As the midpoint nears for achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, there have been important advances in the monitoring framework development and the targets countries have set. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented major setbacks in both respects. Not only are the standard tools used to monitor progress in education affected, but the targets themselves may have to be reconsidered.
The Education 2030 Framework for Action called on countries to establish ‘appropriate intermediate benchmarks (e.g. for 2020 and 2025)’ for SDG 4 indicators to capture the contribution each country would be prepared to make to the global agenda, given their initial conditions. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and GEM Report teams have worked to mobilize the international community in that direction. Following a selection of seven SDG 4 indicators for benchmarking in 2019 and a recommendation of the Global Education Meeting Declaration in October 2020 to ‘accelerate the progress and propose relevant and realistic benchmarks of key SDG 4 indicators’, countries were invited to submit national benchmark values by October 2021 for 2025 and 2030. Values were submitted by 39% of countries. Another 10% committed to do so, while an additional 14% are European Union and Caribbean Community members with regional benchmarks (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Two in three countries have participated in the SDG 4 benchmark-setting process
Proportion of countries by status of submission of national SDG 4 benchmarks by October 2021
The information on baseline values and submitted national benchmark values for 2025 and 2030 now features in the Global Education Observatory, a new gateway to education-related data. The UIS and GEM Report will release a baseline report analysing the results of this process in early 2022. The report will highlight where countries, regions and the world aim to be. A process will be outlined to help countries develop education targets where these are still missing but also, where relevant, to reflect the potential effect of COVID-19 in national benchmarks as data emerge.
COVID-19 is the most serious crisis to have ever hit all the world’s education systems at once. Schools were closed for 28% of days and partially closed for 26% of days between March 2020 and October 2021. The peak was reached in April 2020 (95%). Between September 2020 and August 2021, schools were closed or partially closed for half of school days (Figure 4). Many countries classified their schools as partially open even when most were closed.
Figure 4: Over 20 months, schools were at least partially closed for 55% of days
Proportion of days by school opening status, February 2020 to October 2021
Official SDG 4 statistics, in most cases, are for 2019 and reflect the situation prior to the pandemic. A UIS assessment of 129 education ministry planning units between June and September 2020 found that two thirds had to delay data collection or postpone it to the following school year as they experienced either a moderate or a severe effect on their ability to meet reporting requirements. Survey administration was also severely affected during the pandemic.
Some large household survey programmes switched to phone surveys. But more than 25 surveys planned or already under way in 2020 faced fieldwork delays. Results will have to carefully take into account when exactly the fieldwork was conducted and whether nearby schools were open at the time. In addition, learning assessments were affected. For instance, the 2021 round of the Programme for International Student Assessment was postponed by a year.
The multiplicity of sources, coupled with differences in methodologies, samples, timing and contexts, means the task of assembling a narrative around the impact of COVID-19 remains challenging. In the absence of administrative data, surveys in Ethiopia, Ghana and Senegal provide preliminary evidence that children are returning to school upon reopening, although a rise in repetition rates may mean that dropout has simply been postponed.
The two main concerns are the effect of the disruption on learning and the unequal distribution of negative learning and other effects on more disadvantaged learners.
Globally only one in three children, and one in six of the poorest children, had access to the internet. Thus the most effective of available distance learning modalities excluded the vast majority of learners, and efforts to expand such modalities would be to the detriment of equity in the short to medium term. The use of mobile learning apps, which received much media attention, was the least common remote learning approach in a survey of six sub-Saharan African countries, used by no more than 17% of children in Nigeria and 12% in Ethiopia and by barely any in Burkina Faso, Malawi, Mali and Uganda.
Effects on learning will depend on school closures’ duration, remote learning modality and the extent of support to students, all of which varied greatly between and within countries. Most studies have been conducted in high-income countries. Averaging over seven countries, learning losses were equivalent to 30% of a school year for mathematics and 35% for reading, on average, if schools were closed for eight weeks. But in France, results in reading and mathematics improved among grade 6 students.
There is clear evidence that effects differ by socioeconomic status. In the United States, analysis of grade 3 to 8 students’ examination pass rates in 12 states showed that moving from in-person to fully hybrid or virtual mode exacerbated the negative impact by an average of 10 percentage points in mathematics and 4 percentage points in English. The switch to fully hybrid or virtual mode lowered pass rates by 4 percentage points for a district with no Black or Hispanic students but by 9 percentage points for a district with a 50% Black and Hispanic student population.
There is a dearth of direct learning assessments in low- and middle-income countries. In São Paulo, Brazil, secondary school students learned only 27.5% of what they would have learned in school had there been no pandemic; students whose schools reopened suffered a lower learning loss. In Colombia, students performed five points below the previous year, which represents about one quarter of a school year. In South Africa, grade 2 and 4 students lost between 57% and 81% of a year of reading skills in 2020, relative to their pre-pandemic peers.
