existing EiE contexts and displaced pupils is a vital one, but it is beyond the scope of this review.

This survey collected data on the status of remote learning among school-going children across the country. It was conducted in 86 out of the total 335 sub-counties across 42 of the 47counties. We leveraged technology to collect data using the KoboCollect platform via phone calls from 3,735 households spread in 258 villages.