Introduction
With an estimated 91.3 percent or 1.57 billion students out of school worldwide, ministers of education are executing their plans for school during disruptions related to COVID-19. Under the banner of learning continuity, many countries have slowly begun to use existing platforms, tools, and technologies for some form of interim learning by distance.
Findings in cognitive psychology suggest that without practice, facts and procedural skills are most susceptible to forgetting. School closures due to COVID-19 have left most students on the planet out of school – 1.6 billion students at the peak in April 2020. This global shock to all education systems is being followed by a deep recession. For us here in Africa and Kenya, early lockdowns slowed down the entry of the virus and with the economic effect of the lockdowns, countries are opening up despite the upward trajectory of the virus within populations.
According to the World Bank, “Not being able to attend school impacts children in many ways: children don’t have an opportunity to learn, they may miss their most nutritious meal of the day, and too many students – especially girls – may lose out on the opportunity to complete their education, which will prevent them from achieving their potential,” stressed Annette Dixon, World Bank Vice President for Human Development. “Without rapid, decisive, and coordinated action, the crisis threatens to pose a huge setback to hard-won gains in human capital, irreversibly damaging the lifelong opportunities of millions of children.”
Schools in Kenya have been closed from March 15th 2020. There is now some clarity on how the Education system will be re-opened and in total Basic Education is the biggest loser with a loss of 7 teaching months. There is no research that can show us what the educational impact of COVID-19 school closures might be. Never in our lifetimes have so many schools for so many children been closed. In the western world, seasonal learning and summer learning loss is well documented and shows achievement typically slowing or declining over the summer months. The decline tends to be steeper for maths than for reading, with some pupils returning to schools after their summer holidays having lost ground by up to two or three months, with disadvantaged children lagging behind their better-off peers.
Even a relatively short period of missed school, for example due to illness, will have consequences for learning development. But with students now facing up to seven months without consistent, ongoing guidance from their teachers and the structure offered by a classroom, researchers have estimated that disadvantaged students could be facing learning losses of between four and six months.
Learning Loss
The term learning loss refers to any specific or general loss of knowledge and skills or to reversals in academic progress, most commonly due to extended gaps or discontinuities in a student’s education. While learning loss can manifest in a wide variety of ways for a variety of reasons, the following are a few representative examples of widely recognised forms of learning loss:
- Summer break: Perhaps the most commonly cited form is “summer learning loss,” which occurs when students take extended breaks in their education during the summer. In our case here, we would refer to the long third term holiday in November and December (9 weeks). Here in Kenya, learning loss is largely undocumented even though teachers and schools have anectodal evidence, they have adopted a variety of strategies intended to mitigate the learning loss that occurs over the long christmas break. If students are unprepared upon returning to school in the January term, for example, teachers may review content that was taught the previous year or schools may provide some students with additional instructional time or academic support. Any initiatives or learning programmes designed to help students make up lost academic ground, provide greater educational continuity, or accelerate academic progress during the long break are actually illegal and so is the other common strategy is generally known as expanded learning time, which encompasses any attempt to improve learning acquisition, or reduce learning loss, by increasing the amount of time students are in school and receiving instruction from teachers.
- Interrupted formal education: Students may experience significant interruptions in their formal education for a wide variety of reasons. Some of the most commonly cited examples is the learning loss experienced by girls returning to school after pregnancies or recently immigrated refugee students who, often due to societal unrest in their home countries, have been unable to attend school for extended periods of time—in fact, in some cases these students may never have attended a formal school or may not have attended school for several years. The term “students with interrupted formal education,” or SIFE, is often used in reference to these students.
- Returning dropouts: If a student returns to school after dropping out for an extended period of time, even multiple years, the student may have experienced significant learning loss or gaps in their education. In these cases, students may need to repeat previous grades, complete additional coursework, or accelerate their learning progress in other ways.
- School absence: A prolonged health-related absence/pregnancies would be another potential source of learning loss, as would any family decision to remove students from school or discontinue their formal education. Another common form of absence is the school suspension or expulsion, which can lead to either minor or significant learning loss.
