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Bridget Long, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, addresses the impact of the COVID-19 crisis in the field of education.

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Post-pandemic challenges for schools

Harvard Staff Writer

Ed School dean says flexibility, more hours key to avoid learning loss

With the closing of schools, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed many of the injustices facing schoolchildren across the country, from inadequate internet access to housing instability to food insecurity. The Gazette interviewed Bridget Long, A.M. ’97, Ph.D. ’00, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Saris Professor of Education and Economics, regarding her views on the impact the public health crisis has had on schools, the lessons learned from the pandemic, and the challenges ahead.

Bridget Long

GAZETTE:   The pandemic exposed many inequities that already existed in the education landscape. Which ones concern you the most?

LONG:   Persistent inequities in education have always been a concern, but with the speed and magnitude of the changes brought on by the pandemic, it underscored several major problems. First of all, we often think about education as being solely an academic enterprise, but our schools really do so much more. Immediately, we saw children and families struggling with basic needs, such as access to food and health care, which our schools provide but all of a sudden were removed. We also shifted our focus, once we had to be in lockdown, to the differences in students’ home environments, whether it was lack of access to technology and the other commitments and demands on their time in terms of family situations, space, basic needs, and so forth. The focus had to shift from leveling the playing field within school or within college to instead what are the differences in inequities inside students’ homes and neighborhoods and the differences in the quality and rigor and supports available to students of different backgrounds. All of this was just exacerbated with the pandemic. There are concerns about learning loss and how that will vary across different income groups, communities, and neighborhoods. But there are also concerns about trauma and the mental health strain of the pandemic and how the strain of racial injustice and political turmoil has also been experienced — no doubt differently by different parts of population. And all of that has impacted students’ well-being and academic performance. The inequities we have long seen have become worse this year.

GAZETTE:   Now that those inequities have been exposed, what can leaders in education do to navigate those issues? Are there any specific lessons learned?

LONG:   Something that many educators already understood is that one size does not fit all. This is why education is so complex and why it has been so challenging to bring about improvements because there’s no silver bullet. The solution depends on the individual, the community, and the classroom.

At first, the public health crisis underscored that we needed to meet students where they are. This has been a long-held lesson among experienced education professionals, but it became even more important. In many respects, it butted up against some of our systems, which tried to come up with across-the-board approaches when instead what we needed was a bit of nimbleness depending on the context of the particular school or classroom and the individual needs of students.

Where you have seen some success and progress is where principals and teachers have been proactive and creative in how they can meet the needs of their students. What’s underneath all of this, regardless of whether we’re face-to-face or on technology, is the importance of people and personal connections. Education is a labor-intensive industry. Technology can help us in many respects to supplement or complement what we do, but the key has always been individual personal connection. Some teachers have been able to connect with their students, whether by phone or on Zoom, or schools, where they put concerted effort into doing outreach in the community to check on families to make sure they had basic needs. Some schools were able to understand what challenges their students were facing and were somewhat flexible and proactive to address those challenges, especially if they already had strong parental engagement. That’s where you have continued to see progress and growth.

“In many respects, this crisis forced the entire field to rethink our teaching in a way that I don’t know has happened before.”

GAZETTE:   You spoke about concerns about learning loss. What can we do to avoid a lost year?

LONG:   One of the difficulties is that the experience has differed tremendously. For some students, their parents have been able to supplement or their schools have been able to react. The hope is that they will not lose much learning time, while other students effectively haven’t been in school for almost a year; they have lost quite a bit of ground. As a teacher, you can imagine your students come back to school, and all of a sudden, students of the same chronological age are actually in very different places, depending on their individual family situation and what accommodations were able to be made. I think there’s a great deal we can do to try to address that. First of all, we have to have some understanding of what gains students have made as well as things they haven’t learned yet. That means taking a moment to see where a student is in their learning. The second thing is to make sure we’re capturing the lessons learned from this pandemic by identifying places where teachers and schools used a combination of technology, outreach, personal instruction, and tutors and mentors, and helped students make progress in their learning. We need to share those lessons more broadly so that other districts can see examples that have worked.

As we look ahead, I think it will take extending learning time to close the gaps. Schools will have to decide whether that is after school, weekends, or summer, and whether or not that’s going to involve the teachers themselves, or if it’s going to be using the best tools that are out there, such as videos and technology platforms that students and families use themselves. There has already been talk by some districts of extending the school year into summer or having summer-camp-type programs to give students additional time to work through some of the material.

