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This event took place on January 26, 2022

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00:04 [Abhijit Banerjee] Welcome.
00:07 This is a very proud moment for us.
00:14 It's the launch of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP) report.
00:26 That's a mouthful, but
00:28 it's something that will jump out as being of immediate and extremely clear relevance.
00:42 The report is on prioritizing learning during COVID-19.
00:47 It's been a massive team effort,
00:53 the panel members... but also thanks to an enormous group of other people who worked with us,
01:04 the panel members, you see them (on screen).
01:10 It's a rather, I'm not going to read the names, but it's a remarkable panel
01:18 in the sense that it's a collaboration between educationist and economists,
01:23 and among both are people who are both practicing policy people and academics.
01:36 It's really across a number of different competencies and different interests.
01:46 I think what has been extremely satisfying in this process is the fact that, despite perhaps
01:53 initial doubts, we've worked together beautifully, and I think what has come out of this is a
02:03 rather remarkable product in the sense that it does cross the boundaries between these
02:10 different disciplines. At the same time, very importantly, it sticks to being hard-headed about
02:21 what the evidentiary standards should be and where we should draw the line in terms of
02:31 what is practical and doable now, and in this moment of many challenges. With great pride,
02:45 let me declare that this report is now launched. [Kwame Akyeampong]
02:58 Thank you very much Abhijit. Also, let me add my warm welcome to everybody attending this global
03:06 launch. Just to give you an idea of the rundown of the program which is on your screen. We'll have
03:15 the scale of the problem, and then we will talk about the recommendations from the report. Then
03:23 we will also have administrator observations where we'll have a few reflections of the presentations
03:30 in the report. Then we open up for question and answer session before we close and adjourn.
03:38 Let me add that the report we are about to share and discuss was produced
03:46 by the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, but with the support of the Secretariat,
03:53 which include researchers at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth and Development Office,
03:58 FCDO, the World Bank and UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti. The report represents,
04:07 as professor Abhijit Banerjee has said, the consensus recommendations of an independent
04:14 interdisciplinary panel of global experts who have based their recommendations on the best
04:20 evidence during a rapidly changing global health crisis. We look forward to engaging with you
04:28 and sharing the key highlights and findings from this report. Thank you.
04:39 [Abhijit Banerjee] Now, I think I'm supposed to
04:45 share this session, but I think the title’s slide says everything. It's very clear that
04:56 I think that the starting point of this conversation has to be
05:00 an appreciation of the scale of the problem created by COVID-19, which builds on a
05:08 problem that preexisted, and I think it's important to keep that in mind. So with that,
05:13 I will invite Jaime Saavedra, head of Education Global Practice at the World Bank to speak.
05:20 [Jaime Saavedra] Thank you very much
05:23 Abhijit and Kwame for the production. Yes, this is great and an honor to be part of this panel.
05:34 As you say, this is a consensus to you all people coming from different disciplines, and it comes in
05:39 the moment of real crisis. Unfortunately, if we would have this discussion two years ago,
05:46 we would have already said that we were in a crisis , education was in a crisis. We were
05:51 already saying that more than half of children in the developing world were not able to read by
05:57 age 10, despite the fact that most of those kids were at school. We had a learning crisis already
06:05 despite a very large increases in enrollments during the last few decades,
06:10 that schooling was not being turned into learning. Then the crisis hit, and most governments,
06:18 or basically almost all governments in the world chose school closures as part of the arsenal
06:25 to fight the pandemic. There was no evidence, at that moment, if that will have an impact in
06:31 terms of the reduction on infection and infection rates, but actually that's what countries did. We
06:37 had very little evidence at that moment, what were going to be the benefits of those school closures.
06:43 There was some knowledge in the academic world and in some places that that could generate some
06:49 costs, because we knew about the loss of learning after summer breaks or after a teacher's strike,
06:56 we have seen the impacts of Ebola. We have seen impacts of the earthquake in Pakistan,
07:04 but actually, from the perspective of all the governments in the world, basically school closed.
07:11 There was the attempts of doing remote learning in almost all countries. But basically countries are
07:18 starting to figure out, what's going to be? How are we going to deal with this? Unfortunately,
07:24 all these summer breaks, teacher's strikes, even natural disasters have had relatively short
07:33 processes of closing schools for a short period of time. As we see in the next light, unfortunately,
07:40 first of all, all systems closed, and this is data for April 30 of 2020, what's in green
07:49 and dark blue is basically all systems are closing and in orange, partially closing. So
07:55 basically we have a shutdown of the whole world and 1.6 billion children were out of school.
08:00 But as we see in the next slide, the school closures remain an issue. Unfortunately,
08:07 the length of those school closures were extremely long, and particularly in regions like South Asia,
08:14 like Latin America, parts of the Middle East, even by November 1st of 2021,
08:21 many school systems were only partially open. Sometimes when we say partially open,
08:26 it was only a handful of schools who were open. Overall, we see that it's about 200 and,
08:31 on average, in low and middle-income countries, we see that it's about 250 days of schools
08:36 having lost and even longer in countries like India, like my own country, Peru,
08:42 or Philippines or Indonesia, which we saw extremely long school closures.
08:48 Unfortunately, despite all the efforts of remote learning, which obviously in a world with very low
08:55 internet connections, and despite the efforts of making remote learning multimodal,
09:01 the learning losses are really mounting. As we see in the next slide, we've started since last year,
09:09 trying to project what will be the impact of this school closures on learning, and this indicator
09:18 of learning poverty that we were talking at the beginning, this percentage of children
09:22 who cannot read and understand by age 10, that figure the learning poverty was 53%
09:28 before the pandemic. Initially, we were projecting that that will go up from 53 to 63%,
09:35 our last revisions move that figure to 70%. Both because of the length of the school closures, and
09:43 also because of the evidence that we see regarding the lack of effectiveness and heterogeneity of
09:48 quality of remote learning. Unfortunately, we are already seeing not only these simulations,
09:55 but real data in several countries who would show that those learning losses are real.
10:01 On average we see but not for many countries, for the countries for which we have data, we see that
10:07 one year of school closures are translated into about one year of loss learning. Unfortunately
10:13 we have many school systems in which schools have been closed for one year or even for two years.
10:20 With the early data of studies that have done at some point during 2021, we have seen that
10:27 South Africa, for instance, that closed for most of 2020 reading losses at 81% of a year. Data
10:34 for Karnataka in India also learning losses of about one year in literacy numeracy. Sao Paulo in
10:40 Brazil, remote classes learned 75% less of what they would've learned in presential education.
10:50 These measures were after a year of school closures, which unfortunately they continued.
10:55 In Sao Paulo Brazil, and this is the other figure, there's 2.5 higher risk of dropout rates than what
11:02 we see in in person in the in-person regime. Really worried about the learning losses,
11:09 really worried about large dropout rates. We still have a challenge because learning
11:15 loss has been not measured in many countries. But just to set the stage,
11:19 we're in trouble. That's what we need to see. We are in a crisis over a crisis. Over to you.
11:37 [Abhijit Banerjee] My apologies. The next
11:39 speaker is Sue Dynarski who's professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.
11:46 [Susan Dynarski] Thank you. So I'm speaking to the economic
11:52 impact of the school closures and learning losses that were just described in the previous slides.
12:01 It's possible to estimate the economic impact of school closures. In fact, several rigorous
12:07 research studies have done exactly that. These studies start with empirical evidence from past
12:13 school closures, both, on prolonged learning loss and on long term income. For example, in the US,
12:22 poorer students fall backwards each summer when schools close for the summer by a month's worth
12:30 of learning. In Pakistan four years after a temporary close of schools
12:36 due to an earthquake, students were one and a half years behind their peers.
12:41 The next step is to combine this information about the learning losses due to closures with evidence
12:47 on the impact of educational attainment on income. We know from previous research
12:54 that in high-income countries, individuals make on average 8.2% more for each year of schooling.
13:03 In low-income countries, the figure is 9.3% more for each additional year of schooling.
13:10 We can put these estimates on the relationship between education and earnings,
13:16 together with the estimates on the relationship between the school closures and education.
13:23 We get a very sobering idea of how much the pandemic is going to be affecting our
13:28 economies long term. The results are quite sobering. One credible estimate recently
13:35 made is that we are going to lose $17 trillion in wages due to lower educational attainment.
13:44 As you can see in this graph, students in low-income countries are going to be bearing
13:49 the largest share of the $17 trillion burden as they're expected to lose the equivalent of
13:56 $300 billion. These estimates they're going to keep increasing if the school closures continue.
14:05 Thank you. [Abhijit Banerjee]
14:07 Thank you Susan.
14:08 That's pretty sobering. We now have Rob Jenkins, who's Global Director of Education and
14:15 Adolescent Development at the UNICEF. [Rob Jenkins]
14:19 Well, thank you very much Abhijit, and I'm thrilled to be here with Jaime and
14:24 Susan and all our other friends and colleagues that are on the panel, and just greatly appreciate
14:29 this opportunity. I'm hoping that I'm not stating the obvious, but just to say that marginalized
14:36 children, children that were facing disadvantages prior to the pandemic have disproportionately been
14:42 impacted by school closures and by the pandemic. Why is that? Well, there's maybe a few interesting
14:50 data points that I just want to share. One is if you were a child living in a community that
14:56 already was experiencing poor learning outcomes, you had an increased risk of your school being
15:01 closed for prolonged periods. Basically, we see a correlation between marginalized communities in
15:07 terms of learning outcomes, so countries, or areas of parts of countries which were experiencing poor
15:13 learning outcomes prior to the pandemic and those areas, unfortunately, had schools close
15:19 the longest and continue to have. Just a flag that we have 600 million
15:23 school children globally still impacted by full or partial school closures today. It's
15:29 still very much a crisis happening. If you live in an area with poor learning outcomes,
15:34 you have a greater chance of your school being closed still now and for a prolonged period.
15:40 Secondly, as a marginalized child, you have less access to remote learning. So
15:44 there again, we see disparities increasing. Third, you are less likely to come back into
15:52 a school that's able to provide the full range of support required. Meaning catch up programs, full
16:00 range of psychosocial support, mental health, and nutritional support, recognizing the importance
16:07 of midday meals, etcetera. These are some key factors on why it's so critically important
16:12 moving forward that we collectively proactively reach marginalized children within each community,
16:18 but also prioritize communities as a whole, countries as a whole that require more support.
16:25 Who are these marginalized children? It depends on of course in each context,
16:28 but there are some common characteristics. They tend to be poor or living in remote locations.
16:34 Girls are particularly disadvantaged during this trying time, adolescent girls in particular who
16:40 face compounding disadvantages, greater risk of gender based violence, early marriage
16:45 and pregnancy, and other demand side barriers. Also schools are less able to meet their needs.
16:54 The call to measure and monitor which children are returning to school and provide support so that
17:01 they can overcome the barriers and receive full, comprehensive support as they return to school
17:06 is going to be absolutely critical in the coming days and weeks. It's really a now
17:10 or never moment. Because if we aren't able to provide those services and the support required
17:16 when schools open, or if they have opened after a few days, after a few weeks, if those children
17:21 have not come back, they will not be coming back. Building on Susan's point with economic,
17:27 social, many implications for those children, the communities they live in their countries. Thanks
17:32 again for this opportunity. [Abhijit Banerjee]
17:34 Thank you, Rob and last, but absolutely not the least, Sally Grantham-McGregor,
17:41 Emeritus Professor of Child Health and Nutrition at the University College London.
17:47 Sally. [Sally
17:54 Grantham-McGregor] Hi everyone. I just
17:57 wanted to say a few words about why early childhood and preschool are important.
18:04 Children in the first five years of life, it's well established that the brain is developing
18:11 faster than any other time, and it is more sensitive to environmental stimuli.
18:16 Either beneficial stimuli such as good nutrition, responsive mothering,
18:23 opportunities for learning, or on the other hand for insults such as malnutrition,
18:32 unstimulating environment, exposure to violence.
18:38 What is even more important is changes to the brain function at this age do not disappear.
18:46 They continue and are sustained through life. So the effects now will have long term effects.
18:55 The other point is cognitive development. The level of cognitive development on arrival at
19:01 school, on enrollment predict to some extent how well that child will do in school.
19:07 Therefore early childhood is critically important to educational success.
19:13 Now there's about 138 million and a little more than that of children in low and middle-income
19:21 countries who are enrolled in preschool. There is good evidence that preschool benefits children's
19:29 cognition, language, social, emotional development. There is some evidence that
19:34 this persists and benefits school achievement in primary school.
19:40 So if these kids aren't going to school, they obviously will not get those benefits.
19:44 But there's worse concerns than that because what happens to these children when they're at home?
19:53 We now know extreme poverty has increased, food insecurity in the home has increased.
20:02 Maternal depression has increased, and domestic violence has increased
20:07 during COVID. All of these things will almost certainly affect children's development.
20:16 Now, how does this leave the education services?
20:25 What we have to expect now is children entering preschool who've had maybe up to two years of
20:31 living with COVID, or entering school will be at a much lower level of development
20:37 than pre-pandemic children. And those already in school will be seriously behind,
20:43 and they will need programs to help them catch up.
20:53 The other thing we should consider is that young children are much less likely to get infected
21:00 and to be seriously ill. Well, they may get infected, but they won't get seriously ill. And
21:05 there is some suggestion that they're less likely to be infectious to spread it. So the obvious
21:14 conclusion is we should open preschools as soon as possible, but we need to expand their access.
21:21 We need to expand them in low-income countries
21:24 and in poor populations within countries who are very poorly served at the moment at preschool.
21:30 We need to supply them with school meals whenever we can.
21:38 Though it's not our remit obviously opening the health I haven't said before, but the
21:45 access to the health services and nutrition and parenting services has been severely restricted.
21:53 We need to open these urgently too. Okay, back to you.
21:57 [Abhijit Banerjee] Thank you, Sally.
22:00 I think it's now Sylvia was going to be here. [Sylvia Schmelkes]
22:06 Yes. Thank you very much. Well, it is an honor for me to moderate this second panel with participants
22:12 who were key in the research behind the development of this report. Rachel Glennerster,
22:17 who is Associate Professor in the University of Chicago and former chief economist of FCDO.
22:24 Abhijit Banerjee, co-chair of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, professor of MIT
22:29 and Nobel Prize in economics, and Kwame Akyeampong also co-chair of the panel and professor of
22:36 Education and Development in The Open University. This panel will focus on the recommendations
22:42 to governments that derive from the learning crisis described in the previous panel, and from
22:47 evidence of what works that prioritizes quasi experimental and randomized research studies,
22:54 as well as evidence with a focus on equity. The recommendations are presented in two groups,
23:00 those oriented towards immediate action, and those that derive from what schools should continue
23:06 doing following lessons learned from educational efforts carried out during school closures.
23:13 For immediate action, the document recommends keeping schools fully open and supporting children
23:19 to return. Evidence is presented on how to reduce transmission in schools, prioritizing vaccination
23:27 for teachers, providing masks for continuous use and improving ventilation. Due to learning losses
23:35 instruction will have to be adjusted to children that have fallen behind who should be assessed.
23:41 Instruction should focus on foundations and catch up programs should be implemented.
23:47 Regarding lessons learned during school disruption recommendations deal with how to leverage
23:51 existing technology and with a need to continue to strengthen parental engagement in schools. I will
23:58 immediately proceed to give the word to Rachel Glennerster who is as I said, Associate Professor
24:03 in the University of Chicago. To you, Rachel, [Rachel Glennerster]
24:08 Thank you very much, Sylvia and great to be with everybody. You heard in the previous panel,
24:16 the evidence of the very large economic and social costs of closing schools and disrupting schools.
24:24 Any policymaker who is trying to decide what to do and is facing a surges of infections,
24:30 which many policymakers are now, have to make an assessment of the rest associated with schools.
24:39 We're just going to look at those briefly. There are two main risks. One is the risk to
24:44 children from catching COVID at school, and the other is the risk to teachers.
24:50 We looked at this evidence quite carefully and all the evidence shows that while
24:56 children do get COVID at roughly the same rates as adults. The risk of severe disease
25:03 or death is much smaller in children and that's very related to age. The youngest children
25:11 are very, at facing very much low risks than older children. So, high schoolers are somewhat
25:18 similar to adults, but the preschoolers we've just been hearing about have really very low risks.
25:27 The risk to teachers can be reduced substantially with mitigation measures, which I'm going to talk
25:34 about in a minute, and with those in place, teachers are very unlikely to catch COVID from
25:41 students. Instead, most of the transmission that happens in schools is actually between
25:46 adults. Which is pretty interesting given that teachers spend most of their time with
25:53 students. It's very different from other jobs which tend to involve adult-to-adult interaction.
26:01 As they say, while the risks to teachers aren't zero, if you are worried as a public health group
26:07 about transmission of the disease. You are really going to want to focus on places where there's a
26:13 lot of adult-to-adult interaction and not schools. They're just not a logical place to try and
26:20 control the disease. Indeed this is not just a, we on infectious disease experts on this panel. But
26:28 if you look at recommendations from public health advisory panels who are, they would repeatedly say
26:35 that we should keep schools open, because they are really not a major driver of the disease.
26:45 Now we do have to try and reduce risks in school and there's a lot of good evidence about this,
26:52 and how to do that. Even in very low resource settings, in low and middle-income countries.
26:58 There's randomized control evidence that masks can reduce transmission and that's true even if
27:09 not everyone is wearing masks. So even if there isn't a very high adherence to a mask policy,
27:15 it can still be quite effective. The more people who wear masks the better. The better the quality
27:23 of the mask, the better. Surgical masks have shown to be much more effective than cloth masks,
27:29 but cloth masks are effective in reducing transmission. We also know that vaccines work
27:37 which is why this panel is calling on teachers to be prioritized
27:42 to have vaccinations because we desperately need them in schools, keeping schools open.
27:51 We also know that COVID is airborne and that there are quite low rates of transmission of
27:56 COVID outside. Which means that ventilation is a good idea. It does not necessarily mean
28:03 that you have to have a fancy filter in place. Simply opening a window or teaching in a room
28:10 that doesn't have glass in the windows, which is very common in some tropical countries.
28:15 That can really help with diluting the presence of the virus in the air. The quantity of virus
28:23 that you are exposed to is really determines how sick you get. So anything that you can do to just
28:29 reduce the quantity of the virus in the air will help. Even these relatively simple ventilation
28:36 approaches can really get the air circulating and reduce the of risks.
28:43 Now hand washing has been found to be important for colds and flu, but we have found very few
28:50 cases or, researchers have found relatively few cases of COVID being transmitted through surfaces.
28:57 So we've put most of the priority in the report on masks, ventilation, and vaccines. If you put
29:06 all of that evidence together, you've got very high costs of closing schools. Good feasible
29:14 ways to reduce transmission in schools. Low risk to children from COVID. Low rates of transmission
29:21 from children to teachers which means that closing school should really be the very last resort after
29:32 you've tried everything else, and have no other ways of trying to reduce transmission
29:37 because they're really much less risky activities than many of the other economic activities that
29:46 we are undertaking. They also have these very, very high costs, long term costs of disruption.
29:53 Back to you, Sylvia. [Sylvia Schmelkes]
29:54 Thank you very much, Rachel and I will now give the floor to Abhijit Banerjee. Please, Abhijit.
29:59 [Abhijit Banerjee] Thank you Sylvia.
30:04 I think that we've already talked about the size of the learning losses. I think it's
30:11 worth underscoring something that Jaime already said which is this is sitting on top of a pre
30:17 pandemic learning crisis and the characteristics of that crisis were that it was within each
30:25 classroom it was very, very substantial diversity of children's learning levels.
30:34 Some fifth graders or fifth grade, other fifth graders are
30:38 at second grade. Very large differences and very much concentrated within the same classroom
30:47 which both makes teaching challenging. Often makes it tempting to focus on the children who
30:55 can. So if the syllabus is of the fifth grade, often the teaching is at the fifth grade level.
31:01 Even though half the children are at second grade level. That particular problem is going to be
31:08 very substantially exacerbated the by the crisis. That's, I think evident from
31:16 a lot of the things that Jaime already said. One of them being that the technological
31:27 substitutes for in-classroom teaching are unequally accessed. If you have a good internet,
31:36 if you have can afford to have a good phone. You are much better positioned to take advantage of
31:44 them. If you happen to live in a region where there's good access to networks, you get much
31:53 better position. If you have parents who have time to focus on you and make you sit down and follow,