The Annual Status of Education Report citizen-led assessments in South Asia show that learning levels have declined in the early grades. In rural Karnataka state, India, the percentage of those able to read a grade 2 text fell among students of all grades but the decline was worst among grade 4 students (from 33% to 18%) between 2018 and 2020. In Pakistan, a survey of 16 districts found similar learning losses in foundational skills in grades 1 and 3 but not in grade 5.
This disparate evidence, when combined, confirms that school closures had a negative impact on student learning. If loss is defined in terms of the SDG 4 minimum proficiency level, the impact may be greater in middle-income countries than in low-income countries, where initial levels were very low, or in high-income countries, where schools stayed closed for shorter periods and students had more access to online learning. Still, many aspects remain unknown, including whether learning levels will bounce back or COVID-19 will have a long-term impact on learning.
To mitigate the consequences, countries have extended or adjusted the academic year and have prioritized certain areas of the curriculum or certain skills. Two thirds of countries reported implementing remedial measures in primary and secondary education. In the Philippines, the Department of Education issued guidelines for six-week remedial classes aimed at students who scored below 75% on year-end tests. The National Tutoring Programme in England (United Kingdom) supports 15-hour tutoring courses for up to 6 million disadvantaged students.
The pandemic has also posed unprecedented challenges to teachers. School closures found many teachers unprepared for the move to remote learning, uncertain about their role and unfamiliar with the technology. In a survey of over 20,000 teachers in 165 countries, 39% stated that their physical, mental and emotional well-being had suffered during the pandemic. On the other hand, 50% of respondents stated that they felt more enthusiastic about their vocation. The crisis has raised questions over shifts needed in the content of teacher education. Beyond technological knowledge, teachers need to respond to new social-emotional and academic needs of students.
Education for sustainable development and global citizenship is a response to the challenges of a planet that is increasingly interconnected but whose future is at stake. Yet COVID-19 has revealed education systems’ failures to pursue the ideals of solidarity and multilateralism, and growing inequality within and between countries raises moral concerns. The world has witnessed many responses in the opposite direction, from vaccine nationalism to xenophobic policies and the spread of discriminatory beliefs. COVID-19 has also put health literacy at the centre of attention.
The net effect of school closures and reopenings on infection dynamics at the societal level remains inconclusive. But minimizing infection risk in learning environments is possible through measures ranging from masking, distancing and handwashing to discouraging the sharing of objects and disinfecting touched surfaces frequently. Low-tech solutions for improved ventilation include using outdoor spaces and opening windows, where seasonally appropriate. Less than 10% of low-income countries reported having enough basic measures such as sufficient soap, clean water, masks, and sanitation and hygiene facilities to assure the safety of all learners and staff; the share of high-income countries was 96%.
Some evidence is emerging that the pandemic and its aftermath will have squeezed education financing through a combination of reduced government revenue and increased demands from other sectors. Data collected by the UIS for 71 countries suggest that the median education share in total spending decreased from 14.1% in 2019 to 13.5% in 2021.
In early childhood education, even where remote learning was available, challenges included a lack of teacher training, adapting remote learning for young children, monitoring and assessing child development and dealing with disadvantaged home environments with insufficient support. The closure of facilities and limited interactions deprived children of social and cognitive stimulation beyond their homes.
Technical and vocational education and training suffered as up to 80% of programmes focus on practical and soft skills, which should be acquired in person. Preparing teachers has been a major issue, as they lack capacity to deliver distance learning, while their standard education programmes were disrupted. It is important to use multiple approaches and not rely solely on high-tech solutions to deliver distance learning. At the same time, there are examples of resilience where training continues to support highly affected sectors.
There was more experience of remote learning in tertiary education than in other education levels. In a survey of 53 countries, 3 reported switching fully to online higher education, 19 had primarily online modalities and 28 used a hybrid approach of remote and face-to-face learning. Middle-income countries, from Colombia to Egypt and from China to the Russian Federation, developed online platforms. But in a survey of sub-Saharan African students, only 39% were enrolled in institutions offering remote learning options. In EU countries, 41% of students who worked during their studies lost their jobs, 29% temporarily and 12% permanently.
Popular anglophone international student destinations, such as Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, experienced decreased inbound student mobility. With up to a third of students in Australia being international, this put higher education institutions in serious financial jeopardy. Students and graduates were stranded in host countries when they were expecting to return to their home countries.
Adult literacy and numeracy skills are crucial for health literacy and effective vaccination campaigns and must form an integral part of public emergency responses and reconstruction plans. In India, women who participated in an adult literacy programme had higher COVID-19 knowledge than their illiterate counterparts. Numeracy was the most consistent predictor of decreased susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19. Yet even before the pandemic, distance education was an unpopular mode of delivery for initial literacy programmes. In Brazil, a regulation clarified that classes corresponding to the primary curriculum had to be delivered in person.