Coronavirus also has implications for data collection on education

Questions around Covid-19 and education arise in the short, medium and long term. Right now, it is important to understand how to support teachers, parents, and students to mitigate the impact of school closures, especially for the most vulnerable Later on, we will need to understand the effects on entire school careers and beyond, and on countries’ progress towards the 2030 targets. Both perspectives will require quality data and analysis in the coming 2-3 years to understand and learn which of today’s activities worked or not, and what this means for continued support needs in the decade to come. But finding that data is not easy pickings.

Image: Petterik Wiggers/Panos 

For example, this year, more than two dozen MICS and DHS surveys are planned or are already underway. These are critical for informing on many low and lower-middle income countries’ progress towards SDG 4.

However, these surveys are likely to be disrupted. Fieldwork in many countries may be suspended to be resumed at another point in time, leading to data being collected across different school years, hampering interpretation. Both the DHS and the MICS ask about attendance at any time during the current school year rather than strictly ‘current’ attendance. However, in countries in the southern hemisphere, where schools closed shortly after the beginning of the school year because of the virus, or didn’t open to begin with, it is unclear to what extent households will answer the question consistently. Are children being home-schooled ‘attending’ school?

Three ways to plan for equity during the coronavirus school closures

By Stefania Giannini, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education and Suzanne Grant Lewis, UNESCO-IIEP Director

From school closures and home confinement to travel bans, countries and municipalities are ramping up efforts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. For education, the ramifications have resulted in a record number of children, youth and adults not attending schools or universities.

UNESCO estimates that, as of 24 March, 138 countries have closed schools nationwide, impacting over 1.3 billion children and youth. A further 11 countries have implemented localized school closures.

In the ensuing weeks, this will raise major challenges around equity: how will the most vulnerable students fare when schools are closed?

Understanding the risks of school closures for the most vulnerable

School closures in the context of this rapidly-spreading virus have been deemed necessary by health authorities across the globe, to both slow the spread of the disease and to mitigate the effects on health systems that will not be able to cope with potentially massive numbers of critically ill patients. In some contexts, confinement is becoming not only an act of civil solidarity, but an imperative measure for protecting public health.

However, confinement and school closures often have longer-term consequences, especially for the most vulnerable and marginalized, magnifying already-existing disparities within the education system. In addition to the missed opportunities for learning, many children and youth lose access to healthy meals, and are subjected to economic and social stress.

Image: Kate Holt

How are countries addressing the Covid-19 challenges in education? A snapshot of policy measures

By Gwang-Chol Chang and Satoko Yano, UNESCO’s Section of Education Policy

Close to 80% of the world’s student population – 1.3 billion children and youth – is affected by school closures in 138 countries. Taken as a measure to contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, some of these closures are recent, in others they have already been in place for months. In all cases, closures are placing unprecedented challenges on governments to ensure learning continuity, and on teachers, students, caregivers and parents.

Image: Ivan Flores

UNESCO has been monitoring school closures since early March and documenting national responses, including through virtual ministerial meetings and webinars bringing together a community of practice.

This blog provides a snapshot of some of the measures taken by countries to address their immediate challenges. The information is based on various sources, including government announcements, official documents, decrees, circulars and guidelines available online, as well as media reports. As education is decentralized in many of the countries reviewed, the examples presented below may be implemented locally and not nation-wide – they are by no means exhaustive.

What are the financial implications of the coronavirus for education?

How long is a piece of string? You might be asking, looking at the question this blog is asking. And to some extent, you’d be right. In these early days of the outbreak, it is as yet unknown how long it will be among us, and for how long measures, such as school closures will be required.  We don’t know how much budgets are going to be diverted or how long austerity will be in place to recover the costs of the temporary emergency measures. But instead of fixating on what we do not know, however, let’s list what we do.

One report, which looked at labour market data in the United States, the United Kingdom and the eurozone surmised that, in the event of school closures, up to 20% of the workforce may need to take off work to care for dependent children. If this were to be the case for four weeks, the GDP of these countries could fall by 1.5%.

A separate study looked just at the UK, showing that school closures lasting four weeks could cut 3% from the country’s GDP, costing the economy billions of pounds.  Most studies, however, tend to look at the case of the United States. One, conducted in 2009, which estimated the effect of potential measures under the federal government’s Community Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Mitigation, found that the cost per student per week of school closures that leaves parents unable to work ranges from US$35 to US$157. In total, closing schools for four weeks would cost between 10 and 47 billion US dollars, equivalent to 0.1-0.3 percent of US GDP.

The three researchers dusted their assumptions of ten years ago to produce an updated estimate in the context of the current crisis, which confirmed these fairly devastating sums: $51 billion a month, equivalent to 0.24% of the US economy, would be the price of closing all schools.

UNESCO’s response to the coronavirus crisis offers multilateral solutions

The spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to increasingly stringent measures around the world, including countrywide or localized school closures. As news is moving fast, this blog aims to synthesize some of the resources UNESCO has been set up for countries’ and organisations’ disposal.

As of 22 March, UNESCO has counted as many as 124 countries that have carried out countrywide school closures, affecting over 1.25 billion learners from pre-primary to tertiary education. While some of the first countries to be affected by the crisis, such as China and Japan, are already considering a partial return to school, this number is likely to continue increasing. The crisis brings multiple challenges, some obvious, some not. To operationalize remote learning at such scale requires human capacities, technological infrastructure, experience and finance. Many agencies, organisations and companies are ramping up to help meet the needs.

In the immediate phase, UNESCO set up an Education Response Task Force, coordinated by the Assistant Director-General for Education, which created a web platform with examples of online remote learning solutions, and of different set ups per country. As school closures multiplied at the start of the month, it held a virtual meeting on 10 March with representatives from over 70 countries, which shared some of their innovative and reactive responses to this sudden education crisis.