32:00 one of the things classrooms do is they introduce a degree of automaticity in the process
32:07 of learning. Now, it's the onus is on the parents to make sure that the children who are otherwise
32:20 inclined to go play, make sure that they spend their time in front of the radio,
32:24 in front of the television, in front of the phone absorbing material.
32:34 That ability to do so differentiated by how busy the parents are, whether they have
32:39 slack in their lives, if they can take the extra time off, if you are working from 6:00 AM
32:48 to 6:00 PM, as a domestic. Your children probably don't have that same chance. Yeah, I absolutely
32:55 think that this is going to generate both, overall many children being further behind. Second,
33:06 the fact that some of the children will be less hurt than others. And I think both of those
33:14 will make the teaching challenge of teaching a more diverse classroom and the teaching needs
33:20 that imply. Even more maybe demanding that there were at. I think that there are many things that
33:34 get discussed in this context of what one can do. I think the key is to start from the idea that
33:45 we want children to be, we need to identify the problem. I think less than half the countries
33:54 right now have even a plan to assess learning losses so I think that that's a starting point
34:00 has to be to assess where the children are. I think without that it's going to be impossible to
34:08 tailor the instruction. We also know on the other side, the good news is that we do know what works.
34:15 There's evidence from many randomized control trials, that if you actually
34:20 target children where they are, they catch up very fast. And the approach,
34:29 what is sometimes called teaching at the right level has developed by Pratham and others,
34:36 is now well-founded and with strong evidentiary base. The basic idea is
34:43 to group children by learning levels, at least for part of the day and liberate the teachers
34:52 from the pressure of teaching the curriculum. I think those are independent, partly teachers
35:00 resist where there's evidence that teachers, when they are asked to implement teaching at the right
35:09 level programs, they find it difficult because they feel that it conflicts with their obligation
35:14 to deliver the curriculum. I think that on the other hand, we also have evidence the teachers
35:22 when they're liberated from that pressure, and when it's clear to the why this is being done,
35:30 they are able to implement teaching at the right level programs and at least to learning gains.
35:39 I think we know that this can be done in schools. It can also be done outside schools. I think
35:47 there's large effects of volunteer led programs. They tend to have the disadvantage that not all
35:53 children attend. Maybe we can do a better job of making sure that the children attend
35:58 these programs. I think that while, maybe be desirable to also adjust the curriculum,
36:07 this is a much more fraught issue. So I would focus right now on a temporary, but very, very
36:14 focused program for catch-up of the children. [Sylvia Schmelkes]
36:20 Thank you very much, Abhijit. Now I will give the word to Kwame Akyeampong who has also been
36:29 co-chair of the panel, who is co-chair of the panel, and is professor of education
36:33 and development to of the Open University. Kwame, please.
36:38 [Kwame Akyeampong] Thank you very much.
36:41 One of the things that we've become much more aware of is the importance of technology during
36:46 this pandemic. We know that technology has become important but we also know that it is
36:53 not a substitute for in-person schooling. We found that during the pandemic, remote online education
37:02 was not available to most students in lower-income countries and middle-income countries.
37:08 This is very important. The idea that the technology is not panacea to the problem of
37:14 providing quality education to children who are out of school due to the pandemic. We know that,
37:23 for example, simply providing a device without support is ineffective. I think this is something
37:30 that we need to really focus our attention on because in many cases, countries shifted to
37:40 devices that could be used to continue to provide continuous
37:44 learning for children. Without the support that becomes very, very difficult to accomplish.
37:50 We have seen how technology can be very powerful in many ways and we've seen how in some countries
37:57 they've been used to expand support to teachers. To make sure that teachers are able to use the
38:04 technology to engage with learners whilst they're at home. It does have a huge potential when it
38:11 comes to that. We've also seen how it's been helped to keep intact with students through
38:16 phones. This is very important because we know that one student are out of school, they're at
38:22 home. During this pandemic, we planned it, there needs to be continuous contact with them. Mobile
38:29 phones, in particular, have been the device used in many countries quite effectively, to keep that
38:34 contact with children and to help them learn. We have also evidence of how they've been used to
38:42 teach children to learn at their level. So, we do know that it has potential
38:51 to be used effectively, to ensure that children continue to learn. We also know that despite these
38:57 widespread use of technology, radio education, for example, some countries have used radio education
39:05 which is in many low-income countries have been the technology they've resorted to.
39:12 It's been used quite well in many countries. We also know that this needs to be evaluated,
39:18 so that we actually understand the effectiveness of such low technology
39:23 in ensuring that children continue to learn. Now, I want to now move on to talk about
39:29 the available technology. Say a bit more about what we know about the available technology,
39:36 and what it's able to help us to achieve. In particular, we know that mobile phones
39:45 are becoming a promising technology to leverage. Given that over 80% of household have access to
39:54 simple feature phones in lower and middle-income countries. This opens up some real opportunities
40:00 and possibilities that we should take seriously. I think that the pandemic has given us this
40:07 opportunity to think seriously about low tech, and how we can use it to
40:13 engage with parents, but also with children. The availability of this mobile technology in
40:21 many low-income countries has prompted many countries to look at how they can connect
40:28 with children using, or with parents, using this technology. We know that during the
40:34 pandemic, the texts have been used to notch successfully parents and learners in Brazil,
40:42 to increase educational engagement. Another newer approach has been weekly, one-on-one,
40:50 targeted phone calls by teachers and mentors to parents or caregivers of students in Botswana,
40:57 Bangladesh, and Nepal. These have shown that if you use it appropriately,
41:04 it can have positive effects on learning. We haven't found the same,
41:09 but I must add that it's not the case in all countries. Especially
41:14 when it's been tried in Sierra Leone, it's been found out to be that successful.
41:18 While mobile phone based interventions have been highly cost effective in some settings.
41:23 The use of them by governments remain low among low-income countries. The technology is available,
41:28 but they haven't been used as much in low-income countries. We know, for example, 17%
41:34 compared to 57% in middle-income countries, according to one survey.
41:41 The use of this mobile phone base intervention should be further evaluated. We think what
41:47 the parliament has helped us to think about, is that the these are possibilities
41:53 but we do need to get further evidence and evaluate it's cost effectiveness. So overall,
41:58 we say that these phone based programming through text messages, and teachers calling students and
42:05 caregivers, is a highly promising approach that we should really seriously explore because of the
42:11 opportunities it provides for us to really engage at the level which would ensure that there is
42:17 a continuity in learning. The whole promise many also do not necessitate the careful use adaptation
42:25 and testing of technology where appropriate. We think that this is an area that we need to place
42:32 some emphasis, and governments need to look at. Let me now tend to the next, which is about
42:41 parents and how the parental engagement. If the pandemic has taught us anything at all. It has
42:49 us that learning doesn't necessarily have to happen in the classroom. It is important
42:54 if we want to make sure that children continue to learn, that there is some continuity when they're
42:59 at home. The pandemic forced many of us, many countries to confront that reality. In that case,
43:06 if you had homes where they had parents who were more educated, who had more resources. They could
43:12 then continue providing some supplementary opportunities to learn for their children.
43:19 I think if anything at all, this pandemic has taught us that parental engagement is crucial.
43:24 We do need to give that a lot of thought and emphasis. At the same time, we realize that
43:33 in many low-income countries, especially where parents are do not have the resources at home,
43:40 the benefits have not been the same for everybody. We have to really explore
43:46 opportunities where we can support parents to be able to provide a learning when children are
43:53 at home because we've seen how this has proved very, very successful in many instances. This
44:02 is something that we need to place a lot more emphasis on. We know that emerging evidence
44:10 suggest positive effects in primary school, in Botswana, in Bangladesh from support to parents.
44:16 That's very strong evidence to engage in short, targeted learning exercises with your child.
44:22 These results reinforce findings from a review in non COVID-19 settings which revealed that
44:28 interventions involving parents via phones, I could mention text and emails, have been
44:33 successful in context where communications are two way, personalized and positive. Evidence
44:41 that we've looked at during COVID-19, has showed that SMS text, just taking just SMS text messages,
44:49 to support parents in preschool, boosted learning for their children in Costa Rica. It may sound
44:56 like a very tiny or minor thing to do, but just providing that link with parents through SMS, text
45:03 messages has been proven to really boost learning for children in some countries. In addition,
45:10 evidence suggests that parents reading to their children can help reduce their learning loss.
45:15 This we have found in some countries. We know several intervention to support parental
45:19 engagement education prior to the pandemic really yielded good effects. Including additional
45:27 engagement in Chile, sharing information about our child's education. We have examples from Ghana,
45:33 Malawi, Mexico, France, and the US. We know that these interventions show promise,
45:38 even in low resource settings. Mostly when there is a clear path to influence the quality
45:43 of instruction. I think that is something that we need to keep in mind, as we found in the case
45:48 in Indonesia and in Kenya, but not in India. We need more evidence on the extent to which
45:55 accountability interventions like these can improve schooling and learning during
45:59 the COVID-19 school disruptions. This is really raising the importance of parents, that parental
46:05 engagement could be leveraged to all also improve children's mental health. It has been documented
46:11 that COVID-19 would worsen the mental health of children and caregivers who are already at risk,
46:17 and lead to new cases of mental illness. We need to have interventions that target these caregivers
46:24 to support them, to ensure that they can provide assistance to children whilst
46:31 they're at home. More of this evidence is needed to conclude exactly what works and does not work
46:39 in the current context. We believe this is an important avenue that should be explored further.
46:46 Now altogether, the evidence suggests that interventions to promote parents engagement
46:51 in their children's education can improve student learning. Either through supporting them directly
46:56 or increasing accountability of education systems. I would like to add by stressing this point that
47:05 while over 50% of high income countries report trying to engage parents, few low-income countries
47:12 in our sample that we looked at in the report do so. There is a gap there. That's something
47:16 that we need to address. An effort should be made to ensure that effective, to adopt
47:22 effective parental and engagement strategies. To test new ones is crucial as we move forward.
47:28 Thank you very much. [Sylvia Schmelkes]
47:30 Thank you very much, Kwame. I am finally going to ask Rachel, if she can address the question
47:35 of teacher support. Please, Rachel. [Rachel Glennerster]
47:39 Thank you. As we've heard, teachers are facing a very difficult situation
47:47 with much wider ranges of learning levels which is already a problem in classes,
47:58 but has been made much worse by the pandemic. If you look at what has happened
48:07 in terms of support to teachers during the pandemic, you see this very stark
48:13 difference with low-income countries, providing very little additional support to teachers despite
48:22 the very difficult time they've been having and so this is one of the large gaps that we identified.
48:29 What kind of support can you provide? Well, some of the things is... Way to support them is
48:40 through structured pedagogy programs, which can help them deal with this range of learning levels
48:50 in the class, the kinds of support to do the kinds of programs that Abhijit was talking about.
48:58 Now, when people have looked at general skills training of teachers
49:03 that has not been very effective, what you want is very targeted support to teachers to do
49:10 the kinds of things which are now needed given the much lower levels of learning that they're
49:18 having to cope with. So simply say, simply throwing them this much more challenging situation
49:26 is not going to be help, not going to work very effectively if you don't provide the
49:31 support for them to deal with a very changed landscape. If you move to the next slide.
49:41 The other thing that you can do to support teachers is provide additional
49:49 teaching assistance or tutors to help with this wide range of learning, but also just this
49:56 much bigger catch shot that needs to happen. This has been tried in a number of both high
50:03 and low-income countries actually, where you provide tutors or teaching assistance
50:13 to cover the material that children have missed out on, or have fallen behind. There's help to
50:24 teachers themselves, but to help, to cope with these very challenging class situations
50:31 but also bringing in additional support through tutors and teaching assistants.
50:39 Back to you, Sylvia. [Sylvia Schmelkes]
50:40 Thank you very much. Well, thank you to the three of you for the presentations and also for your
50:46 intensive work on this important report. It gives dimension to the gravity of the learning crisis
50:52 and the affectation to the universal right to education produced by widespread school closures
50:58 that have exacerbated educational inequity. The recommendations presented are meant to provide
51:03 governments with evidence for the decisions that they are now having to take to fully reopen
51:09 preschools and schools, and to provide the needed support. We encourage all countries to take stock
51:16 of the losses to children's education that have occurred as a result of the pandemic
51:21 to use this report as a resource for taking specific cost effective actions to address
51:27 these losses. Thank you very much and I will now turn the word over to Jaime Saavedra.
51:32 [Jaime Saavedra] Thank you very much, Sylvia. This has been
51:37 extremely interesting. Let me now turn over to a great panel that we have in which we're
51:42 going to hear about what has happened on the ground and also about what's the importance
51:46 of all this work. To do that I really have the pleasure to have me joining in the panel
51:57 Joan Osa Oviawe who's the commissioner of education in Edo State in Nigeria. I mean,
52:05 Dr. Vinod Rao, a good friend who is a secretary of education in the state of Gujarat in India.
52:15 Actually, as you're going to see, these are not random selections of experiences around the globe.
52:22 These are excellent selections of teams on the ground who have been doing fantastic work during
52:29 the pandemic, and now the schools are starting to open. Finally, we have Charlotte Watts who is the
52:41 chief scientific advisor or FCDO, who will discuss with us about the importance of evidence
52:48 based policy making, particularly in the complex political and social situations that were living
52:56 in many countries. We were supposed to have also Vicky Ford, who is minister for Africa,
53:01 Latin America and the Caribbean, but unfortunately she had an emergency.
53:07 Without further ado, let me further pass the word to Dr. Joan Osa to let us know a bit
53:14 about what happened in Edo state, in Nigeria, when schools were closed. You were able to respond more
53:22 resilient in a more resilient fashion than many other systems because of the investments that you
53:27 have already made in technology and in training before the pandemic. You survive that period,
53:34 a complex struggle that you did a lot. Now the schools have reopening,
53:38 you're building on that experience of this past two years, so what would you give us,
53:44 unfortunately, we have only less than five minutes, but it gives us snapshot
53:48 right of today. What is that in which way you're learning from this past experience and also of
53:55 the deep recommendations of the conditions of these panels, what is that resonates with
53:59 you? Over to you, Joan. [Joan Osa Oviawe]
54:02 Thank you so much Jaime for the invitation. I'm going to just speak, because of time constraints,
54:07 on some key aspects. As you said, it helped greatly that we had done some previous work before
54:14 the COVID-19 partial shutdown, however when school resumed, I think we resumed school in October
54:22 and as in Edo State was particularly peculiar because it was also an election year for us.
54:30 There was all kinds of craziness going on. What we did immediately after school resumed
54:38 was to find a way to support those learners, that we are not able to access our e-learning
54:51 program during the lockdown. Then there were also, we discovered initially from an evidence from
55:00 teachers, based on their interaction with their pupils, that there were some pupils who had begun
55:06 learning how to read right before they shutdown. By the time we resume, so we shut down in
55:13 March 2020, and resume in October. In February of 2020, we had just started a very, a campaign
55:24 called Every Child, a Reading Champion to promote literature, and so as a child, we
55:30 had been trained, and we trained, and there was a big push for literacy and numeracy.
55:37 When we resume back in October, some of the teachers reported that they notice that those
55:43 kids who were beginning to read right before the closure, they obviously were no longer able to,
55:52 or were not able to read at the pace that they were before. We adjust the timetable,
56:00 so spend a little bit more time on literacy and numeracy, so that helped in plain catch
56:06 up across the system. The other thing that we did before COVID-19 was that in 2019, after we
56:18 did a pupil diagnosis and discover that quite a number of kids learner were below grade level.
56:26 We essentially took a radical step to stop the clock by introducing what it's called teaching
56:33 at the right level. For two terms, we basically taught literacy, numeracy, writing, and critical
56:41 thinking. Having that initial teaching at the right level structure was enabled us to in
56:48 October, November, December 2020, we were able to use that same framework to provide very targeted
56:59 remedies studies in the critical numeracy and literacy area that helped us. The other lessons
57:08 we've learned in our own state is that when we look at the learning gains and then learning laws
57:14 during the COVID and post COVID shutdown, we discovered that there was quite a disparity
57:20 between our basic school, primary school and our secondary school. In secondary school, there
57:27 was a significant loss that we are actually now trying to remediate. The reason for that is that
57:38 in the last three years, the reform of our education system actually started at the
57:43 basic level because that's the foundation. I'm saying the results of the basic reform,
57:50 education reform. We are now expanding to secondary. We are just now this year putting
57:58 in place the work that is going to help us to deal with basic, I mean, secondary education.
58:09 The other thing going forward for us in Edo state is that we are now introduced and we are just
58:15 in the process of analyzing our learning assessment strategy. Prior to now,
58:20 we've not done any learning assessment so we don't have any large scale data that tells us
58:26 how our learners are doing. We've introduced, we are piloting beginning in February of 2021,
58:33 I mean, excuse me, of 2022 learning assessments are three critical meet points in the nine
58:41 years of basic education, so we are doing basic testing at basic three, basic six and basic nine.
58:50 Again, because of the lessons learned from the basic education reform, we are now applying the
58:58 same thinking to our secondary schools, where we now, also by the new academic
59:04 section in September of this year, we are going to be ruling out an assessment across all our
59:14 non-tertiary educational level, secondary school, TVET, as well as special education
59:22 for us in special education, and even in our special education soft, soft sector.
59:27 We discovered that, I mean, we made effort during the shutdown to ensure that they were
59:32 still learning. We've particularly realized that even our special education need to be repositioned
59:41 because by introducing skills acquisition, and so what is driving all of this from a policy
59:48 standpoint from a strategy standpoint is our [inaudible] best 2.0 transformation framework,
59:57 and it's inched on five pillars governance, teaching innovations, learning for skills,
01:00:05 school environment, and values. This is giving us a roadmap to deal decisively with learning
01:00:13 loss while at the same time making progress in the eradication of learning poverty in our basic
01:00:22 education and secondary education system. [Jaime Saavedra]
01:00:27 Great. Thank you very much, Joan, I think this was a great tour of the bold,
01:00:33 you were already implementing bold reforms before the pandemic, and that allowed you to be bolder
01:00:40 and confront all the different issues that we have actually been discussing
01:00:47 during this event, so thank you very much for all the work and thanks for sharing it with us.
01:00:51 Let me now turn to Dr. Vinod Rao. So Vinod, the Gujarat has been receiving a lot of attention
01:01:01 for the investments that you have made in measuring children during levels to monitor
01:01:05 how children are learning at the classroom, in the classroom, what's happening in the classroom. You
01:01:12 have a fantastic monitoring center, and you have used that during the school closures.
01:01:18 The question that I have for you is what are the measures that you're taking now
01:01:21 to promote learning recovery, right, especially in the area of foundational learning, and how do your
01:01:27 priorities and recommendations align to what you have heard of your recommendations of the panel.
01:01:35 I know the last time we spoke, we took like two hours and a half just to review a few of the
01:01:41 innovations that you were doing, but now you have only, you have less than five minutes. So over to
01:01:47 you and your synthesis capacity over to you Vinod. [Vinod Rao]
01:01:51 Yeah. Thank you so much. I have a very brief presentation of say seven,
01:01:55 eight slides. I'll take only four to five minutes. I'll first share
01:01:59 that presentation and subsequently I'll respond to your query.
01:02:04 [Jaime Saavedra] Super. Please go ahead.
01:02:09 [Vinod Rao] Can you see the presentation?
01:02:11 [Jaime Saavedra] Yes. If you click presentation mode,
01:02:14 that will be better. [Vinod Rao]
01:02:16 Yes. I hope- [Jaime Saavedra]
01:02:18 Super. Excellent. Go ahead, please. Go ahead. [Vinod Rao]
01:02:21 All these years we were struggling with the issue of schooling without learning. We, in India,
01:02:32 particularly in Gujarat we almost ensured 100% enrollment of students, but the learning outcome
01:02:38 and particularly great appropriate learning outcome was always a challenge.
01:02:43 Until now we were grappling with the issue of schooling without learning, and COVID made
01:02:48 us grapple with the issue of learning without schooling, and then came our initiatives most
01:02:57 of which were technology added initiatives. Next. Immediately after the lockdown came in March 2020,
01:03:06 we started home learning initiative, which was a multi-modal initiative using all
01:03:11 possible technology driven platforms. It involved our routine television channels,
01:03:20 our dedicated channels, which Gujarat government has, which is through what we call BISAG,
01:03:27 Bhaskaracharya Institute for Space Applications, and that has dedicated channels we