- Ineffective teaching: Lower-quality teaching can, in some cases, lead to slower academic progress, which produce learning losses in relation to other students or in terms of where students are expected to be at a specific stage in their education. For example, some studies have found evidence that highly effective teachers can teach students up to a year and a half (or more) of content in a single year, while other teachers may teach students only a half year of content over the course of a full year of school. If students receive poor-quality teaching over multiple years, learning losses can compound and grow more severe, decreasing the students’ chances of catching up with their peers or completing school.
Socio-economic factors
Just as might have been expected, students in lower socio-economic areas, communities and families experienced the impact more harshly – the ‘Faucet Theory’. According to the theory, the “resource faucet” is on for all students during the school year, enabling all students to make learning gains. Over the long christmas holiday, however, the flow of resources slows for students from disadvantaged backgrounds but not for students from advantaged backgrounds. Higher-income students tend to continue to have access to financial and human capital resources (such as parental education) over the Christmas holiday, thereby facilitating learning.
- on average, studies have shown that students’ achievement scores declined over the Christmas vacation by 25-30%,
- declines were sharper for maths than for reading, and
- the extent of loss was larger at higher grade levels. Importantly, they also concluded that income-based reading gaps grew over the Christmas Vacation, given that higher income students tended to show improvement in reading skills while lower-income students tended to experience loss.
Learning disabilities
Where students have learning disabilities, the time away from education can have a greater impact, as they have a greater need for continuous learning.
Learning loss is exponential
The higher the grade of the students, the greater the learning loss. Like all skills, the harder they are, the more effort it takes to attain, and the more practice is needed to maintain it. It is worth noting that not all subjects experience learning loss equally. For instance learning loss has the greatest impact on mathematics, followed by spelling and literacy.
But why mathematics? You might ask – one simple explanation might be that there’s an abundance of opportunity to spell, read and write over christmas vacations. This ties in with the exponential nature of Learning losses
Equity-Focused Approaches to Learning Loss during COVID-19
Even in the best-resourced and highest-performing education systems, most COVID responses in education will end up by privileging better-off children. Students from households with greater levels of connectivity, higher levels of parental education, greater availability of parental time for engagement, and in-home availability of books and materials have much better ability to access and benefit from distance learning. These advantages are further reinforced by the fact that digital learning platforms are typically more developed for secondary and higher education than at the primary level. International organizations have also emphasized COVID education responses that rely on technology. In developing countries, where far fewer children have access to secondary education, and where learning opportunities are heavily defined by quality education in the early years, COVID presents an especially stark equity challenge.
According to the Centre for Global Development there exists a wide range of evidence about interventions that hold promise as equity-focused approaches to learning continuity. The main message is that emergency measures which rely solely on technology are unlikely to offer an adequate response for learning continuity for children who sit at what Wagner describes as “the bottom of the learning pyramid.” And no country can improve overall learning outcomes without tackling the “tail” of its learning distribution—the children who are most left behind by current policies.
Thus, while we discuss how the Ministry of Education here can “layer” an effective set of enabling responses for learning continuity during COVID school closures, emergency interventions are likely to make modest contributions to learning continuity—their primary role may be to keep children engaged in their education. It is worth noting here that the Ministry of Education has started to implement targeted measures to ensure children from the poorest households can catch up when schools reopen, using the mounting evidence on accelerated learning. The Community Based Learning (CBL) framework is going to provide a framework to ensure learning continuity.
1. What do we know about equity challenges in learning continuity?
Evidence in recent years has highlighted how gaps in schooling lead to loss of learning, providing an important caution for educators. Estimates vary by context, but the impact of school closure is stark. For example, in the United States, where children enjoy summer breaks of 8-10 weeks, summer learning loss has been estimated at between 10-25 percent of yearly learning, with children from poorer households disproportionately affected. Studies in low-income settings show that gaps in schooling lead to drop outs at critical transitions between educational levels, and can lower the progression of the most disadvantaged children through the school system. Further, as research from Argentina and Rwanda has shown, school closures at primary level can have harsh cumulative effects, lowering chances of secondary completion and reducing labor market earnings of affected children many years later. A new analysis by the World Bank offers starkly different scenarios for learning loss during COVID.
