Classrooms and Covid

Per a study conducted by the Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi, school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic have led to a learning crisis for primary schoolchildren in Pakistan. There is no doubt that the pandemic has had an enormous impact on education, and the learning of children, especially those who are comparatively young. The study has shown that about two percent of children are no longer enrolled in schools in 2021 compared to the figures for 2019. It also indicates that while 63 percent of children aged between five and 16 report receiving help at home from family members during the pandemic, others did not. It is also significant that 58 percent of children report getting no tools or material from their schools and 32 percent say this was provided. The survey covers four districts in each province of the country and just over 25,000 children in the 5-16 age bracket and 21,000 children in the 3-16 age bracket.

The study also found that the worst losses had occurred in grade 3 where the ability to read Urdu sentences fell significantly. While programmes on PTV to help with education did offer some aid to a number of children, many did not follow these transmissions. It is also true that educated parents, and especially educated mothers, were able to help their children far more effectively than those who had not benefited from any learning. This is hardly a startling fact. But it does point to the need to educate as many girls as possible, so that they can act as teachers within their homes and also benefit from education in terms of good parenting.

It is quite obvious that steps need to be taken to help children catch up with the gap that has been created in their learning. Children cannot learn on their own in a vacuum. When they miss out on months or years of education, or go to school sporadically, there are bound to be deficiencies in their levels of learning. A programme should be run to help children catch up to the level they stood at before the pandemic so that we can then proceed further on that platform and take children to the levels they need to acquire in order to gain a meaningful education. This is especially true for young children, who need frequent reinforcement in one form or the other to retain concepts, while girls who have dropped out also need to be brought back to school as quickly as possible, so that we can move back to at least the already poor levels of literacy and learning that we had in place before the pandemic. A further loss to this level is catastrophic.