01:03:34 extensively deployed Microsoft Teams classes. We also had a Gujarat Virtual
01:03:41 Shala YouTube channel, which we started. Next. We, in 2019, coincidentally, we decided to
01:03:52 initiate pilot off, energized the textbooks using QR coding. This coincidentally was launched in
01:04:01 2020, along with the COVID lockdown. As soon as COVID lockdown was announced, we distributed,
01:04:10 energized the textbooks in the month of April, May, June, and this ensure that as soon as
01:04:20 the textbooks reached to the students, the access to live audio, which were learning
01:04:25 content significantly, or rather dramatically improved. Next. We saw that until month of June
01:04:33 of live place across the state, we were in across the country. We were in 10 and in just
01:04:39 three months, we immediately short to number one position with maximum access to edtech content,
01:04:48 in particularly, our government schools, next. We went ahead with deployment of extensive
01:04:58 edtech initiatives like, through, YouTube, Microsoft teams live classes, Facebook
01:05:06 channel, JioTV, and millions viewers benefited out of it. Next.
01:05:16 Simultaneously we also ensure teachers reach out to individual students, weekly periodic
01:05:21 assessments, submitting assessments twice a year. They were diligently and religiously flowed around
01:05:27 two lab teachers reach out to individual students and handed over worksheets and
01:05:31 collected their answer sheets. Data entry of performance of each student was conducted,
01:05:36 learning progress was through centrally through newly started command and control central for
01:05:41 schools, which was again launched during the COVID time. Pratham, is a reputed organization in
01:05:48 India, which conducts every year, in 2020, 2021, it ranked as the state with maximum outreach of
01:05:56 teachers to students during COVID lockdown of schools. This was possible also because we were
01:06:02 tracking in real time these teachers initiatives through our command and control center. Next.
01:06:09 We simultaneously started social psychological support for children because it was not all about
01:06:15 learning content but also about emotional wellbeing of the student during the COVID times.
01:06:20 A separate dedicated program was initiated, which was held by the
01:06:25 appraised and appreciated by the Ministry of Education Government of India. Next. Our
01:06:32 initiative also included the first of its time, only fully government own company for edtech, so
01:06:41 Gujarat education technology limited was launched in 2021. Today it has three million downloads,
01:06:49 three million students have downloaded the app, and this is giving free content to government
01:06:55 school students and at almost negligible cost to private school students. We are working, we're
01:07:02 the first state government to start an edtech company of our own, and we want to beat predatory
01:07:10 strategies, which many of the tech companies are doing in India and the rest of the developing
01:07:17 world, which is extremely exploitative of our students. Today government itself will provide
01:07:24 better content, world-class content at almost free of cost, to private school students and
01:07:30 absolutely free of cost to government students. This is also an initiative post COVID. Next.
01:07:36 Our command and control center for real-time monitoring. The first of its kind exclusive CCC,
01:07:41 real-time monitoring, evaluation and support on key indicators, like attendance,
01:07:46 learning outcomes. Of course, when schools are closed, we are monitoring the attendance and
01:07:50 movement of teachers, our field functionaries. We have around two lakh teachers in primary schools,
01:07:56 another almost one lakh teachers in secondary higher secondary schools. We have about 10,000
01:08:02 field functionaries for supervisory staff. We are doing real-time monitoring of their contribution
01:08:07 during COVID. We have collected about 500 crore data points through these initiatives.
01:08:15 We are able to see, track the learning outcome progression of every child sitting here. We have
01:08:21 student wise progress card, which we have developed,
01:08:24 and we are seeing in which learning outcomes across the state, patterns of learning loss
01:08:31 across the state on very subjects on various learning outcomes, we are able to generate
01:08:36 through extensive deployment of big data analysis and artificial intelligence. Next.
01:08:42 We did a statewide survey of access-to technology, particularly devices. And we came out with certain
01:08:52 very useful insights. Today state government is focusing in improving this reach of devices and
01:08:58 connectivity to all schools and maximum number of students. Next. This my last slide, for all these
01:09:06 decades, we were struggling with schooling without learning. The challenge now is to ensure learning
01:09:12 without schooling. Across the globe, COVID has prodded governments to adopt technology assisted
01:09:18 education. What two decades of improvement and improvements in technology could not achieve,
01:09:27 two years of COVID as achieved. We, in many parts of the world, this crisis was converted
01:09:33 into an opportunity. Technology is not a solution, it's not the final solution overarching solution,
01:09:39 but technology is indeed a very big, useful tool to improve learning outcomes across
01:09:46 schools. 85% of school budgets, and this is something I would request,
01:09:53 also to focus on, 85% of school budgets are going for salaries,
01:10:00 many government they couldn't upgrade their technology, upgrade their infrastructure over the
01:10:05 past few years because excessively, budget was getting diverted for salaries of teachers.
01:10:13 Today after all these decades post COVID, we have realized that we need to invest in
01:10:20 technology and to ensure that technology, which is every student, at least in some part of the world.
01:10:28 What actually COVID has done is schooling laws, that schooling laws has not necessarily learned.
01:10:38 Schooling laws has not necessarily resulted in learning laws in at least some parts of the world.
01:10:44 In some pockets of our state, at least schooling laws has led to learning gain.
01:10:50 Today the ability of a poor weak teacher to limit the learning outcome, the strength of the learning
01:10:57 outcome of students has been almost nullified. Every teacher cannot be made outstanding,
01:11:03 but one outstanding teacher can be made available to every student
01:11:06 through deployment of technology. COVID has given us this unprecedented opportunity for technology
01:11:13 driven transformation in school education. I believe we will all have to work with it to
01:11:19 capitalize on this opportunity. In any case, even after post COVID, when school's reopen,
01:11:24 blended learning has become a new normal. It's not just about offline learning,
01:11:28 offline plus online technology assisted, plus physical has become the new normal across India
01:11:37 and particularly in Gujarat. Thank you. [Jaime Saavedra]
01:11:39 Thank you very much Vinod, and as this two country examples or estate examples, really show that,
01:11:49 I mean, change is possible, that we can really focus on learning and that, and also technology
01:11:54 is critical. But as you have said technology is about complimenting what teachers can do, be
01:12:03 done with knowledge, even if it's not a panacea. Let me now turn to Charlotte Watts, basically, to
01:12:15 answer kind of an existential question for all of us. Why is all this, all the use of evidence
01:12:22 and data, which is about this, a panel like this, but it's also one, what we have seen from,
01:12:28 from Dr. Rao's presentation, the use of data is critical during policy making and policy making
01:12:33 implementation? Over to you, Charlotte. I know you can speak hours about this but we need to do it in
01:12:39 less than five minutes. Over to you. [Charlotte Watts]
01:12:42 Okay. I'll have a go. So thank you very much for giving me the chance to join you today.
01:12:49 Just to say, Minister Ford sends her heartfelt apology. She was called away on urgent action
01:12:56 and asked me to take her place. So I'm FCDO's chief scientific advisor, and part of my role
01:13:03 is to support the generation and use of evidence. This is an agenda that I feel
01:13:10 very strongly about because, and I'm very pleased to join you in the launch of this
01:13:15 report because it is practical, which is what we really need, but it also is evidence-based.
01:13:22 The recommendations are really what policy makers need to make sure that we can reopen schools,
01:13:28 that schools can remain open and that children can be helped to catch up,
01:13:33 but also to thrive and continue to progress. I mean, I think what the data and evidence,
01:13:39 this report highlights is just the huge impacts that school closures have had in many,
01:13:46 many different contexts on so many aspects of children's lives and especially hitting
01:13:52 and impacting on the most vulnerable. We've seen it in the UK, but also across the world. Clearly,
01:13:59 there are variations and it's really exciting to hear the really positive examples of what
01:14:05 has been successful, but also there's been broader challenges that we've all faced.
01:14:12 These impacts, if unaddressed, really have the risk that learning losses are compounded
01:14:18 over time, and have a legacy of impact over decades to come. This is a huge challenge
01:14:24 that's facing many children, families, teachers, and governments, and so it is really good that we
01:14:31 are hearing about these examples and we have the recommendations coming from the report that tell
01:14:36 us that there are evidence-based solutions that can and will deliver results. So, for example,
01:14:44 we were proud to have supported The Literacy, a mass accelerator program in Kano state that
01:14:49 was adopted in response to the pandemic and just hugely proud of the coverage that that program
01:14:56 reached of 37,000 children. This program builds very much on the proven approach of teaching at
01:15:04 the right level, where students are grouped according to their skills and knowledge and
01:15:10 engaged with relatable activities that build their core skills. We heard a bit about that early on.
01:15:18 This type of intervention that adjusts teaching to match children's achievement
01:15:23 is a key recommendation of today's report and it's something that in many ways seems very simple
01:15:30 and intuitive to implement, but in many schools is still not the standard approach. We think this
01:15:37 approach can help children not only catch up in loss learning, but also help strengthen education
01:15:44 systems in the long term and address the ongoing learning crisis that was there before COVID hit
01:15:50 us and has been exacerbated because of COVID. Teaching for the needs of every child, obviously
01:15:58 depends on reliable data about a child's progress and attainment. So it's important that investment
01:16:06 is made in collecting the data and using the data. Dr. Rao's presentation, I think, is fantastic in
01:16:14 showing us what the opportunities are of really to use data in real time to understand
01:16:21 children's need to track attendance and to track progress over time and to take actions if children
01:16:27 are falling behind or if they need extra support. As part of our broader support to education,
01:16:33 the UK government will continue to invest spending on strengthening data and evidence.
01:16:39 And we are pleased that also other funders are joining us in these efforts. These investments in
01:16:46 data and evidence speak for themselves the value of these from the examples that we're hearing.
01:16:52 But we, and we are investing in them not only to help inform our own investments in education
01:16:58 globally to make them more cost-effective, but also we hope to help support national level
01:17:05 investments by ministries of education across lower and middle-income countries.
01:17:11 An important element to flag linked to that is the new What Works Hub for global education,
01:17:17 which will work jointly with UNICEF and the World Bank to build
01:17:21 further evidence of successful approaches to education
01:17:25 and to ensure the best and latest research is available to policy makers and teachers.
01:17:32 But our final word of reflection is, evidence is critical. Data is critical, but it can only
01:17:38 get us so far. We also need political will to strengthen education systems, and deliver
01:17:45 foundational learning for all. Everyone here has a really important role in championing this
01:17:51 agenda. So many thanks to the advisory panel and to everyone taking part today. We are massing a
01:17:58 growing coalition that is determined to improve education globally and ensure that more and more
01:18:05 children get the best chance to learn. Thank you. [Jaime Saavedra]
01:18:08 Thank you very much Charlotte and thank you very much for your continued support and the
01:18:12 continued support and partnership of the FCDO. It's great that you have emphasized that it's
01:18:16 not about the evidence and the design, but it's also about the political commitment.
01:18:21 I would add to the implementation capacity. We need to have all those ingredients for policy
01:18:25 to really work. Thank you very much for your participation. Now let me quickly turn to
01:18:32 Tahir, to share a short, what's going to be a shorter session of Q and A. Tahir, over to you.
01:18:39 [Tahir Andrabi] Okay, wonderful. Yeah, it is going to be short.
01:18:44 My quick preamble is that I've been involved in a very large assessment diagnostics and our
01:18:50 target instruction program and design of it. Our kind of preliminary pre-pilot kind of findings
01:18:56 suggest that the depth of the problem is even greater than we are talking about here.
01:19:01 For sure. Even at fourth grade levels, kids might be at grade zero. On the positive side,
01:19:09 it is that governments don't seem to be in denial. They seem to be accepting. On the teachers side,
01:19:15 given the caveats that Abhijit talked about in terms of creating the space for teachers,
01:19:19 we find a lot of buy-in. So, both good and kind of bad news, in the scope of the challenge.
01:19:23 I mean, my question to you, I'll start with, there are questions on the chat. Given that we
01:19:28 are short of time, we'll try to answer all those questions online, but I mean, my big
01:19:31 question is that we have been thinking about pilot studies. We talk about research studies, evidence,
01:19:36 but given that the scale of the problem, I mean, does it require like a system level reset? I mean,
01:19:41 what's the strategy for really implementing these things in whole systems rather than in kind of
01:19:47 the typical kind of research-based studies that we have done? What is the strategy there and what has
01:19:53 that been? I'll have a follow-up for Rachel. I think that's the time I just may have.
01:19:58 [Jaime Saavedra] So there, let me just give a snippet.
01:20:02 I think a key issue is what actually Charlotte was saying at the end, which is political commitment.
01:20:08 Actually, we are living war times now. Actually, we need to use the information that we have. Yes,
01:20:16 it's greater than we have already pilot studies and we have evidence, but actually the challenge
01:20:22 of countries is to implement systemic solutions to this problem, because actually this has
01:20:28 been massive. This has been a shock that has to require an intervention that covers, basically,
01:20:35 complete education systems. That's why the use of data-verses is critical, but then it's use of
01:20:41 interventions that can be scaled up. That's actually the key thing. Even when we talk,
01:20:46 when we say it's absolutely critical that we catch students where they are, at the level
01:20:52 that they are today, we'll have to do it in, we'll have to think in each part of the country,
01:20:57 what is the right intervention that can be implemented at scale?
01:21:04 There are low tech and very sophisticated ways of doing teaching at the right level. In each
01:21:09 country we need to be pragmatic and we need to understand what's the implementation capacity
01:21:14 today, and then have the best teaching at the right level, given the capabilities of a country.
01:21:19 Maybe we can only do some sort of grouping, but that's fine. Let's do,
01:21:23 I mean this classroom grouping, because that would be easy through structure to pedagogy to give the
01:21:28 right instructions to all teachers to do that. We really need to worry the scale and really need to
01:21:35 worry about equity. To make sure that we give all students that minimum level of learning that they
01:21:42 need. Let me stop there for now. [Tahir Andrabi]
01:21:43 Okay. Rachel, I'll come to you. That is you have a unique position of straddling both the policy
01:21:49 world and the academic world and the research world. So the question is why, you think about
01:21:56 a generalized strategy taking in from what Jaime said, how do we really bring in the local
01:22:01 contacts, the cultural, political, institutional commitments. I mean, in some ways the devil is in
01:22:06 the details in all of this. In terms of thinking about kind of a global strategy, how do we really
01:22:11 balance this global versus local and in your opinion of both as a policy
01:22:16 maker and a researcher? [Rachel Glennerster]
01:22:18 Yeah. So I think I'd very much build on what Jaime was saying, which is
01:22:25 there's some broad things that we know that seem to apply in pretty much every country,
01:22:30 which is, if you are trying to teach children at a level where they're not there, you're not going to
01:22:38 succeed. You need to understand where children are in order to target instruction at the right level.
01:22:48 How you do that is going to be very different. You want to first understand what are the issues
01:22:56 in the way you tailor that global evidence to the local contacts is you collect data or you
01:23:04 understand the issues locally first. Is it the case that students are at a very wide range
01:23:11 of learning levels in these classrooms? Or is it just that everybody is at a very low level, right?
01:23:17 Those are two different situations. Your response is going to be different,
01:23:20 but we know we have evidence about what to do in both of those situations.
01:23:26 First of all, to tailor things, you need to understand the local situation. Then
01:23:31 you need to implement in a way that is tailored to the implementation capacity.
01:23:38 So, you can do the more complicated technology that we heard about in Gujarat or you can
01:23:47 phone someone, or you can have just tutors helping out. You get some program I worked on, you get
01:24:00 people who got a secondary school education in the community and have them come in and help out.
01:24:09 You use the resources that you have in any given contacts to do the thing that we know is right,
01:24:15 which is teaching at the right level, but also other things we talked about. Not closing schools,
01:24:21 this is the main message of this report is don't close schools. That is something that you can do
01:24:27 everywhere, except if you are in a really, really extreme, but it should be the very last thing to
01:24:35 do. That is because of what we've learned across the board about the transmission of the disease
01:24:43 and the mitigation measures. Again, you can use different, your ventilation is going to
01:24:48 be different in different settings, some places it's opening a window, some places it's putting
01:24:53 in a to filter. The principle is the same. [Tahir Andrabi]
01:24:59 Okay. Last question. Kwame, you talked about involving households. One of the key members of
01:25:08 the households are mothers and mothers have their own issues with most knowledge about the child,
01:25:13 but very restrictive in many cases in mobility and contacting with schools. Maybe I'll direct
01:25:18 the question to Sally. Sally, how difficult or how effective has been dealing with households
01:25:27 in the early childhood thing, and you have less than one minute to answer and that
01:25:30 would be the last question. [Sally Grantham-McGregor]
01:25:38 Sorry. I mean, you can do great things working with mothers in households, and you can also
01:25:44 work with groups of mothers, but the thing is to get to scale quickly. It's very similar
01:25:53 working with mothers is very similar to working with children. You have to, first of all, find
01:25:58 out what they know, what they're doing, build on what they're doing, understand the local context.
01:26:07 They're just as good as other teachers. If you train them, if you train the mothers,
01:26:11 and lots of positive reinforcement, and keeping everything at the level of the child so that
01:26:18 you're not doing activities that are frustrating for the child or too easy for the child.
01:26:25 The going to scale is the real challenge. I'm sure it can be done, but it needs a certain
01:26:36 amount of supervision. If you've got one existing, that's fine. You can continue it.
01:26:42 Most of the parenting programs I know stopped during COVID and people resorted to texting and
01:26:50 take-home packages, and using materials in the home for the children to play with.
01:26:58 All that can be done, but it needs a certain amount of organization.
01:27:02 It needs curriculum in place. There are curriculum in different places that can be used.
01:27:11 Mothers, even illiterate mothers, can help. That's the encouraging thing. If illiterate mothers looks
01:27:17 at picture books and tells stories, the child's language will improve and that will lead onto
01:27:24 better reading. [crosstalk] [Tahir Andrabi]
01:27:26 We are virtually out of time. I have to pass this on to Kwame. Kwame great presentation on teachers
01:27:31 and technology. Can you please wrap it down? [Kwame Akyeampong]
01:27:34 Okay. Now thank you very much. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you for
01:27:43 being here with us. There's several things that have come out from this presentation.
01:27:50 This is a very important moment for the world. We know just how governments have raced against
01:27:59 time to make sure we have a vaccine to protect all of us because if the response was not immediate,
01:28:08 we knew what the consequences are. I think that what this report does is to remind us that
01:28:14 have a similar situation when it comes to education. That the impact of the pandemic
01:28:20 on future generations of children is going to be really, really important. It's our state,
01:28:29 and this report has really made it clear that if we don't take action, now, we are
01:28:34 going to be faced with an even more critical situation with the future of our children.
01:28:39 I think that the presentations today that we've listened to has really made this point clear.
01:28:45 I want to think on just one or two things to kind of wrap up this session. I think we are learning
01:28:51 a little bit more about what you do when you have schools, when schools are closed. I liked
01:29:00 what has been happening in the state of Gujarat India that the issue about learning without
01:29:06 schooling. We are beginning to understand that learning just doesn't happen in the four confines
01:29:12 of a building in a school. We have to think much more creatively. We've learned how technology
01:29:18 can provide us an opportunity to address this space when we have schools that are closed.
01:29:24 I think this report contains some very, very important messages
01:29:28 and recommendations that we believe, the panel believes that if taking on board
01:29:33 would really help prepare our education systems to respond as we move forward. Someone else said
01:29:40 that we should never waste opportunity as crisis presents. I think this is a great opportunity
01:29:45 for us. We've learned from the evidence that there things we can do. We've also learned how
01:29:52 systems have actually done some of the things the evidence has suggested. So we are in a good place,
01:29:57 but we do need to take action because the evidence is also very clear that if we don't,
01:30:01 the impact is going to be devastating. We are very pleased that in this report,
01:30:06 we have provided some of the latest research to document the impact and also the responses that
01:30:15 have been taken by some governments. I hope that we will all become involved in sharing this
01:30:22 message and supporting governments to really put these into practice. Thank you all very much for
01:30:29 being with us and for all the presenters and the panelists for sharing thoughts on this report.
01:30:36 We look forward to moving this agenda forward, ensuring that every child has an opportunity
01:30:41 to close that learning gap and also to move forward in the education. Thank you over to you,
01:30:50 Abhijit. [Jaime Saavedra]
01:31:00 You're muted, Abhijit. [Abhijit Banerjee]
01:31:03 Thank you. I just wanted to say thank you. There's been amazing discussion, and hopefully
01:31:10 it will spur a lot of conversations that in one form or the other, we will on social media,
01:31:18 in the press, and hopefully we will be able to
01:31:22 continue to engage with this. I think this is the beginning, not the end of this process. As
01:31:30 was said many times, the goal here is going to be to support the implementation and
01:31:41 the general absorption of these messages by the policy system. In that we all have a role to play.
01:31:52 It's an exciting beginning, and let's continue with this impetus. Thank you, everyone.
01:31:58 [Jaime Saavedra] Thanks for everyone.