Connectivity cannot be counted on to solve learning loss for children at the bottom of the pyramid. Many governments have turned to online learning as a handy and effective way to staunch learning loss. However, several sobering reviews show just how limited connectivity for students is around the world. For example, in their excellent planning resource on COVID-19, Harvard and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that while in many OECD countries children from advantaged schools have access to computers, in many other countries, including Turkey, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, Peru, and Indonesia, 50 percent or fewer children from disadvantaged schools have a computer at home. Access to the internet is even more severely limited in many developing countries—for example, Young Lives data show that in Ethiopia four of five rural children have never used the internet. Access to other forms of connectivity are also profoundly unequal, especially in South Asia and Africa. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, while three quarters of the population have a cell phone, most use pay as you go SIM cards and often change service providers and numbers. In some states in India, only half of all schools have working electricity, and there are stark differences in access to cell phones and the internet between girls and boys. Fewer than 40 percent of all households in low- and lower-middle-income countries own radios or televisions.
Perhaps for these reasons, education leaders surveyed in 75 countries report that availability of technological infrastructure is the most challenging issue in the implementation of their COVID response. Even among rich countries—like Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom—the absence of connectivity has slowed down the shift to distance learning during COVID-19 and continues to be a major challenge. In short: relying on connectivity for distance learning is not a panacea during school closures; indeed technologically mediated distance learning is likely to increase inequality in learning continuity.
2. Remote learning opportunities for children without connectivity
Given that inequality in connectivity is only going to heighten the gaps between rich and poor as we turn to distance learning, what can governments do? A wide range of options exist. Almost all require governments take a pro-poor approach that layers five reinforcing opportunities for learning:
i). Simplify curricula and modify learning goals
To reach children at the bottom of the pyramid, governments could start with simplified curricula targeting areas where learning loss will be most consequential for learning progression in the coming school year. Focused strategies that ensure continuity in early grade literacy and numeracy during the COVID crisis are urgently needed. For higher grades, governments could prioritize learning continuity for children most at risk of dropping out, such as cohorts transitioning from primary to lower secondary school, by including strategies to keep vulnerable populations engaged and excited about learning.
ii). Make learning materials available
Even during a pandemic, school systems should be able to work with partners to safely deliver or allow families to pick up a basic package of learning materials, including books and writing materials (for example, from food distribution/ Assistant Chiefs offices locations). The impact that learning materials can have on learning continuity during periods of school closure are well researched. For example, a US-based intervention that mailed 10 books to students over the summer matched to students reading interests, accompanied by email or text messages to parents, promoted more than one month of gains in reading skills.
The governments may be able to fund these materials using unused capitation funding owed to schools and by drawing on resources and support from development partners to purchase materials for the poorest households. Governments could leverage other COVID-related social services—for example, health service programmes—by using volunteers (with social distancing), or other means. Education can learn much from health emergency distribution chains about how to safely ensure such deliveries.
iii). Use radio, television, and SMS to amplify learning
There is evidence to suggest that across the learning continuum from kindergarten to secondary schooling, radio provides a low-tech and effective intervention that can mitigate learning loss when it is combined with outreach from teachers, provision of learning materials, and interactive content—including in emergency settings, such as Sierra Leone during the Ebola crisis. Many countries already have radio-based programmes upon which to build. Where individual households lack radios, it may be possible to provide low-cost devices or to use speakers to broadcast short lessons in communities. A number of experimental programmes suggest that SMS messaging or simple phone calls may also be used to provide simple learning activities and nudges to students to help maintain engagement in learning, though they can in no way replace a formal curricula.
Such low-tech solutions are likely to be most effectives when they are combined with the other interventions described in this article: opportunities for interactive engagement (including with family members), outreach from teachers, and access to learning materials.
iv). Make use of family engagement, an under-utilized resource
Parental and sibling support during COVID-19 are an especially important layer in efforts to bridge gaps in learning continuity within poor households during emergencies. Yet the importance of family engagement in enhancing learning is an area often overlooked in mainstream planning of education systems—where the role for parents and communities is also limited to raising resources or participating in governance and accountability.
