Parallel session
What are the long-term impacts on learning and how can education systems respond?
The COVID-19 pandemic has had dramatic effects on lives and education systems including widespread school closures. The school closures come on top of a pre-existing learning crisis and threatens to further widen learning gaps, leaving even more children behind. What long term effects on children’s learning outcomes can we expect from these closures? And how can education systems “reboot” to most effectively respond to these and make use of the opportunity to build back better?
The panel will present findings from three studies on the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on education as part of the RISE (Research on Improving Systems of Education) Programme—a large-scale multi-country research endeavour focused on understanding how countries can overcome the learning crisis and deliver improved learning for all. These include simulations of potential long term learning loss, empirical measures of learning loss, and a study of efforts to remediate and recover from the pandemic. The findings emphasize the need for immediate responses to remediate losses and highlight the potential that recovery from this crisis presents to embark on long-term systems improvements for learning.