Prioritizing Learning During COVID-19: Launch of Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel Report

Follow the event on Twitter #GEEAP

Join us for the launch of a new Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP) report recommending the most effective ways to keep children learning during and post-pandemic.

A new report, “Prioritizing Learning During Covid-19”, provides recommendations from the GEEAP, an independent, cross-disciplinary body composed of leading education experts, including a Nobel Prize winner.

This report draws on insights from the latest research to document the devastating impact of Covid-19 and countries’ responses to the pandemic. It offers guidance on how education systems in low- and middle-income countries can reverse the devastating learning losses and widening inequalities (gender, socioeconomic, and other) caused by the pandemic.

The report presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with education ministers.

See the list of speakers ▼

00:00 Welcome and opening remarks: Prioritizing Learning During COVID-19
05:14 Why we should prioritize keeping schools and preschools fully open
11:39 The economic impact of the school closures and learning losses
14:11 Inequities
17:36 Why early childhood and preschool are important
22:08 Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel recommendations
24:10 Keep schools fully open. Reduce transmission in schools
29:56 Adjust instruction: assessing learning. Helping students catch up
36:23 Support teachers. Leveraging existing technology. Encourage parental engagement
47:32 Structured pedagogical support. Engage additional instructors
53:10 Ministerial observations: Nigeria
1:00:51 Ministerial observations: India
1:12:11 The use of evidence and data during policy making implementation
1:19:31 A system level reset? A strategy for really implementing these changes
1:21:47 Towards a global strategy: The policy world & the academic world
1:25:20 Dealing with households in the early childhood education
1:27:39 Closing remarks

RESOURCES

Documents

Website

Speakers

Abhijit Banerjee

Nobel Laureate and Professor of Economics, MIT
@JPAL
Susan Dynarski

Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
@dynarski
Jaime Saavedra

Human Development Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, World Bank
@jaimesaavedra22
Rachel Glennerster

Associate Professor, University of Chicago
@rglenner
Robert Jenkins

Global Director, Education and Adolescent Development, UNICEF
@RobertG_Jenkins
Sally Grantham-McGregor

Emeritus Professor of Child Health and Nutrition, UCL GOS Institute of Child Health, Faculty of Pop Health Sciences
Kwame Akyeampong

GEEAP co-chair and Professor of International Education and Development, The Open University
@Kwameakyeampong
Sylvia Schmelkes

Provost of Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City
@SYLVIASCHMELKES
Tahir Andrabi

Professor of Economics at Pomona College, California, and Dean, LUMS School of Education
@AndrabiTahir
Charlotte Watts

Chief Scientific Adviser UK Department for International Development (DFID)
@CharlotteHWatts
Joan Osa Oviawe

