Unleashing the Potential of the Community to Address Education Disruptions and Inequity: Global Evidence from Learning Catch-up Programmes

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted education systems worldwide for the past two years, affecting over 1.6 billion children (UNESCO, 2020), particularly learners who experience inequality and discrimination. It is estimated that over 1.8 trillion hours of school (UNICEF, 2021,) time have been lost since schools first closed in March 2020, and large numbers of children, especially girls, are at risk of dropping out or not returning to school. According to the World Bank (2021),school closures and disruption to school participation and learning are projected to amount to losses valued at $10 trillion in terms of affected children’s future earnings.

Even more concerning, learning loss due to Covid-19 is compounding a pre-existing learning crisis, with many children failing to develop basic foundational skills even after several years of school. Before the pandemic hit, 617 million children and adolescents worldwide were unable to reach minimum proficiency levels in reading and math (UNESCO, 2017), despite two-thirds of them being in school. Recent evidence (Patrinos et al, 2022; Azevedo et al 2021) finds learning losses range between 0.6 and 0.9 years of schooling.
Learning loss is significant, and the impacts are profound, intergenerational, and disproportionately affecting the children that have historically experienced inequality and discrimination. This situation represents a significant challenge for the education systems. While some governments are implementing learning recovery programs, schools face significant challenges in effectively providing this support due to a range of issues such as lack of staff, workload, resources, and limited technical assistance.

As a response to address the learning crisis and education disruptions, we developed and tested catch-up programmes across a number of countries to address learning equity. These approaches are community-led models to help children catch up on their foundational skills and social and emotional learning so that they are ready to return to and/or stay in school. These evidence-based models consist of short, targeted and structured sessions implemented over three or four months to support the attainment of reading and numeracy skills. The approaches utilize the methodology “Teaching at the Right Level (TARL)” to place children into groups based on their learning level rather than their age.

The overall focus of this panel is to share rigorous evidence and lessons learned during COVID-19 for catch up learning and resuming education (addressing the learning crisis) in development and humanitarian settings. We will present recent efforts and evidence around these transformational approaches to address learning equity and prevent widespread learning loss and dropout. The first paper entitled ”A child-centered, community driven catch up programme to support the most vulnerable children’s safe return to school in Cambodia, Zimbabwe and Ghana” examines the role of communities to lead and sustain catch-up programmes for most vulnerable children. It provides findings of an action-learning process from all stakeholders in addition to learning outcomes from children accessing the programme. The second paper entitled “Community-Led Learning as a scalable and sustainable innovation to mitigate lost learning in Uganda” reviews the learning data from a quasi-experimental impact assessment for a representative sample of a cohort over 90,000 learners in a community-led learning initiative in Uganda. It considers how the model can bring parents and communities into the education system to strengthen learning for the most marginalised children, through an initiative which has reached a quarter of a million children to date. The third paper entitled “Catch-Up Clubs: What works to mitigate learning loss in rural communities in Colombia?” presents the impact evaluation results and the implications of these findings in informing the sustainability of catch-up models in settings affected by internal armed conflict. The panel will also bring in global good practice from INEE’s Accelerated Education Working Group and specifically their work on supporting learners to catch up during and after the Covid 19 pandemic.

Sub Unit

• Global Literacy SIG

Chair

• Ana Tenorio, World Vision International

Individual Presentations

• A child-centered, community-driven catch up programme to support the most vulnerable children’s safe return to school in Cambodia, Zimbabwe and Ghana - Ana Tenorio, World Vision International

• Community-Led Learning as a scalable and sustainable innovation to mitigate lost learning in Uganda - Laura Garforth, Cambridge Education

• Catch-Up Clubs: What works to mitigate learning loss in rural communities in Colombia? - Sara Cohen; Tim Murray

Discussant

• Martha Hewison, Inter Agency for Education in Emergencies