“As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its third year, 23 countries home to around 405 million schoolchildren are yet to fully open schools, with many schoolchildren at risk of dropping out. Children have to get back to the classroom, but changes are needed to ensure that they really learn, starting with the foundational basics of reading and numeracy,” read a new UNICEF report released on Wednesday.
The report highlights how 147 million children missed more than half of their time of in-person schooling over the past 2 years – amounting to 2 trillion hours of lost in-person learning globally. According to a report, 92 per cent of students in the lower-income strata of children in India has lost at least one specific language ability and 82 per cent has lost at least one specific mathematic ability from the previous year.
As per the National Education Policy 2020, over five crore children in the elementary school system lacked the ability to read and comprehend basic text.
While the Indian government has focused on online education in order to combat the learning loss induced by pandemic, various private stakeholders have also stepped up. Speaking on the module, Himanshu Gautam, Co-Founder and CEO of an innovative edtech platform, Safalta, said, “The pandemic induced loss in learning has created a huge gap in education that needs to be bridged on a priority basis. We have tried to play our part. Apart from regular school subjects, we have shifted our focus on exams like NTSE, JEE, Olympiads. We have boosted our faculties equipped with necessary experience and our students are conditioned to prepare through notes, practise-question papers and monthly tests, and we have ensured that their linguistic capabilities are also enhanced by the day.”
Children are expected to have acquired foundational reading and numeracy skills at the end of Grade 2. But in half of the countries analysed, only 30 per cent of children attending Grade 3 have foundational reading skills and a mere 18 per cent have foundational numeracy skills. Among many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than one in 10 children have foundational learning skills on time.
From a total of 34 countries, findings have revealed that on an average, an estimated four to five months of lost learning along with increase in inequality have impeded the growth of children, making it safe to assume that prolonged school closures and other disruptions to the education system brought on by the pandemic have led to substantial learning loss.