The other important piece is partnerships. Schools oftentimes work with members of the community or nonprofit organizations, and that’s a really important layer in our system. After-school programs, enrichment programs, tutors, and mentors are essential, and we really want to continue with that expanded sense of capacity and partnership. It’s going to have an impact on all of us if we lose a generation, or if this generation goes backwards in terms of their learning. It certainly is in all of our best interests to try to contribute to the solution.

GAZETTE:   Many parents gained renewed appreciation of the work teachers do. Do you think the pandemic would lead to a reappraisal of the profession?

LONG:   Certainly, in the beginning, there was so much more appreciation for what teachers do. As parents needed to start doing homeschooling, there was a new understanding of just how difficult teaching is. Imagine having a classroom with different personalities, different strengths and assets, and also different weaknesses, and somehow being nimble enough to continue that class moving forward. As time has gone on, I worry a little bit about the level of contentiousness in some communities as schools haven’t reopened. There is the balancing act between caring for children’s learning and the fact that we have to make sure that the adults are safe and supported. You hear stories of teachers trying to teach from home while they are also homeschooling their own children. I would hope that coming out of this would be an appreciation of the amazing things teachers do in the classroom, as well as also some acknowledgement that these are people who are also living through a devastating pandemic with all the stress and strain that every individual is going through.

One other point is that given that we know that teachers do more than just academics, we need to make sure our teachers are trained to be able to provide social emotional support to students. As some of the students come back into the classroom, we need to acknowledge that they may be dealing with devastating losses, or the frustration of being kept inside, or the violence that is happening in their homes and neighborhoods. It’s very hard to learn if you’re first dealing with those kinds of issues. Our teachers already do so much, and we need to support them more and provide even more training to help them address that wide-ranging set of challenges their students may be facing even before they can get to the learning part.

“Something that many educators already understood is that one size does not fit all. This is why education is so complex and why it has been so challenging to bring about improvements because there’s no silver bullet.”

GAZETTE:   Are there any silver linings in education brought on by the pandemic?

LONG:   The first one is when we all needed to pivot last spring, and especially this fall, many educators took a moment to pause and reflect on their learning goals and priorities. There was a great deal of discussion, both in K‒12 and higher education, to think carefully and deliberately about the ways in which we could make sure our teaching was engaging and active and how we could bring in different voices and perspectives. In many respects, this crisis forced the entire field to rethink our teaching in a way that I don’t know has happened before. The second silver lining is the innovation and creativity. Because there wasn’t necessarily one right answer, you saw a lot of experimentation. We have seen an explosion of different approaches to teaching, and many more people got involved in that process, not just some small 10 percent of the teaching force. We’ve identified new ways of engaging with our students, and we’ve also increased the capacity of our educators to be able to deliver new ways of engagement. From this process, my hope is that we’ll walk away with even more tools and approaches to how we engage our students, so that we can then make choices about what to do face-to-face, how to use technology, and what to do in more of an asynchronous sort of way. But key to this is being able to share those lessons learned with others, how you were able to still maintain connection, how you were better able to teach certain material, and perhaps even build better relationships with parents and families during this process. Just the innovation, experimentation, and growth of instructors in many places has been very positive in so many respects.

GAZETTE:   In which ways do you think the education system should be transformed after this year? How should it be rebuilt?

LONG:   First, we’ve all had to understand that education and schools are not a spot on a map. They are actually communities; they have to include families, nonprofit organizations, and community-based organizations. For a university in particular, it’s not just about coming to campus; it’s actually about the people coming together, and how they are involved in learning from each other. It’s great to push on this reconceptualization and to be clear that education is an exchange of information, of perspective, of content, and making connections, regardless of the age of the student. The crisis has also forced us to go back to some of the fundamentals of what do we need students to learn, and how are we going to accomplish those goals. That has been a very important discussion for education. And the third part is realizing that education is not a one-size-fits-all. The best educators use multiple methods and approaches to be able to connect with their students, to be able to present material, and to provide support. That’s always been the case. How do we meet students where they are? That framing is one that I hope will not go away because all students have the potential to learn, and it’s a matter of how to personalize the learning experience to meet their needs, how we notice and provide supports to help learners who are struggling. That really is at the core of education, and I hope that we will take away that lesson as we look ahead.