Commissioner of Education, Edo State, Nigeria
Vinod Rao

Secretary (Primary & Secondary Education), State of Gujarat, India

Read the transcript

00:04 [Abhijit Banerjee] Welcome.
00:07 This is a very proud moment for us.
00:14 It's the launch of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP) report.
00:26 That's a mouthful, but
00:28 it's something that will jump out as being of immediate and extremely clear relevance.
00:42 The report is on prioritizing learning during COVID-19.
00:47 It's been a massive team effort,
00:53 the panel members... but also thanks to an enormous group of other people who worked with us,
01:04 the panel members, you see them (on screen).
01:10 It's a rather, I'm not going to read the names, but it's a remarkable panel
01:18 in the sense that it's a collaboration between educationist and economists,
01:23 and among both are people who are both practicing policy people and academics.
01:36 It's really across a number of different competencies and different interests.
01:46 I think what has been extremely satisfying in this process is the fact that, despite perhaps
01:53 initial doubts, we've worked together beautifully, and I think what has come out of this is a
02:03 rather remarkable product in the sense that it does cross the boundaries between these
02:10 different disciplines. At the same time, very importantly, it sticks to being hard-headed about
02:21 what the evidentiary standards should be and where we should draw the line in terms of
02:31 what is practical and doable now, and in this moment of many challenges. With great pride,
02:45 let me declare that this report is now launched. [Kwame Akyeampong]
02:58 Thank you very much Abhijit. Also, let me add my warm welcome to everybody attending this global
03:06 launch. Just to give you an idea of the rundown of the program which is on your screen. We'll have
03:15 the scale of the problem, and then we will talk about the recommendations from the report. Then
03:23 we will also have administrator observations where we'll have a few reflections of the presentations
03:30 in the report. Then we open up for question and answer session before we close and adjourn.
03:38 Let me add that the report we are about to share and discuss was produced
03:46 by the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, but with the support of the Secretariat,
03:53 which include researchers at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth and Development Office,
03:58 FCDO, the World Bank and UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti. The report represents,
04:07 as professor Abhijit Banerjee has said, the consensus recommendations of an independent
04:14 interdisciplinary panel of global experts who have based their recommendations on the best
04:20 evidence during a rapidly changing global health crisis. We look forward to engaging with you
04:28 and sharing the key highlights and findings from this report. Thank you.
04:39 [Abhijit Banerjee] Now, I think I'm supposed to
04:45 share this session, but I think the title’s slide says everything. It's very clear that
04:56 I think that the starting point of this conversation has to be
05:00 an appreciation of the scale of the problem created by COVID-19, which builds on a
05:08 problem that preexisted, and I think it's important to keep that in mind. So with that,
05:13 I will invite Jaime Saavedra, head of Education Global Practice at the World Bank to speak.
05:20 [Jaime Saavedra] Thank you very much
05:23 Abhijit and Kwame for the production. Yes, this is great and an honor to be part of this panel.
05:34 As you say, this is a consensus to you all people coming from different disciplines, and it comes in
05:39 the moment of real crisis. Unfortunately, if we would have this discussion two years ago,
05:46 we would have already said that we were in a crisis , education was in a crisis. We were
05:51 already saying that more than half of children in the developing world were not able to read by
05:57 age 10, despite the fact that most of those kids were at school. We had a learning crisis already
06:05 despite a very large increases in enrollments during the last few decades,
06:10 that schooling was not being turned into learning. Then the crisis hit, and most governments,
06:18 or basically almost all governments in the world chose school closures as part of the arsenal
06:25 to fight the pandemic. There was no evidence, at that moment, if that will have an impact in
06:31 terms of the reduction on infection and infection rates, but actually that's what countries did. We
06:37 had very little evidence at that moment, what were going to be the benefits of those school closures.
06:43 There was some knowledge in the academic world and in some places that that could generate some
06:49 costs, because we knew about the loss of learning after summer breaks or after a teacher's strike,
06:56 we have seen the impacts of Ebola. We have seen impacts of the earthquake in Pakistan,
07:04 but actually, from the perspective of all the governments in the world, basically school closed.
07:11 There was the attempts of doing remote learning in almost all countries. But basically countries are
07:18 starting to figure out, what's going to be? How are we going to deal with this? Unfortunately,
07:24 all these summer breaks, teacher's strikes, even natural disasters have had relatively short
07:33 processes of closing schools for a short period of time. As we see in the next light, unfortunately,
07:40 first of all, all systems closed, and this is data for April 30 of 2020, what's in green
07:49 and dark blue is basically all systems are closing and in orange, partially closing. So
07:55 basically we have a shutdown of the whole world and 1.6 billion children were out of school.
08:00 But as we see in the next slide, the school closures remain an issue. Unfortunately,
08:07 the length of those school closures were extremely long, and particularly in regions like South Asia,
08:14 like Latin America, parts of the Middle East, even by November 1st of 2021,
08:21 many school systems were only partially open. Sometimes when we say partially open,
08:26 it was only a handful of schools who were open. Overall, we see that it's about 200 and,
08:31 on average, in low and middle-income countries, we see that it's about 250 days of schools
08:36 having lost and even longer in countries like India, like my own country, Peru,
08:42 or Philippines or Indonesia, which we saw extremely long school closures.
08:48 Unfortunately, despite all the efforts of remote learning, which obviously in a world with very low
08:55 internet connections, and despite the efforts of making remote learning multimodal,
09:01 the learning losses are really mounting. As we see in the next slide, we've started since last year,
09:09 trying to project what will be the impact of this school closures on learning, and this indicator
09:18 of learning poverty that we were talking at the beginning, this percentage of children
09:22 who cannot read and understand by age 10, that figure the learning poverty was 53%
09:28 before the pandemic. Initially, we were projecting that that will go up from 53 to 63%,
09:35 our last revisions move that figure to 70%. Both because of the length of the school closures, and
09:43 also because of the evidence that we see regarding the lack of effectiveness and heterogeneity of
09:48 quality of remote learning. Unfortunately, we are already seeing not only these simulations,
09:55 but real data in several countries who would show that those learning losses are real.
10:01 On average we see but not for many countries, for the countries for which we have data, we see that
10:07 one year of school closures are translated into about one year of loss learning. Unfortunately
10:13 we have many school systems in which schools have been closed for one year or even for two years.
10:20 With the early data of studies that have done at some point during 2021, we have seen that
10:27 South Africa, for instance, that closed for most of 2020 reading losses at 81% of a year. Data
10:34 for Karnataka in India also learning losses of about one year in literacy numeracy. Sao Paulo in
10:40 Brazil, remote classes learned 75% less of what they would've learned in presential education.
10:50 These measures were after a year of school closures, which unfortunately they continued.
10:55 In Sao Paulo Brazil, and this is the other figure, there's 2.5 higher risk of dropout rates than what
11:02 we see in in person in the in-person regime. Really worried about the learning losses,
11:09 really worried about large dropout rates. We still have a challenge because learning
11:15 loss has been not measured in many countries. But just to set the stage,
11:19 we're in trouble. That's what we need to see. We are in a crisis over a crisis. Over to you.
11:37 [Abhijit Banerjee] My apologies. The next
11:39 speaker is Sue Dynarski who's professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.
11:46 [Susan Dynarski] Thank you. So I'm speaking to the economic
11:52 impact of the school closures and learning losses that were just described in the previous slides.
12:01 It's possible to estimate the economic impact of school closures. In fact, several rigorous
12:07 research studies have done exactly that. These studies start with empirical evidence from past
12:13 school closures, both, on prolonged learning loss and on long term income. For example, in the US,
12:22 poorer students fall backwards each summer when schools close for the summer by a month's worth
12:30 of learning. In Pakistan four years after a temporary close of schools
12:36 due to an earthquake, students were one and a half years behind their peers.
12:41 The next step is to combine this information about the learning losses due to closures with evidence
12:47 on the impact of educational attainment on income. We know from previous research
12:54 that in high-income countries, individuals make on average 8.2% more for each year of schooling.
13:03 In low-income countries, the figure is 9.3% more for each additional year of schooling.
13:10 We can put these estimates on the relationship between education and earnings,
13:16 together with the estimates on the relationship between the school closures and education.
13:23 We get a very sobering idea of how much the pandemic is going to be affecting our
13:28 economies long term. The results are quite sobering. One credible estimate recently
13:35 made is that we are going to lose $17 trillion in wages due to lower educational attainment.
13:44 As you can see in this graph, students in low-income countries are going to be bearing
13:49 the largest share of the $17 trillion burden as they're expected to lose the equivalent of
13:56 $300 billion. These estimates they're going to keep increasing if the school closures continue.
14:05 Thank you. [Abhijit Banerjee]
14:07 Thank you Susan.
14:08 That's pretty sobering. We now have Rob Jenkins, who's Global Director of Education and
14:15 Adolescent Development at the UNICEF. [Rob Jenkins]
14:19 Well, thank you very much Abhijit, and I'm thrilled to be here with Jaime and
14:24 Susan and all our other friends and colleagues that are on the panel, and just greatly appreciate
14:29 this opportunity. I'm hoping that I'm not stating the obvious, but just to say that marginalized
14:36 children, children that were facing disadvantages prior to the pandemic have disproportionately been
14:42 impacted by school closures and by the pandemic. Why is that? Well, there's maybe a few interesting
14:50 data points that I just want to share. One is if you were a child living in a community that
14:56 already was experiencing poor learning outcomes, you had an increased risk of your school being
15:01 closed for prolonged periods. Basically, we see a correlation between marginalized communities in
15:07 terms of learning outcomes, so countries, or areas of parts of countries which were experiencing poor
15:13 learning outcomes prior to the pandemic and those areas, unfortunately, had schools close
15:19 the longest and continue to have. Just a flag that we have 600 million
15:23 school children globally still impacted by full or partial school closures today. It's
15:29 still very much a crisis happening. If you live in an area with poor learning outcomes,
15:34 you have a greater chance of your school being closed still now and for a prolonged period.
15:40 Secondly, as a marginalized child, you have less access to remote learning. So
15:44 there again, we see disparities increasing. Third, you are less likely to come back into
15:52 a school that's able to provide the full range of support required. Meaning catch up programs, full
16:00 range of psychosocial support, mental health, and nutritional support, recognizing the importance
16:07 of midday meals, etcetera. These are some key factors on why it's so critically important
16:12 moving forward that we collectively proactively reach marginalized children within each community,
16:18 but also prioritize communities as a whole, countries as a whole that require more support.
16:25 Who are these marginalized children? It depends on of course in each context,
16:28 but there are some common characteristics. They tend to be poor or living in remote locations.
16:34 Girls are particularly disadvantaged during this trying time, adolescent girls in particular who
16:40 face compounding disadvantages, greater risk of gender based violence, early marriage
16:45 and pregnancy, and other demand side barriers. Also schools are less able to meet their needs.
16:54 The call to measure and monitor which children are returning to school and provide support so that
17:01 they can overcome the barriers and receive full, comprehensive support as they return to school
17:06 is going to be absolutely critical in the coming days and weeks. It's really a now
17:10 or never moment. Because if we aren't able to provide those services and the support required
17:16 when schools open, or if they have opened after a few days, after a few weeks, if those children
17:21 have not come back, they will not be coming back. Building on Susan's point with economic,
17:27 social, many implications for those children, the communities they live in their countries. Thanks
17:32 again for this opportunity. [Abhijit Banerjee]
17:34 Thank you, Rob and last, but absolutely not the least, Sally Grantham-McGregor,
17:41 Emeritus Professor of Child Health and Nutrition at the University College London.
17:47 Sally. [Sally
17:54 Grantham-McGregor] Hi everyone. I just
17:57 wanted to say a few words about why early childhood and preschool are important.
18:04 Children in the first five years of life, it's well established that the brain is developing
18:11 faster than any other time, and it is more sensitive to environmental stimuli.
18:16 Either beneficial stimuli such as good nutrition, responsive mothering,
18:23 opportunities for learning, or on the other hand for insults such as malnutrition,
18:32 unstimulating environment, exposure to violence.
18:38 What is even more important is changes to the brain function at this age do not disappear.
18:46 They continue and are sustained through life. So the effects now will have long term effects.
18:55 The other point is cognitive development. The level of cognitive development on arrival at
19:01 school, on enrollment predict to some extent how well that child will do in school.
19:07 Therefore early childhood is critically important to educational success.
19:13 Now there's about 138 million and a little more than that of children in low and middle-income
19:21 countries who are enrolled in preschool. There is good evidence that preschool benefits children's
19:29 cognition, language, social, emotional development. There is some evidence that
19:34 this persists and benefits school achievement in primary school.
19:40 So if these kids aren't going to school, they obviously will not get those benefits.
19:44 But there's worse concerns than that because what happens to these children when they're at home?
19:53 We now know extreme poverty has increased, food insecurity in the home has increased.
20:02 Maternal depression has increased, and domestic violence has increased
20:07 during COVID. All of these things will almost certainly affect children's development.
20:16 Now, how does this leave the education services?
20:25 What we have to expect now is children entering preschool who've had maybe up to two years of
20:31 living with COVID, or entering school will be at a much lower level of development
20:37 than pre-pandemic children. And those already in school will be seriously behind,
20:43 and they will need programs to help them catch up.
20:53 The other thing we should consider is that young children are much less likely to get infected
21:00 and to be seriously ill. Well, they may get infected, but they won't get seriously ill. And
21:05 there is some suggestion that they're less likely to be infectious to spread it. So the obvious
21:14 conclusion is we should open preschools as soon as possible, but we need to expand their access.
21:21 We need to expand them in low-income countries
21:24 and in poor populations within countries who are very poorly served at the moment at preschool.
21:30 We need to supply them with school meals whenever we can.
21:38 Though it's not our remit obviously opening the health I haven't said before, but the
21:45 access to the health services and nutrition and parenting services has been severely restricted.
21:53 We need to open these urgently too. Okay, back to you.
21:57 [Abhijit Banerjee] Thank you, Sally.
22:00 I think it's now Sylvia was going to be here. [Sylvia Schmelkes]
22:06 Yes. Thank you very much. Well, it is an honor for me to moderate this second panel with participants
22:12 who were key in the research behind the development of this report. Rachel Glennerster,
22:17 who is Associate Professor in the University of Chicago and former chief economist of FCDO.
22:24 Abhijit Banerjee, co-chair of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, professor of MIT
22:29 and Nobel Prize in economics, and Kwame Akyeampong also co-chair of the panel and professor of
22:36 Education and Development in The Open University. This panel will focus on the recommendations
22:42 to governments that derive from the learning crisis described in the previous panel, and from
22:47 evidence of what works that prioritizes quasi experimental and randomized research studies,
22:54 as well as evidence with a focus on equity. The recommendations are presented in two groups,
23:00 those oriented towards immediate action, and those that derive from what schools should continue
23:06 doing following lessons learned from educational efforts carried out during school closures.
23:13 For immediate action, the document recommends keeping schools fully open and supporting children
23:19 to return. Evidence is presented on how to reduce transmission in schools, prioritizing vaccination
23:27 for teachers, providing masks for continuous use and improving ventilation. Due to learning losses
23:35 instruction will have to be adjusted to children that have fallen behind who should be assessed.
23:41 Instruction should focus on foundations and catch up programs should be implemented.
23:47 Regarding lessons learned during school disruption recommendations deal with how to leverage
23:51 existing technology and with a need to continue to strengthen parental engagement in schools. I will
