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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

Smart Buys: Cost-Effective Approaches to Improve Global Learning (pdf)

How to Improve Education Outcomes Most Efficiently? (pdf)

The State of the Global Education Crisis: A Path to Recovery (pdf)

RewirEd Summit Agenda : A global summit on education

Website

Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel

Ending Learning Poverty

Human Capital Project

World Bank & Education

Speakers

Abhijit Banerjee

Nobel Laureate and Professor of Economics, MIT

@JPAL
Susan Dynarski

Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

@dynarski
Jaime Saavedra

Global Director for Education, 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.

Read the chat

Liviane

Hello everyone! Please submit your questions and comments now, using the chat feature. We look forward to interacting with you LIVE on January 26th!

Thu, 01/20/2022 - 10:20

Liviane

Abhijit Banerjee, Nobel Laureate and Professor of Economics at MIT, officially launched the report produced by the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP) : “Prioritizing Learning During Covid-19”.

Wed, 01/26/2022 - 08:06

Liviane

Good morning! Thank you for joining us for this event. We'll be starting shortly.

Wed, 01/26/2022 - 08:09

Liviane

The report provides recommendations from the #GEEAP, an independent, cross-disciplinary body composed of leading education experts. To learn more about the GEEAP, visit the website

Wed, 01/26/2022 - 08:10

Liviane

Jaime Saavedra, Global Director for Education at the World Bank is presenting key facts and recent findings that help understand the impact that COVID-19 has had so far on education.

Wed, 01/26/2022 - 08:12

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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