Could coronavirus shape the way assessments work forever?

Exams cancelled? This is the next wave of impact on education systems caused by the Coronavirus. The UK has cancelled its GCSE and A-Level exams. The CBSE board in India has cancelled exams for classes 10 and 12, national open school exam and the joint entrance exam, Madhya Pradesh is postponing secondary education exams until further notice. NAPLAN exams in Australia have been cancelled for the year. Pennsylvania is cancelling its PSSA testing and Keystone exams.  The list goes on.

Image: NEA

It is increasingly said that this public health crisis is prompting large questions on economic and social life that were just beneath the surface, not least in education. The case of assessing learning is just one of those.

A focus on exams gives a structure to learning. Removing that structure, and the end goal that students have been working towards – some of them for years – will be hugely disappointing, and no doubt stressful for many. “They are taking away everything I have been working for?” one girl said in the UK when she heard the news. What are the implications?

Various different methods, and mixes of methods are being suggested by countries to put in place of exams. These include using previous grades from mock exams, teachers’ assessments and prior grade expectations.  But to what extent will these be fair representations of performance?

Coronavirus: could education systems have been better prepared?

The world was caught by surprise with the global pandemic emergency. But was it entirely unexpected? Pandemics have always been a likelihood. A pandemic has occurred every 10-50 years for the past centuries. In any given year, a 1% probability exists of an influenza pandemic that causes nearly 6 million pneumonia and influenza deaths or more globally. This translates into a 25% likelihood of such a pandemic over 30 years, and that’s just influenza.

It’s not ‘if’ a pandemic occurs, therefore, but ‘when’. ‘In order to mitigate human and financial losses as a result of future global pandemics, we must plan now’ was the call of experts in 2016 in the immediate aftermath of the Ebola virus epidemic in western Africa and the international organizations’ admission of the response having been slow. In this latest major and unfolding crisis, the emphasis has been on different health systems’ responses. But could education systems have been better prepared?

Pandemics needs to be factored into education planning, as much as in other sectors. Closing schools during disease outbreaks should not be taken lightly. As the 2020 GEM Report will tell us, schools are often the location not just for education but also for school meals or health interventions. But, according to the World Health Organisation, ‘under ideal conditions, school closure can reduce the demand for health care by an estimated 30-50% at the peak of the pandemic’.  Clearly, then, with the risk of a pandemic striking, education planners need to be prepared for a stint of interrupted education.

Faced with the coronavirus, as UNESCO reports on a daily basis, as of today, 113 countries have sent children home from school, 102 of which have closed schools nationwide, with an estimated 849 million children and youth out of school. There are three periods to consider for school preparedness: in normal times, during the crisis, and after the crisis.

Postponing the 2020 GEM Report launch

With the Coronavirus pandemic sweeping the world, the launch of the 2020 GEM Report Inclusion and education: All means all, originally scheduled for Wednesday 8 April, will be delayed until Tuesday 23 June.

The GEM Report team had already replaced the launch events scheduled for Accra, Dubai, Jakarta and Washington DC, with a virtual launch. However, the ongoing developments means that even these alternative plans would not have been relevant under the current circumstances, given the needs of the audiences the Report is written for.

Noting the high risk that the virus may still be affecting the lives of many in June, the postponement will give the team time to further develop its first-ever virtual launch and discuss with partners how our online activities can serve their needs.

Rethinking non-state engagement in education

By Dr. Prachi Srivastava, Associate Professor, University of Western Ontario, author of the Think Piece prepared for the 2021 GEM Report on non-state actors in education.

As previous recent blogs on this site have illustrated, non-state actors have long operated in education. They have gained attention with intensity in global and domestic policy circles and with researchers, civil society, and individual citizens implicated in local education systems. The increasing prominence of related issues is also visible in the GEM Report series and its predecessor, the Education For All Global Monitoring Report. The 2009 Global Monitoring Report was the first in the series to include explicit analysis of non-state engagement with a dedicated section on low-fee private schooling. Various issues relating to non-state actors and non-state engagement have since been addressed in subsequent reports. That the theme of the 2021 GEM Report is on Non-state Actors in Education, further attests to the relevance of these actors in education globally, and of associated issues. This blog post summarizes key points of a conceptual framework I developed in a Think Piece to feed into the GEM Report team’s research as they work on the 2021 Report.

Why the fuss?

Despite growing interest in the field, conceptual framing on how to think about non-state engagement in education is nascent. The range of non-state engagement is broad, and the actors, diverse. Typological issues have not been resolved. Earlier research is mainly descriptive and exploratory. To a fair extent it still is, given the uneven geographic and sectoral concentrations of the body of evidence. A number of existing questions have thin evidence bases, leaving us with a range of unanswered questions.

What you told us in the online consultation for the 2021 GEM Report on non-state actors

The 2021 GEM Report will focus on the many ways in which non-state actors are involved in education systems. It will discuss the state role in the process (regulatory frameworks, accountability mechanisms) and reflect on the most recent developments in the non-state actors’ landscape (the role of global corporations or philanthropic foundations and new public-private arrangements).

This blog summarises some of your inputs during the online consultation we launched in December on the concept note for our Report. Over 1300 people have visited the consultation website, many of which left comments. We also received 47 personalised emails. While we have not been able to cover all of your suggestions in this blog, all are being examined by the team. Thank you for your contributions. They are invaluable as we get to work scoping out the research we will carry out over the coming year.

Justification for the report

It was advised that the Report establish a stronger rationale for covering the role of non-state actors in 2021 and that this should extend beyond the expansion in private education. For example, you called for looking at the risk to equality posed by new forms of non-state action in education in the form of online courses.