23:58 immediately proceed to give the word to Rachel Glennerster who is as I said, Associate Professor
24:03 in the University of Chicago. To you, Rachel, [Rachel Glennerster]
24:08 Thank you very much, Sylvia and great to be with everybody. You heard in the previous panel,
24:16 the evidence of the very large economic and social costs of closing schools and disrupting schools.
24:24 Any policymaker who is trying to decide what to do and is facing a surges of infections,
24:30 which many policymakers are now, have to make an assessment of the rest associated with schools.
24:39 We're just going to look at those briefly. There are two main risks. One is the risk to
24:44 children from catching COVID at school, and the other is the risk to teachers.
24:50 We looked at this evidence quite carefully and all the evidence shows that while
24:56 children do get COVID at roughly the same rates as adults. The risk of severe disease
25:03 or death is much smaller in children and that's very related to age. The youngest children
25:11 are very, at facing very much low risks than older children. So, high schoolers are somewhat
25:18 similar to adults, but the preschoolers we've just been hearing about have really very low risks.
25:27 The risk to teachers can be reduced substantially with mitigation measures, which I'm going to talk
25:34 about in a minute, and with those in place, teachers are very unlikely to catch COVID from
25:41 students. Instead, most of the transmission that happens in schools is actually between
25:46 adults. Which is pretty interesting given that teachers spend most of their time with
25:53 students. It's very different from other jobs which tend to involve adult-to-adult interaction.
26:01 As they say, while the risks to teachers aren't zero, if you are worried as a public health group
26:07 about transmission of the disease. You are really going to want to focus on places where there's a
26:13 lot of adult-to-adult interaction and not schools. They're just not a logical place to try and
26:20 control the disease. Indeed this is not just a, we on infectious disease experts on this panel. But
26:28 if you look at recommendations from public health advisory panels who are, they would repeatedly say
26:35 that we should keep schools open, because they are really not a major driver of the disease.
26:45 Now we do have to try and reduce risks in school and there's a lot of good evidence about this,
26:52 and how to do that. Even in very low resource settings, in low and middle-income countries.
26:58 There's randomized control evidence that masks can reduce transmission and that's true even if
27:09 not everyone is wearing masks. So even if there isn't a very high adherence to a mask policy,
27:15 it can still be quite effective. The more people who wear masks the better. The better the quality
27:23 of the mask, the better. Surgical masks have shown to be much more effective than cloth masks,
27:29 but cloth masks are effective in reducing transmission. We also know that vaccines work
27:37 which is why this panel is calling on teachers to be prioritized
27:42 to have vaccinations because we desperately need them in schools, keeping schools open.
27:51 We also know that COVID is airborne and that there are quite low rates of transmission of
27:56 COVID outside. Which means that ventilation is a good idea. It does not necessarily mean
28:03 that you have to have a fancy filter in place. Simply opening a window or teaching in a room
28:10 that doesn't have glass in the windows, which is very common in some tropical countries.
28:15 That can really help with diluting the presence of the virus in the air. The quantity of virus
28:23 that you are exposed to is really determines how sick you get. So anything that you can do to just
28:29 reduce the quantity of the virus in the air will help. Even these relatively simple ventilation
28:36 approaches can really get the air circulating and reduce the of risks.
28:43 Now hand washing has been found to be important for colds and flu, but we have found very few
28:50 cases or, researchers have found relatively few cases of COVID being transmitted through surfaces.
28:57 So we've put most of the priority in the report on masks, ventilation, and vaccines. If you put
29:06 all of that evidence together, you've got very high costs of closing schools. Good feasible
29:14 ways to reduce transmission in schools. Low risk to children from COVID. Low rates of transmission
29:21 from children to teachers which means that closing school should really be the very last resort after
29:32 you've tried everything else, and have no other ways of trying to reduce transmission
29:37 because they're really much less risky activities than many of the other economic activities that
29:46 we are undertaking. They also have these very, very high costs, long term costs of disruption.
29:53 Back to you, Sylvia. [Sylvia Schmelkes]
29:54 Thank you very much, Rachel and I will now give the floor to Abhijit Banerjee. Please, Abhijit.
29:59 [Abhijit Banerjee] Thank you Sylvia.
30:04 I think that we've already talked about the size of the learning losses. I think it's
30:11 worth underscoring something that Jaime already said which is this is sitting on top of a pre
30:17 pandemic learning crisis and the characteristics of that crisis were that it was within each
30:25 classroom it was very, very substantial diversity of children's learning levels.
30:34 Some fifth graders or fifth grade, other fifth graders are
30:38 at second grade. Very large differences and very much concentrated within the same classroom
30:47 which both makes teaching challenging. Often makes it tempting to focus on the children who
30:55 can. So if the syllabus is of the fifth grade, often the teaching is at the fifth grade level.
31:01 Even though half the children are at second grade level. That particular problem is going to be
31:08 very substantially exacerbated the by the crisis. That's, I think evident from
31:16 a lot of the things that Jaime already said. One of them being that the technological
31:27 substitutes for in-classroom teaching are unequally accessed. If you have a good internet,
31:36 if you have can afford to have a good phone. You are much better positioned to take advantage of
31:44 them. If you happen to live in a region where there's good access to networks, you get much
31:53 better position. If you have parents who have time to focus on you and make you sit down and follow,
32:00 one of the things classrooms do is they introduce a degree of automaticity in the process
32:07 of learning. Now, it's the onus is on the parents to make sure that the children who are otherwise
32:20 inclined to go play, make sure that they spend their time in front of the radio,
32:24 in front of the television, in front of the phone absorbing material.
32:34 That ability to do so differentiated by how busy the parents are, whether they have
32:39 slack in their lives, if they can take the extra time off, if you are working from 6:00 AM
32:48 to 6:00 PM, as a domestic. Your children probably don't have that same chance. Yeah, I absolutely
32:55 think that this is going to generate both, overall many children being further behind. Second,
33:06 the fact that some of the children will be less hurt than others. And I think both of those
33:14 will make the teaching challenge of teaching a more diverse classroom and the teaching needs
33:20 that imply. Even more maybe demanding that there were at. I think that there are many things that
33:34 get discussed in this context of what one can do. I think the key is to start from the idea that
33:45 we want children to be, we need to identify the problem. I think less than half the countries
33:54 right now have even a plan to assess learning losses so I think that that's a starting point
34:00 has to be to assess where the children are. I think without that it's going to be impossible to
34:08 tailor the instruction. We also know on the other side, the good news is that we do know what works.
34:15 There's evidence from many randomized control trials, that if you actually
34:20 target children where they are, they catch up very fast. And the approach,
34:29 what is sometimes called teaching at the right level has developed by Pratham and others,
34:36 is now well-founded and with strong evidentiary base. The basic idea is
34:43 to group children by learning levels, at least for part of the day and liberate the teachers
34:52 from the pressure of teaching the curriculum. I think those are independent, partly teachers
35:00 resist where there's evidence that teachers, when they are asked to implement teaching at the right
35:09 level programs, they find it difficult because they feel that it conflicts with their obligation
35:14 to deliver the curriculum. I think that on the other hand, we also have evidence the teachers
35:22 when they're liberated from that pressure, and when it's clear to the why this is being done,
35:30 they are able to implement teaching at the right level programs and at least to learning gains.
35:39 I think we know that this can be done in schools. It can also be done outside schools. I think
35:47 there's large effects of volunteer led programs. They tend to have the disadvantage that not all
35:53 children attend. Maybe we can do a better job of making sure that the children attend
35:58 these programs. I think that while, maybe be desirable to also adjust the curriculum,
36:07 this is a much more fraught issue. So I would focus right now on a temporary, but very, very
36:14 focused program for catch-up of the children. [Sylvia Schmelkes]
36:20 Thank you very much, Abhijit. Now I will give the word to Kwame Akyeampong who has also been
36:29 co-chair of the panel, who is co-chair of the panel, and is professor of education
36:33 and development to of the Open University. Kwame, please.
36:38 [Kwame Akyeampong] Thank you very much.
36:41 One of the things that we've become much more aware of is the importance of technology during
36:46 this pandemic. We know that technology has become important but we also know that it is
36:53 not a substitute for in-person schooling. We found that during the pandemic, remote online education
37:02 was not available to most students in lower-income countries and middle-income countries.
37:08 This is very important. The idea that the technology is not panacea to the problem of
37:14 providing quality education to children who are out of school due to the pandemic. We know that,
37:23 for example, simply providing a device without support is ineffective. I think this is something
37:30 that we need to really focus our attention on because in many cases, countries shifted to
37:40 devices that could be used to continue to provide continuous
37:44 learning for children. Without the support that becomes very, very difficult to accomplish.
37:50 We have seen how technology can be very powerful in many ways and we've seen how in some countries
37:57 they've been used to expand support to teachers. To make sure that teachers are able to use the
38:04 technology to engage with learners whilst they're at home. It does have a huge potential when it
38:11 comes to that. We've also seen how it's been helped to keep intact with students through
38:16 phones. This is very important because we know that one student are out of school, they're at
38:22 home. During this pandemic, we planned it, there needs to be continuous contact with them. Mobile
38:29 phones, in particular, have been the device used in many countries quite effectively, to keep that
38:34 contact with children and to help them learn. We have also evidence of how they've been used to
38:42 teach children to learn at their level. So, we do know that it has potential
38:51 to be used effectively, to ensure that children continue to learn. We also know that despite these
38:57 widespread use of technology, radio education, for example, some countries have used radio education
39:05 which is in many low-income countries have been the technology they've resorted to.
39:12 It's been used quite well in many countries. We also know that this needs to be evaluated,
39:18 so that we actually understand the effectiveness of such low technology
39:23 in ensuring that children continue to learn. Now, I want to now move on to talk about
39:29 the available technology. Say a bit more about what we know about the available technology,
39:36 and what it's able to help us to achieve. In particular, we know that mobile phones
39:45 are becoming a promising technology to leverage. Given that over 80% of household have access to
39:54 simple feature phones in lower and middle-income countries. This opens up some real opportunities
40:00 and possibilities that we should take seriously. I think that the pandemic has given us this
40:07 opportunity to think seriously about low tech, and how we can use it to
40:13 engage with parents, but also with children. The availability of this mobile technology in
40:21 many low-income countries has prompted many countries to look at how they can connect
40:28 with children using, or with parents, using this technology. We know that during the
40:34 pandemic, the texts have been used to notch successfully parents and learners in Brazil,
40:42 to increase educational engagement. Another newer approach has been weekly, one-on-one,
40:50 targeted phone calls by teachers and mentors to parents or caregivers of students in Botswana,
40:57 Bangladesh, and Nepal. These have shown that if you use it appropriately,
41:04 it can have positive effects on learning. We haven't found the same,
41:09 but I must add that it's not the case in all countries. Especially
41:14 when it's been tried in Sierra Leone, it's been found out to be that successful.
41:18 While mobile phone based interventions have been highly cost effective in some settings.
41:23 The use of them by governments remain low among low-income countries. The technology is available,
41:28 but they haven't been used as much in low-income countries. We know, for example, 17%
41:34 compared to 57% in middle-income countries, according to one survey.
41:41 The use of this mobile phone base intervention should be further evaluated. We think what
41:47 the parliament has helped us to think about, is that the these are possibilities
41:53 but we do need to get further evidence and evaluate it's cost effectiveness. So overall,
41:58 we say that these phone based programming through text messages, and teachers calling students and
42:05 caregivers, is a highly promising approach that we should really seriously explore because of the
42:11 opportunities it provides for us to really engage at the level which would ensure that there is
42:17 a continuity in learning. The whole promise many also do not necessitate the careful use adaptation
42:25 and testing of technology where appropriate. We think that this is an area that we need to place
42:32 some emphasis, and governments need to look at. Let me now tend to the next, which is about
42:41 parents and how the parental engagement. If the pandemic has taught us anything at all. It has
42:49 us that learning doesn't necessarily have to happen in the classroom. It is important
42:54 if we want to make sure that children continue to learn, that there is some continuity when they're
42:59 at home. The pandemic forced many of us, many countries to confront that reality. In that case,
43:06 if you had homes where they had parents who were more educated, who had more resources. They could
43:12 then continue providing some supplementary opportunities to learn for their children.
43:19 I think if anything at all, this pandemic has taught us that parental engagement is crucial.
43:24 We do need to give that a lot of thought and emphasis. At the same time, we realize that
43:33 in many low-income countries, especially where parents are do not have the resources at home,
43:40 the benefits have not been the same for everybody. We have to really explore
43:46 opportunities where we can support parents to be able to provide a learning when children are
43:53 at home because we've seen how this has proved very, very successful in many instances. This
44:02 is something that we need to place a lot more emphasis on. We know that emerging evidence
44:10 suggest positive effects in primary school, in Botswana, in Bangladesh from support to parents.
44:16 That's very strong evidence to engage in short, targeted learning exercises with your child.
44:22 These results reinforce findings from a review in non COVID-19 settings which revealed that
44:28 interventions involving parents via phones, I could mention text and emails, have been
44:33 successful in context where communications are two way, personalized and positive. Evidence
44:41 that we've looked at during COVID-19, has showed that SMS text, just taking just SMS text messages,
44:49 to support parents in preschool, boosted learning for their children in Costa Rica. It may sound
44:56 like a very tiny or minor thing to do, but just providing that link with parents through SMS, text
45:03 messages has been proven to really boost learning for children in some countries. In addition,
45:10 evidence suggests that parents reading to their children can help reduce their learning loss.
45:15 This we have found in some countries. We know several intervention to support parental
45:19 engagement education prior to the pandemic really yielded good effects. Including additional
45:27 engagement in Chile, sharing information about our child's education. We have examples from Ghana,
45:33 Malawi, Mexico, France, and the US. We know that these interventions show promise,
45:38 even in low resource settings. Mostly when there is a clear path to influence the quality
45:43 of instruction. I think that is something that we need to keep in mind, as we found in the case
45:48 in Indonesia and in Kenya, but not in India. We need more evidence on the extent to which
45:55 accountability interventions like these can improve schooling and learning during
45:59 the COVID-19 school disruptions. This is really raising the importance of parents, that parental
46:05 engagement could be leveraged to all also improve children's mental health. It has been documented
46:11 that COVID-19 would worsen the mental health of children and caregivers who are already at risk,
46:17 and lead to new cases of mental illness. We need to have interventions that target these caregivers
46:24 to support them, to ensure that they can provide assistance to children whilst
46:31 they're at home. More of this evidence is needed to conclude exactly what works and does not work
46:39 in the current context. We believe this is an important avenue that should be explored further.
46:46 Now altogether, the evidence suggests that interventions to promote parents engagement
46:51 in their children's education can improve student learning. Either through supporting them directly
46:56 or increasing accountability of education systems. I would like to add by stressing this point that
47:05 while over 50% of high income countries report trying to engage parents, few low-income countries
47:12 in our sample that we looked at in the report do so. There is a gap there. That's something
47:16 that we need to address. An effort should be made to ensure that effective, to adopt
47:22 effective parental and engagement strategies. To test new ones is crucial as we move forward.
47:28 Thank you very much. [Sylvia Schmelkes]