A growing body of research shows significant effects of parents and siblings on childhood learning, by supplementing and reinforcing the traditional 2–4 hours of focused learning within schools. Furthermore, evidence from recently evaluated programmes, such as Save the Children’s/Global Partnership for Education Literacy Boost, USAID’s Tusome Programme and other family-based literacy interventions, show that even in the poorest households and households with limited literacy, parental and sibling engagement and support can add significantly to learning outcomes using very simple methods. Those methods can take the form of creating dedicated time for children to learn, teaching parents to engage children in talk and answering questions, or creating simple counting and language activities as part of daily household routines. “Child-to-child” approaches, and peer and collaborative learning—where older siblings or cousins support learning for younger students—can be safe and effective reinforcing skills. While a lack of parental education may further disadvantage poorer children, parental engagement programmes in developing countries have shown that even parents with limited literacy can do much to enhance learning. COVID responses should build on these existing programmes.
v). Encourage outreach and support from teachers, school leaders and communities
The final layer in an integrated strategy for bridging learning loss for students from poorer households during COVID-19 involves structured support from teachers, school leaders, community leaders, and Sub-County Education Offices. As we learned in the health sector during the Ebola crisis in West Africa, enabling local problem-solving and supporting context-specific solutions is especially important during health emergencies.
These actors know much about the individualised needs of children in their care. They can do much to ensure that families and students understand available learning opportunities and maintain motivation and engagement in learning. While many countries are already using social and other media as platforms to communicate their broad plans for learning under COVID, disadvantaged children will benefit disproportionately from more personalized outreach from teachers and school leaders.
Leaders at the sub-county and Location level should have a fair understanding of the disadvantages and barriers to participation for children within their catchments. During COVID closures, they have an important role to play in supporting teachers and leaders to find context-specific solutions, which may range from “drive-by loudspeaker announcements” to SMS messages, phone calls, or even household visits (respecting social distance).
3. Recovery: planning for learning recovery when schools reopen
The options suggested above focus primarily on actions governments can take during periods of school closures. However, even in well-resourced education systems, it is unlikely that this combination of interventions will be able to fully mitigate against learning loss, especially for the most disadvantaged households. For this reason, governments should be planning interventions now that ensure that disadvantaged children can return to school and catch up with their peers when schools reopen.
Strong evidence from around the world suggests that summer and afterschool learning programmes, including those that utilize trained teachers or volunteers, structured pedagogy, enrichment experiences, ability grouping and high levels of teacher-student engagement, can generate significant learning gains for disadvantaged populations. Accelerated learning programmes and other kinds of intensive “learning camps” targeted to the most disadvantaged children have been shown to be effective in many developing country contexts, both for bridging periods of learning loss and pathways for successful re-entry of out of school children. Other interventions, such as after school tutoring and peer-to-peer coaching, also hold promise.
Now is the time to plan for these programmes, so that teachers, school leaders and volunteers can be prepared and outreach to parents can be launched before schools are abruptly reopened. Teachers and community volunteers, who are more likely to have online access, can be trained and coached virtually on accelerated learning. Relevant curricula and materials for accelerated learning can be designed. Community and school leaders can identify disadvantaged groups and tailor approaches to specific contexts; and parents can be informed and engaged. Priority should be given to the most vulnerable in two age groups: children at primary level, where learning loss can most limit educational progress; and adolescents transitioning from primary to secondary education, where the poorest are most at risk of dropping out.
Conclusion
Kenya is finally mapping out the re-opening of the country. The Ministry of Education was ready to roll out the Community Based Learning (CBL) Framework, which is an intervention aimed at ensuring that the learners at the lowest socio-economic strata of our country begin to re-engage with structured engagements to prepare them for the eventual reopening of schools. Managing education in times of emergencies is difficult but there are tried and tested strategies which have been employed by other countries similar to Kenya. It is now acknowledged that teenagers have been particularly vulnerable, and that teachers are the best hope for our children to learn. This crisis is a difficult time for families and students alike, educators must be prepared to deal with the mental well-being of students as the TSC launches the CBL and other learning initiatives going on. The CBL offers simplicity in content and delivery- we are after all in a crisis- it therefore must be supported by communities and parents at the grassroots level as a measure to ensure that no child is left behind.
I liked the analysis herein.