GAZETTE:   What do you think the role of higher education should be in this new educational landscape?

LONG: Higher education has an incredibly important role, and in particular given the economic recession. Traditionally, this is when many more people go into higher education to learn new skills, given what’s happening in the labor market. We have yet to see what the long-term impact is going to be, but in the short term, one thing we’ve noticed is that college enrollments are down. That’s very alarming and may have to do with how suddenly and how quickly the pandemic affected society. The first thing that higher education is going to have to think about is increasing proactive outreach — how to connect with potential students and how to help them get into programs that are going to give them skills necessary for this changing economy. Unfortunately, they’ll be doing this in a context where students are going to have greater needs, and where it’s not quite clear if funding from state and local governments is going to be declining. That’s the challenge that higher education will have to face. While it’s an amazing instrument in helping individuals further their skills or retool their skills, we need to make investments and make sure individuals can actually access the training available in our colleges and universities.

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GAZETTE:   What are your hopes for the Biden administration in the area of education?

LONG:   Government has a very important role in education, but it has to be balanced with the importance of local control and the fact that the context of every community is slightly different. Certainly, as we’ve been in the middle of a public health crisis, this has been incredibly challenging for schools. Schools had been trying to continue providing food and health care and connect with their students and, all of a sudden, they had to become experts in public health and buildings. This is something that falls under the purview of the federal government. Having access to the best doctors, the best public health officials, and people who think about buildings, and how to make things safe, the government needs to put that information together to give guidance to schools, principals, and teachers. It’s the government that can say, “Here are the risks, and here are the things you can do to mitigate those risks. Here are the conditions that are necessary for buildings. Here is what we know in terms of preventing spread, and here is what we know about the impact on children of different ages, and how we can protect the adults.” That kind of guidance would be incredibly helpful, as you have all of these individual school districts trying to sort through complex information and what the science says and how it applies to their particular context. Guidance is No. 1.

No. 2 is data. It’s very important having some understanding about where we stand in terms of learning loss, what we need to prioritize, and what areas of the country perhaps need more help than others. The other key component is to gauge what lessons have been learned and share the best practices across all school districts. The idea is to use the federal government as a central information bank with proactive outreach to schools. Government also plays a critical role in funding the research that will document the lessons from this pandemic.

It’s going to be incredibly helpful to have a more active federal government. As we have a better sense about where our students are the most vulnerable, and what are the kinds of high-impact practices that would be most beneficial, it’s going to be critical having the funding to support those kinds of investments because they will most certainly pay off. That possibility, I’m much more optimistic about now.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity

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New research finds that pandemic learning loss impacted whole communities, regardless of student race or income.

Analysis of prior decade shows that learning loss will become permanent if schools and parents do not expand learning time this summer and next year

(May 11, 2023) – Today, The Education Recovery Scorecard , a collaboration with researchers at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR) and Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project, released 12 new state reports and a research brief to provide the most comprehensive picture yet of how the pandemic affected student learning. Building on their previous work, their findings reveal how school closures and local conditions exacerbated inequality between communities — and how little time school leaders have to help students catch up.

The research team reviewed data from 8,000 communities in 40 states and Washington, D.C., including 2022 NAEP scores and Spring 2022 assessments, COVID death rates, voting rates and trust in government, patterns of social activity and survey data from Facebook/Meta on family activities and mental health during the pandemic.

They found that where children lived during the pandemic mattered more to their academic progress than their family background, income, or internet speed.  Moreover, after studying instances where test scores rose or fell in the decade before the pandemic, the researchers found that the impacts lingered for years. 

“Children have resumed learning, but largely at the same pace as before the pandemic. There’s no hurrying up teaching fractions or the Pythagorean theorem,” said CEPR faculty director Thomas Kane. “The hardest hit communities—like Richmond, VA, St. Louis, MO, and New Haven, CT, where students fell behind by more than 1.5 years in math—would have to teach 150 percent of a typical year’s worth of material for three years in a row—just to catch up. That is simply not going to happen without a major increase in instructional time.  Any district that lost more than a year of learning should be required to revisit their recovery plans and add instructional time—summer school, extended school year, tutoring, etc.—so that students are made whole. ”

“It’s not readily visible to parents when their children have fallen behind earlier cohorts, but the data from 7,800 school districts show clearly that this is the case,” said Sean Reardon, Professor of Poverty and Inequality, Stanford Graduate School of Education. “The educational impacts of the pandemic were not only historically large, but were disproportionately visited on communities with many low-income and minority students. Our research shows that schools were far from the only cause of decreased learning—the pandemic affected children through many ways – but they are the institution best suited to remedy the unequal impacts of the pandemic.”