47:30 Thank you very much, Kwame. I am finally going to ask Rachel, if she can address the question
47:35 of teacher support. Please, Rachel. [Rachel Glennerster]
47:39 Thank you. As we've heard, teachers are facing a very difficult situation
47:47 with much wider ranges of learning levels which is already a problem in classes,
47:58 but has been made much worse by the pandemic. If you look at what has happened
48:07 in terms of support to teachers during the pandemic, you see this very stark
48:13 difference with low-income countries, providing very little additional support to teachers despite
48:22 the very difficult time they've been having and so this is one of the large gaps that we identified.
48:29 What kind of support can you provide? Well, some of the things is... Way to support them is
48:40 through structured pedagogy programs, which can help them deal with this range of learning levels
48:50 in the class, the kinds of support to do the kinds of programs that Abhijit was talking about.
48:58 Now, when people have looked at general skills training of teachers
49:03 that has not been very effective, what you want is very targeted support to teachers to do
49:10 the kinds of things which are now needed given the much lower levels of learning that they're
49:18 having to cope with. So simply say, simply throwing them this much more challenging situation
49:26 is not going to be help, not going to work very effectively if you don't provide the
49:31 support for them to deal with a very changed landscape. If you move to the next slide.
49:41 The other thing that you can do to support teachers is provide additional
49:49 teaching assistance or tutors to help with this wide range of learning, but also just this
49:56 much bigger catch shot that needs to happen. This has been tried in a number of both high
50:03 and low-income countries actually, where you provide tutors or teaching assistance
50:13 to cover the material that children have missed out on, or have fallen behind. There's help to
50:24 teachers themselves, but to help, to cope with these very challenging class situations
50:31 but also bringing in additional support through tutors and teaching assistants.
50:39 Back to you, Sylvia. [Sylvia Schmelkes]
50:40 Thank you very much. Well, thank you to the three of you for the presentations and also for your
50:46 intensive work on this important report. It gives dimension to the gravity of the learning crisis
50:52 and the affectation to the universal right to education produced by widespread school closures
50:58 that have exacerbated educational inequity. The recommendations presented are meant to provide
51:03 governments with evidence for the decisions that they are now having to take to fully reopen
51:09 preschools and schools, and to provide the needed support. We encourage all countries to take stock
51:16 of the losses to children's education that have occurred as a result of the pandemic
51:21 to use this report as a resource for taking specific cost effective actions to address
51:27 these losses. Thank you very much and I will now turn the word over to Jaime Saavedra.
51:32 [Jaime Saavedra] Thank you very much, Sylvia. This has been
51:37 extremely interesting. Let me now turn over to a great panel that we have in which we're
51:42 going to hear about what has happened on the ground and also about what's the importance
51:46 of all this work. To do that I really have the pleasure to have me joining in the panel
51:57 Joan Osa Oviawe who's the commissioner of education in Edo State in Nigeria. I mean,
52:05 Dr. Vinod Rao, a good friend who is a secretary of education in the state of Gujarat in India.
52:15 Actually, as you're going to see, these are not random selections of experiences around the globe.
52:22 These are excellent selections of teams on the ground who have been doing fantastic work during
52:29 the pandemic, and now the schools are starting to open. Finally, we have Charlotte Watts who is the
52:41 chief scientific advisor or FCDO, who will discuss with us about the importance of evidence
52:48 based policy making, particularly in the complex political and social situations that were living
52:56 in many countries. We were supposed to have also Vicky Ford, who is minister for Africa,
53:01 Latin America and the Caribbean, but unfortunately she had an emergency.
53:07 Without further ado, let me further pass the word to Dr. Joan Osa to let us know a bit
53:14 about what happened in Edo state, in Nigeria, when schools were closed. You were able to respond more
53:22 resilient in a more resilient fashion than many other systems because of the investments that you
53:27 have already made in technology and in training before the pandemic. You survive that period,
53:34 a complex struggle that you did a lot. Now the schools have reopening,
53:38 you're building on that experience of this past two years, so what would you give us,
53:44 unfortunately, we have only less than five minutes, but it gives us snapshot
53:48 right of today. What is that in which way you're learning from this past experience and also of
53:55 the deep recommendations of the conditions of these panels, what is that resonates with
53:59 you? Over to you, Joan. [Joan Osa Oviawe]
54:02 Thank you so much Jaime for the invitation. I'm going to just speak, because of time constraints,
54:07 on some key aspects. As you said, it helped greatly that we had done some previous work before
54:14 the COVID-19 partial shutdown, however when school resumed, I think we resumed school in October
54:22 and as in Edo State was particularly peculiar because it was also an election year for us.
54:30 There was all kinds of craziness going on. What we did immediately after school resumed
54:38 was to find a way to support those learners, that we are not able to access our e-learning
54:51 program during the lockdown. Then there were also, we discovered initially from an evidence from
55:00 teachers, based on their interaction with their pupils, that there were some pupils who had begun
55:06 learning how to read right before they shutdown. By the time we resume, so we shut down in
55:13 March 2020, and resume in October. In February of 2020, we had just started a very, a campaign
55:24 called Every Child, a Reading Champion to promote literature, and so as a child, we
55:30 had been trained, and we trained, and there was a big push for literacy and numeracy.
55:37 When we resume back in October, some of the teachers reported that they notice that those
55:43 kids who were beginning to read right before the closure, they obviously were no longer able to,
55:52 or were not able to read at the pace that they were before. We adjust the timetable,
56:00 so spend a little bit more time on literacy and numeracy, so that helped in plain catch
56:06 up across the system. The other thing that we did before COVID-19 was that in 2019, after we
56:18 did a pupil diagnosis and discover that quite a number of kids learner were below grade level.
56:26 We essentially took a radical step to stop the clock by introducing what it's called teaching
56:33 at the right level. For two terms, we basically taught literacy, numeracy, writing, and critical
56:41 thinking. Having that initial teaching at the right level structure was enabled us to in
56:48 October, November, December 2020, we were able to use that same framework to provide very targeted
56:59 remedies studies in the critical numeracy and literacy area that helped us. The other lessons
57:08 we've learned in our own state is that when we look at the learning gains and then learning laws
57:14 during the COVID and post COVID shutdown, we discovered that there was quite a disparity
57:20 between our basic school, primary school and our secondary school. In secondary school, there
57:27 was a significant loss that we are actually now trying to remediate. The reason for that is that
57:38 in the last three years, the reform of our education system actually started at the
57:43 basic level because that's the foundation. I'm saying the results of the basic reform,
57:50 education reform. We are now expanding to secondary. We are just now this year putting
57:58 in place the work that is going to help us to deal with basic, I mean, secondary education.
58:09 The other thing going forward for us in Edo state is that we are now introduced and we are just
58:15 in the process of analyzing our learning assessment strategy. Prior to now,
58:20 we've not done any learning assessment so we don't have any large scale data that tells us
58:26 how our learners are doing. We've introduced, we are piloting beginning in February of 2021,
58:33 I mean, excuse me, of 2022 learning assessments are three critical meet points in the nine
58:41 years of basic education, so we are doing basic testing at basic three, basic six and basic nine.
58:50 Again, because of the lessons learned from the basic education reform, we are now applying the
58:58 same thinking to our secondary schools, where we now, also by the new academic
59:04 section in September of this year, we are going to be ruling out an assessment across all our
59:14 non-tertiary educational level, secondary school, TVET, as well as special education
59:22 for us in special education, and even in our special education soft, soft sector.
59:27 We discovered that, I mean, we made effort during the shutdown to ensure that they were
59:32 still learning. We've particularly realized that even our special education need to be repositioned
59:41 because by introducing skills acquisition, and so what is driving all of this from a policy
59:48 standpoint from a strategy standpoint is our [inaudible] best 2.0 transformation framework,
59:57 and it's inched on five pillars governance, teaching innovations, learning for skills,
01:00:05 school environment, and values. This is giving us a roadmap to deal decisively with learning
01:00:13 loss while at the same time making progress in the eradication of learning poverty in our basic
01:00:22 education and secondary education system. [Jaime Saavedra]
01:00:27 Great. Thank you very much, Joan, I think this was a great tour of the bold,
01:00:33 you were already implementing bold reforms before the pandemic, and that allowed you to be bolder
01:00:40 and confront all the different issues that we have actually been discussing
01:00:47 during this event, so thank you very much for all the work and thanks for sharing it with us.
01:00:51 Let me now turn to Dr. Vinod Rao. So Vinod, the Gujarat has been receiving a lot of attention
01:01:01 for the investments that you have made in measuring children during levels to monitor
01:01:05 how children are learning at the classroom, in the classroom, what's happening in the classroom. You
01:01:12 have a fantastic monitoring center, and you have used that during the school closures.
01:01:18 The question that I have for you is what are the measures that you're taking now
01:01:21 to promote learning recovery, right, especially in the area of foundational learning, and how do your
01:01:27 priorities and recommendations align to what you have heard of your recommendations of the panel.
01:01:35 I know the last time we spoke, we took like two hours and a half just to review a few of the
01:01:41 innovations that you were doing, but now you have only, you have less than five minutes. So over to
01:01:47 you and your synthesis capacity over to you Vinod. [Vinod Rao]
01:01:51 Yeah. Thank you so much. I have a very brief presentation of say seven,
01:01:55 eight slides. I'll take only four to five minutes. I'll first share
01:01:59 that presentation and subsequently I'll respond to your query.
01:02:04 [Jaime Saavedra] Super. Please go ahead.
01:02:09 [Vinod Rao] Can you see the presentation?
01:02:11 [Jaime Saavedra] Yes. If you click presentation mode,
01:02:14 that will be better. [Vinod Rao]
01:02:16 Yes. I hope- [Jaime Saavedra]
01:02:18 Super. Excellent. Go ahead, please. Go ahead. [Vinod Rao]
01:02:21 All these years we were struggling with the issue of schooling without learning. We, in India,
01:02:32 particularly in Gujarat we almost ensured 100% enrollment of students, but the learning outcome
01:02:38 and particularly great appropriate learning outcome was always a challenge.
01:02:43 Until now we were grappling with the issue of schooling without learning, and COVID made
01:02:48 us grapple with the issue of learning without schooling, and then came our initiatives most
01:02:57 of which were technology added initiatives. Next. Immediately after the lockdown came in March 2020,
01:03:06 we started home learning initiative, which was a multi-modal initiative using all
01:03:11 possible technology driven platforms. It involved our routine television channels,
01:03:20 our dedicated channels, which Gujarat government has, which is through what we call BISAG,
01:03:27 Bhaskaracharya Institute for Space Applications, and that has dedicated channels we
01:03:34 extensively deployed Microsoft Teams classes. We also had a Gujarat Virtual
01:03:41 Shala YouTube channel, which we started. Next. We, in 2019, coincidentally, we decided to
01:03:52 initiate pilot off, energized the textbooks using QR coding. This coincidentally was launched in
01:04:01 2020, along with the COVID lockdown. As soon as COVID lockdown was announced, we distributed,
01:04:10 energized the textbooks in the month of April, May, June, and this ensure that as soon as
01:04:20 the textbooks reached to the students, the access to live audio, which were learning
01:04:25 content significantly, or rather dramatically improved. Next. We saw that until month of June
01:04:33 of live place across the state, we were in across the country. We were in 10 and in just
01:04:39 three months, we immediately short to number one position with maximum access to edtech content,
01:04:48 in particularly, our government schools, next. We went ahead with deployment of extensive
01:04:58 edtech initiatives like, through, YouTube, Microsoft teams live classes, Facebook
01:05:06 channel, JioTV, and millions viewers benefited out of it. Next.
01:05:16 Simultaneously we also ensure teachers reach out to individual students, weekly periodic
01:05:21 assessments, submitting assessments twice a year. They were diligently and religiously flowed around
01:05:27 two lab teachers reach out to individual students and handed over worksheets and
01:05:31 collected their answer sheets. Data entry of performance of each student was conducted,
01:05:36 learning progress was through centrally through newly started command and control central for
01:05:41 schools, which was again launched during the COVID time. Pratham, is a reputed organization in
01:05:48 India, which conducts every year, in 2020, 2021, it ranked as the state with maximum outreach of
01:05:56 teachers to students during COVID lockdown of schools. This was possible also because we were
01:06:02 tracking in real time these teachers initiatives through our command and control center. Next.
01:06:09 We simultaneously started social psychological support for children because it was not all about
01:06:15 learning content but also about emotional wellbeing of the student during the COVID times.
01:06:20 A separate dedicated program was initiated, which was held by the
01:06:25 appraised and appreciated by the Ministry of Education Government of India. Next. Our
01:06:32 initiative also included the first of its time, only fully government own company for edtech, so
01:06:41 Gujarat education technology limited was launched in 2021. Today it has three million downloads,
01:06:49 three million students have downloaded the app, and this is giving free content to government
01:06:55 school students and at almost negligible cost to private school students. We are working, we're
01:07:02 the first state government to start an edtech company of our own, and we want to beat predatory
01:07:10 strategies, which many of the tech companies are doing in India and the rest of the developing
01:07:17 world, which is extremely exploitative of our students. Today government itself will provide
01:07:24 better content, world-class content at almost free of cost, to private school students and
01:07:30 absolutely free of cost to government students. This is also an initiative post COVID. Next.
01:07:36 Our command and control center for real-time monitoring. The first of its kind exclusive CCC,
01:07:41 real-time monitoring, evaluation and support on key indicators, like attendance,
01:07:46 learning outcomes. Of course, when schools are closed, we are monitoring the attendance and
01:07:50 movement of teachers, our field functionaries. We have around two lakh teachers in primary schools,
01:07:56 another almost one lakh teachers in secondary higher secondary schools. We have about 10,000
01:08:02 field functionaries for supervisory staff. We are doing real-time monitoring of their contribution
01:08:07 during COVID. We have collected about 500 crore data points through these initiatives.
01:08:15 We are able to see, track the learning outcome progression of every child sitting here. We have
01:08:21 student wise progress card, which we have developed,
01:08:24 and we are seeing in which learning outcomes across the state, patterns of learning loss
01:08:31 across the state on very subjects on various learning outcomes, we are able to generate
01:08:36 through extensive deployment of big data analysis and artificial intelligence. Next.
01:08:42 We did a statewide survey of access-to technology, particularly devices. And we came out with certain
01:08:52 very useful insights. Today state government is focusing in improving this reach of devices and
01:08:58 connectivity to all schools and maximum number of students. Next. This my last slide, for all these
01:09:06 decades, we were struggling with schooling without learning. The challenge now is to ensure learning
01:09:12 without schooling. Across the globe, COVID has prodded governments to adopt technology assisted
01:09:18 education. What two decades of improvement and improvements in technology could not achieve,
01:09:27 two years of COVID as achieved. We, in many parts of the world, this crisis was converted
01:09:33 into an opportunity. Technology is not a solution, it's not the final solution overarching solution,
01:09:39 but technology is indeed a very big, useful tool to improve learning outcomes across
01:09:46 schools. 85% of school budgets, and this is something I would request,
01:09:53 also to focus on, 85% of school budgets are going for salaries,
01:10:00 many government they couldn't upgrade their technology, upgrade their infrastructure over the
01:10:05 past few years because excessively, budget was getting diverted for salaries of teachers.
01:10:13 Today after all these decades post COVID, we have realized that we need to invest in
01:10:20 technology and to ensure that technology, which is every student, at least in some part of the world.
01:10:28 What actually COVID has done is schooling laws, that schooling laws has not necessarily learned.
01:10:38 Schooling laws has not necessarily resulted in learning laws in at least some parts of the world.
01:10:44 In some pockets of our state, at least schooling laws has led to learning gain.
01:10:50 Today the ability of a poor weak teacher to limit the learning outcome, the strength of the learning
01:10:57 outcome of students has been almost nullified. Every teacher cannot be made outstanding,
01:11:03 but one outstanding teacher can be made available to every student
