Children and COVID-19 Research Library

School testing for SARS-CoV-2 infection has become an important policy and planning issue as schools were reopened after the summer season and as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. Decisions to test or not to test and, if testing, how many tests, how often and for how long, are complex decisions that need to be taken under uncertainty and conflicting pressures from various stakeholders. This study aims to develop an agent-based model and simulation tool that can be used to analyze the outcomes and effectiveness of different testing strategies and scenarios in schools with various number of classrooms and class sizes.

The COVID-19 pandemic will create enormous disruptions for youth and families with respect to economic and health status, social relationships, and education for years to come. The process of closing and intermittently reopening schools adds to this disruption and creates confusion for parents and school officials who must balance student educational progress with health and safety concerns. One framework that may serve as a roadmap in this regard is a multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) model. This article briefly addresses four main domains of functioning (adjustment, traumatic stress, academic status, health and safety) across three tiers of support (universal, targeted, intensive). Each section draws on existing literature bases to provide specific recommendations for school officials who must address various and changing logistical, academic, and health-based challenges. The recommendations are designed to be flexible given fluctuations in the current crisis as well as focused on maximum-value targets.

This paper uses a calibrated “pedagogical production function” model to estimate the potential long-term losses to children’s learning from the temporary shock of Covid-19 related school closures. It then models possible gains from two mitigation strategies. Without mitigation, children could lose more than a full year’s worth of learning from a three-month school closure because they will be behind the curriculum when they re-enter school and will fall further behind as time goes on. Remediation when children return to school reduces the long-term learning loss by half, but still leaves children more than half a year behind where they would have been with no shock. Remediation combined with long-term reorientation of curriculum to align with children’s learning levels fully mitigates the long-term learning loss due to the shock and surpasses the learning in the counterfactual of no shock by more than a full year’s worth of learning.

Non-pharmacological interventions (NPI), including lockdowns, have been used to address the COVID-19 pandemic. We describe changes in the environment and lifestyle of school children in Cyprus before the lockdown and during school re-opening, and assess compliance to NPI, using the exposome concept.

The COVID-19 education emergency has not affected all children equally. Refugee children already faced significant barriers in accessing good quality learning because of poverty and discrimination. The pandemic has further compounded these challenges. Progress under threat highlights the impact this pandemic is having on refugee children, including in the ten countries with the largest refugee populations where Save the Children works. Refugees are much less likely to access remote learning, will have lost many months of learning and may drop-out of school. The pandemic has severely impacted their learning and wellbeing, which was already more complex than their host community peers due to the very nature of forced displacement.

Across the globe and in Africa, COVID 19 has spread rapidly. A series of measures have been implemented across countries that include school closures, home isolation and community lockdown. This resulted in secondary social and economic impact on children an their households. This reflection report for Save the Children’s West and Central Africa region is developed to highlight the impact of COVID 19 on children based on the global research data, secondary resources and made policy recommendations and asks going forward.

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.

The  suspension  of  in-person  classes  as  a  consequence  of  the  COVID-19  pandemic  profoundly  affected  the  education  systems  in  Latin  America  and  the  Caribbean  (LAC) and compromised the achievements reached around the goals established in the SDG4-Education 2030 Agenda. This report analyzes the possibilities, restrictions and needs that the countries of the region will face during the process of returning to in-person classes, considering five dimensions:  (i)  safe  schools  (school  infrastructure,  access  to  water  and  sanitation);  (ii)  human  resources  (principals  and  teachers);  (iii)  access  to  ITC  and  connectivity;  (iv) education financing and (v) information and planning.

In Mongolia, following school closures and term break from February to September 2020 affecting more than 600,000 children, the Government put learning at the heart of reopening, dedicating the first month of the new school term to the assessment of learning and remedial lessons and activities. UNICEF supported the Ministry of Education and Science in the development and distribution of teacher guidance for remedial classes covering all core subjects from pre-primary to upper secondary.

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. 

This paper reports a study with families of children with disabilities in Uganda during the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020, known as COVID-19. Families of children with disabilities in Uganda are well informed about COVID-19 and try to follow prevention measures. Families of children with disabilities have difficulties meeting daily basic needs as they were unable to work and had no income during the COVID-19 related lock down. The COVID-19 response affects access to health and rehabilitation services for children with disabilities in Uganda. Parents of children with disabilities struggle with home education and learning due to lack of access to accessible learning materials and learning support in Uganda. The COVID-19 response affects the peer support networks and social support for parents of children with disabilities in Uganda. Children with disabilities and their families should be involved and considered in the development and implementation of the COVID-19 response.

COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented human and health crisis and has been affecting lives in many forms. What seemed to be a health crisis eventually became a major ongoing global economic crisis. Sector-wide disruptions are threatening both short- and long-term livelihoods and well-being of millions of youth around the globe, especially youth from vulnerable communities. Business closures threatened the operations and soundness of the enterprises resulting in layoffs and wage losses, affecting a major chunk of youth including the young care leavers of alternative care programmes in Asia. This called for customised interventions and support for such young care leavers. Immediate actions were needed for managing their mental health, for maintaining education continuity and for reskilling of such young care leavers to prepare them to cope with the pandemic. This article is based on the learning and experiences of SOS Children’s Villages responses to supporting nearly 1,500 care leavers in various Asian countries.

This paper examines the role of interprofessional collaboration in the identification and reporting of a child in need. Such collaboration is especially important in the context of the global pandemic caused by the novel Coronavirus disease of 2019, known as COVID-19. The child protection system must have the capacity and resources to respond to increased demands during this time, and early childhood educators serve as an essential link for child protective services in identifying and reporting a child in need. As an effective system to accomplish these two aims requires a working collaboration among its participants, Bronstein’s interdisciplinary collaboration model was used as a framework to interpret this practice. A small-scale qualitative study was conducted that included principals of nursery schools and child protection workers from one region in Estonia.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many grandparents in China have spent more time with their grandchildren than they used to. When their adult children returned to work after a period of lockdown, many grandparents extended their roles from taking care of household tasks and looking after their grandchildren’s basic needs to supervising their online learning and providing academic support. It has been a precious opportunity for both the children and their grandparents to get to know each other better and to learn from each other. During this challenging period of home learning, a Chinese initiative called the “Shaping Students’ Vacation Life Project” (SSVLP), which is led by the Shanghai Municipal Institute for Lifelong Education (SMILE) of East China Normal University (ECNU), conducted a two-month project that investigated intergenerational learning between grandparents and grandchildren (IL-GP&GC) across seven primary schools located in six areas of China.

The aim of the present study was to examine parental experiences of homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic in families with or without a child with a mental health condition across Europe. The study included 6720 parents recruited through schools, patient organizations and social media platforms (2002 parents with a child with a mental health condition and 4718 without) from seven European countries.