01:11:06 through deployment of technology. COVID has given us this unprecedented opportunity for technology
01:11:13 driven transformation in school education. I believe we will all have to work with it to
01:11:19 capitalize on this opportunity. In any case, even after post COVID, when school's reopen,
01:11:24 blended learning has become a new normal. It's not just about offline learning,
01:11:28 offline plus online technology assisted, plus physical has become the new normal across India
01:11:37 and particularly in Gujarat. Thank you. [Jaime Saavedra]
01:11:39 Thank you very much Vinod, and as this two country examples or estate examples, really show that,
01:11:49 I mean, change is possible, that we can really focus on learning and that, and also technology
01:11:54 is critical. But as you have said technology is about complimenting what teachers can do, be
01:12:03 done with knowledge, even if it's not a panacea. Let me now turn to Charlotte Watts, basically, to
01:12:15 answer kind of an existential question for all of us. Why is all this, all the use of evidence
01:12:22 and data, which is about this, a panel like this, but it's also one, what we have seen from,
01:12:28 from Dr. Rao's presentation, the use of data is critical during policy making and policy making
01:12:33 implementation? Over to you, Charlotte. I know you can speak hours about this but we need to do it in
01:12:39 less than five minutes. Over to you. [Charlotte Watts]
01:12:42 Okay. I'll have a go. So thank you very much for giving me the chance to join you today.
01:12:49 Just to say, Minister Ford sends her heartfelt apology. She was called away on urgent action
01:12:56 and asked me to take her place. So I'm FCDO's chief scientific advisor, and part of my role
01:13:03 is to support the generation and use of evidence. This is an agenda that I feel
01:13:10 very strongly about because, and I'm very pleased to join you in the launch of this
01:13:15 report because it is practical, which is what we really need, but it also is evidence-based.
01:13:22 The recommendations are really what policy makers need to make sure that we can reopen schools,
01:13:28 that schools can remain open and that children can be helped to catch up,
01:13:33 but also to thrive and continue to progress. I mean, I think what the data and evidence,
01:13:39 this report highlights is just the huge impacts that school closures have had in many,
01:13:46 many different contexts on so many aspects of children's lives and especially hitting
01:13:52 and impacting on the most vulnerable. We've seen it in the UK, but also across the world. Clearly,
01:13:59 there are variations and it's really exciting to hear the really positive examples of what
01:14:05 has been successful, but also there's been broader challenges that we've all faced.
01:14:12 These impacts, if unaddressed, really have the risk that learning losses are compounded
01:14:18 over time, and have a legacy of impact over decades to come. This is a huge challenge
01:14:24 that's facing many children, families, teachers, and governments, and so it is really good that we
01:14:31 are hearing about these examples and we have the recommendations coming from the report that tell
01:14:36 us that there are evidence-based solutions that can and will deliver results. So, for example,
01:14:44 we were proud to have supported The Literacy, a mass accelerator program in Kano state that
01:14:49 was adopted in response to the pandemic and just hugely proud of the coverage that that program
01:14:56 reached of 37,000 children. This program builds very much on the proven approach of teaching at
01:15:04 the right level, where students are grouped according to their skills and knowledge and
01:15:10 engaged with relatable activities that build their core skills. We heard a bit about that early on.
01:15:18 This type of intervention that adjusts teaching to match children's achievement
01:15:23 is a key recommendation of today's report and it's something that in many ways seems very simple
01:15:30 and intuitive to implement, but in many schools is still not the standard approach. We think this
01:15:37 approach can help children not only catch up in loss learning, but also help strengthen education
01:15:44 systems in the long term and address the ongoing learning crisis that was there before COVID hit
01:15:50 us and has been exacerbated because of COVID. Teaching for the needs of every child, obviously
01:15:58 depends on reliable data about a child's progress and attainment. So it's important that investment
01:16:06 is made in collecting the data and using the data. Dr. Rao's presentation, I think, is fantastic in
01:16:14 showing us what the opportunities are of really to use data in real time to understand
01:16:21 children's need to track attendance and to track progress over time and to take actions if children
01:16:27 are falling behind or if they need extra support. As part of our broader support to education,
01:16:33 the UK government will continue to invest spending on strengthening data and evidence.
01:16:39 And we are pleased that also other funders are joining us in these efforts. These investments in
01:16:46 data and evidence speak for themselves the value of these from the examples that we're hearing.
01:16:52 But we, and we are investing in them not only to help inform our own investments in education
01:16:58 globally to make them more cost-effective, but also we hope to help support national level
01:17:05 investments by ministries of education across lower and middle-income countries.
01:17:11 An important element to flag linked to that is the new What Works Hub for global education,
01:17:17 which will work jointly with UNICEF and the World Bank to build
01:17:21 further evidence of successful approaches to education
01:17:25 and to ensure the best and latest research is available to policy makers and teachers.
01:17:32 But our final word of reflection is, evidence is critical. Data is critical, but it can only
01:17:38 get us so far. We also need political will to strengthen education systems, and deliver
01:17:45 foundational learning for all. Everyone here has a really important role in championing this
01:17:51 agenda. So many thanks to the advisory panel and to everyone taking part today. We are massing a
01:17:58 growing coalition that is determined to improve education globally and ensure that more and more
01:18:05 children get the best chance to learn. Thank you. [Jaime Saavedra]
01:18:08 Thank you very much Charlotte and thank you very much for your continued support and the
01:18:12 continued support and partnership of the FCDO. It's great that you have emphasized that it's
01:18:16 not about the evidence and the design, but it's also about the political commitment.
01:18:21 I would add to the implementation capacity. We need to have all those ingredients for policy
01:18:25 to really work. Thank you very much for your participation. Now let me quickly turn to
01:18:32 Tahir, to share a short, what's going to be a shorter session of Q and A. Tahir, over to you.
01:18:39 [Tahir Andrabi] Okay, wonderful. Yeah, it is going to be short.
01:18:44 My quick preamble is that I've been involved in a very large assessment diagnostics and our
01:18:50 target instruction program and design of it. Our kind of preliminary pre-pilot kind of findings
01:18:56 suggest that the depth of the problem is even greater than we are talking about here.
01:19:01 For sure. Even at fourth grade levels, kids might be at grade zero. On the positive side,
01:19:09 it is that governments don't seem to be in denial. They seem to be accepting. On the teachers side,
01:19:15 given the caveats that Abhijit talked about in terms of creating the space for teachers,
01:19:19 we find a lot of buy-in. So, both good and kind of bad news, in the scope of the challenge.
01:19:23 I mean, my question to you, I'll start with, there are questions on the chat. Given that we
01:19:28 are short of time, we'll try to answer all those questions online, but I mean, my big
01:19:31 question is that we have been thinking about pilot studies. We talk about research studies, evidence,
01:19:36 but given that the scale of the problem, I mean, does it require like a system level reset? I mean,
01:19:41 what's the strategy for really implementing these things in whole systems rather than in kind of
01:19:47 the typical kind of research-based studies that we have done? What is the strategy there and what has
01:19:53 that been? I'll have a follow-up for Rachel. I think that's the time I just may have.
01:19:58 [Jaime Saavedra] So there, let me just give a snippet.
01:20:02 I think a key issue is what actually Charlotte was saying at the end, which is political commitment.
01:20:08 Actually, we are living war times now. Actually, we need to use the information that we have. Yes,
01:20:16 it's greater than we have already pilot studies and we have evidence, but actually the challenge
01:20:22 of countries is to implement systemic solutions to this problem, because actually this has
01:20:28 been massive. This has been a shock that has to require an intervention that covers, basically,
01:20:35 complete education systems. That's why the use of data-verses is critical, but then it's use of
01:20:41 interventions that can be scaled up. That's actually the key thing. Even when we talk,
01:20:46 when we say it's absolutely critical that we catch students where they are, at the level
01:20:52 that they are today, we'll have to do it in, we'll have to think in each part of the country,
01:20:57 what is the right intervention that can be implemented at scale?
01:21:04 There are low tech and very sophisticated ways of doing teaching at the right level. In each
01:21:09 country we need to be pragmatic and we need to understand what's the implementation capacity
01:21:14 today, and then have the best teaching at the right level, given the capabilities of a country.
01:21:19 Maybe we can only do some sort of grouping, but that's fine. Let's do,
01:21:23 I mean this classroom grouping, because that would be easy through structure to pedagogy to give the
01:21:28 right instructions to all teachers to do that. We really need to worry the scale and really need to
01:21:35 worry about equity. To make sure that we give all students that minimum level of learning that they
01:21:42 need. Let me stop there for now. [Tahir Andrabi]
01:21:43 Okay. Rachel, I'll come to you. That is you have a unique position of straddling both the policy
01:21:49 world and the academic world and the research world. So the question is why, you think about
01:21:56 a generalized strategy taking in from what Jaime said, how do we really bring in the local
01:22:01 contacts, the cultural, political, institutional commitments. I mean, in some ways the devil is in
01:22:06 the details in all of this. In terms of thinking about kind of a global strategy, how do we really
01:22:11 balance this global versus local and in your opinion of both as a policy
01:22:16 maker and a researcher? [Rachel Glennerster]
01:22:18 Yeah. So I think I'd very much build on what Jaime was saying, which is
01:22:25 there's some broad things that we know that seem to apply in pretty much every country,
01:22:30 which is, if you are trying to teach children at a level where they're not there, you're not going to
01:22:38 succeed. You need to understand where children are in order to target instruction at the right level.
01:22:48 How you do that is going to be very different. You want to first understand what are the issues
01:22:56 in the way you tailor that global evidence to the local contacts is you collect data or you
01:23:04 understand the issues locally first. Is it the case that students are at a very wide range
01:23:11 of learning levels in these classrooms? Or is it just that everybody is at a very low level, right?
01:23:17 Those are two different situations. Your response is going to be different,
01:23:20 but we know we have evidence about what to do in both of those situations.
01:23:26 First of all, to tailor things, you need to understand the local situation. Then
01:23:31 you need to implement in a way that is tailored to the implementation capacity.
01:23:38 So, you can do the more complicated technology that we heard about in Gujarat or you can
01:23:47 phone someone, or you can have just tutors helping out. You get some program I worked on, you get
01:24:00 people who got a secondary school education in the community and have them come in and help out.
01:24:09 You use the resources that you have in any given contacts to do the thing that we know is right,
01:24:15 which is teaching at the right level, but also other things we talked about. Not closing schools,
01:24:21 this is the main message of this report is don't close schools. That is something that you can do
01:24:27 everywhere, except if you are in a really, really extreme, but it should be the very last thing to
01:24:35 do. That is because of what we've learned across the board about the transmission of the disease
01:24:43 and the mitigation measures. Again, you can use different, your ventilation is going to
01:24:48 be different in different settings, some places it's opening a window, some places it's putting
01:24:53 in a to filter. The principle is the same. [Tahir Andrabi]
01:24:59 Okay. Last question. Kwame, you talked about involving households. One of the key members of
01:25:08 the households are mothers and mothers have their own issues with most knowledge about the child,
01:25:13 but very restrictive in many cases in mobility and contacting with schools. Maybe I'll direct
01:25:18 the question to Sally. Sally, how difficult or how effective has been dealing with households
01:25:27 in the early childhood thing, and you have less than one minute to answer and that
01:25:30 would be the last question. [Sally Grantham-McGregor]
01:25:38 Sorry. I mean, you can do great things working with mothers in households, and you can also
01:25:44 work with groups of mothers, but the thing is to get to scale quickly. It's very similar
01:25:53 working with mothers is very similar to working with children. You have to, first of all, find
01:25:58 out what they know, what they're doing, build on what they're doing, understand the local context.
01:26:07 They're just as good as other teachers. If you train them, if you train the mothers,
01:26:11 and lots of positive reinforcement, and keeping everything at the level of the child so that
01:26:18 you're not doing activities that are frustrating for the child or too easy for the child.
01:26:25 The going to scale is the real challenge. I'm sure it can be done, but it needs a certain
01:26:36 amount of supervision. If you've got one existing, that's fine. You can continue it.
01:26:42 Most of the parenting programs I know stopped during COVID and people resorted to texting and
01:26:50 take-home packages, and using materials in the home for the children to play with.
01:26:58 All that can be done, but it needs a certain amount of organization.
01:27:02 It needs curriculum in place. There are curriculum in different places that can be used.
01:27:11 Mothers, even illiterate mothers, can help. That's the encouraging thing. If illiterate mothers looks
01:27:17 at picture books and tells stories, the child's language will improve and that will lead onto
01:27:24 better reading. [crosstalk] [Tahir Andrabi]
01:27:26 We are virtually out of time. I have to pass this on to Kwame. Kwame great presentation on teachers
01:27:31 and technology. Can you please wrap it down? [Kwame Akyeampong]
01:27:34 Okay. Now thank you very much. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you for
01:27:43 being here with us. There's several things that have come out from this presentation.
01:27:50 This is a very important moment for the world. We know just how governments have raced against
01:27:59 time to make sure we have a vaccine to protect all of us because if the response was not immediate,
01:28:08 we knew what the consequences are. I think that what this report does is to remind us that
01:28:14 have a similar situation when it comes to education. That the impact of the pandemic
01:28:20 on future generations of children is going to be really, really important. It's our state,
01:28:29 and this report has really made it clear that if we don't take action, now, we are
01:28:34 going to be faced with an even more critical situation with the future of our children.
01:28:39 I think that the presentations today that we've listened to has really made this point clear.
01:28:45 I want to think on just one or two things to kind of wrap up this session. I think we are learning
01:28:51 a little bit more about what you do when you have schools, when schools are closed. I liked
01:29:00 what has been happening in the state of Gujarat India that the issue about learning without
01:29:06 schooling. We are beginning to understand that learning just doesn't happen in the four confines
01:29:12 of a building in a school. We have to think much more creatively. We've learned how technology
01:29:18 can provide us an opportunity to address this space when we have schools that are closed.
01:29:24 I think this report contains some very, very important messages
01:29:28 and recommendations that we believe, the panel believes that if taking on board
01:29:33 would really help prepare our education systems to respond as we move forward. Someone else said
01:29:40 that we should never waste opportunity as crisis presents. I think this is a great opportunity
01:29:45 for us. We've learned from the evidence that there things we can do. We've also learned how
01:29:52 systems have actually done some of the things the evidence has suggested. So we are in a good place,
01:29:57 but we do need to take action because the evidence is also very clear that if we don't,
01:30:01 the impact is going to be devastating. We are very pleased that in this report,
01:30:06 we have provided some of the latest research to document the impact and also the responses that
01:30:15 have been taken by some governments. I hope that we will all become involved in sharing this
01:30:22 message and supporting governments to really put these into practice. Thank you all very much for
01:30:29 being with us and for all the presenters and the panelists for sharing thoughts on this report.
01:30:36 We look forward to moving this agenda forward, ensuring that every child has an opportunity
01:30:41 to close that learning gap and also to move forward in the education. Thank you over to you,
01:30:50 Abhijit. [Jaime Saavedra]
01:31:00 You're muted, Abhijit. [Abhijit Banerjee]
01:31:03 Thank you. I just wanted to say thank you. There's been amazing discussion, and hopefully
01:31:10 it will spur a lot of conversations that in one form or the other, we will on social media,
01:31:18 in the press, and hopefully we will be able to
01:31:22 continue to engage with this. I think this is the beginning, not the end of this process. As
01:31:30 was said many times, the goal here is going to be to support the implementation and
01:31:41 the general absorption of these messages by the policy system. In that we all have a role to play.
01:31:52 It's an exciting beginning, and let's continue with this impetus. Thank you, everyone.
01:31:58 [Jaime Saavedra] Thanks for everyone.

Prioritizing Learning During COVID-19: The Most Effective Ways to Keep Children Learning During and Post-Pandemic

REPORT | SLIDES | PRESS RELEASE

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