The new research includes:

• A research brief that offers insights into why students in some communities fared worse than others.
• An update to the Education Recovery Scorecard, including data from 12 additional states whose 2022 scores were not available in October. The project now includes a district-level view of the pandemic’s effects in 40 states (plus DC).
• A new interactive map  that highlights examples of inequity between neighboring school districts.

Among the key findings:

• Within the typical school district, the declines in test scores were similar for all groups of students, rich and poor, white, Black, Hispanic. And the extent to which schools were closed appears to have had the same effect on all students in a community, regardless of income or race.
• Test scores declined more in places where the COVID death rate was higher, in communities where adults reported feeling more depression and anxiety during the pandemic, and where daily routines of families were most significantly restricted. This is true even in places where schools closed only very briefly at the start of the pandemic.
• Test score declines were smaller in communities with high voting rates and high Census response rates—indicators of what sociologists call “institutional trust.” Moreover, remote learning was less harmful in such places. Living in a community where more people trusted the government appears to have been an asset to children during the pandemic.
• The average U.S. public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading.

The researchers also looked at data from the decade prior to the pandemic to see how students bounced back after significant learning loss due to disruption in their schooling. The evidence shows that schools do not naturally bounce back: Affected students recovered 20-30% of the lost ground in the first year, but then made no further recovery in the subsequent 3-4 years.  

“Schools were not the sole cause of achievement losses,” Kane said. “Nor will they be the sole solution. As enticing as it might be to get back to normal, doing so will just leave the devastating increase in inequality caused by the pandemic in place.   We must create learning opportunities for students outside of the normal school calendar, by adding academic content to summer camps and after-school programs and adding an optional 13th year of schooling.”

The Education Recovery Scorecard is supported by funds from Citadel founder and CEO Kenneth C. Griffin , Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Walton Family Foundation.

About the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University The Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, seeks to transform education through quality research and evidence. CEPR and its partners believe all students will learn and thrive when education leaders make decisions using facts and findings, rather than untested assumptions. Learn more at cepr.harvard.edu.

Contact: Jeff Frantz, [email protected] , 614-204-7438 (mobile)

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The changes we need: Education post COVID-19

1 Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

2 School of Education, University of Kansas, 419 JRP, Lawrence, KS 66049 USA

Jim Watterston

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused both unprecendented disruptions and massive changes to education. However, as schools return, these changes may disappear. Moreover, not all of the changes are necessarily the changes we want in education. In this paper, we argue that the pandemic has created a unique opportunity for educational changes that have been proposed before COVID-19 but were never fully realized. We identify three big changes that education should make post COVID: curriculum that is developmental, personalized, and evolving; pedagogy that is student-centered, inquiry-based, authentic, and purposeful; and delivery of instruction that capitalizes on the strengths of both synchronous and asynchronous learning.

Introduction

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education is both unprecedented and widespread in education history, impacting nearly every student in the world (UNICEF 2020 ; United Nations 2020 ). The unexpected arrival of the pandemic and subsequent school closures saw massive effort to adapt and innovate by educators and education systems around the world. These changes were made very quickly as the prevailing circumstances demanded. Almost overnight, many schools and education systems began to offer education remotely (Kamanetz 2020 ; Sun et al. 2020 ). Through television and radio, the Internet, or traditional postal offices, schools shifted to teach students in very different ways. Regardless of the outcomes, remote learning became the de facto method of education provision for varying periods. Educators proactively responded and showed great support for the shifts in lesson delivery. Thus, it is clear and generally accepted that “this crisis has stimulated innovation within the education sector” (United Nations 2020 , p. 2).

However, the changes or innovations that occurred in the immediate days and weeks when COVID-19 struck are not necessarily the changes education needs to make in the face of massive societal changes in a post-COVID-19 world. By and large, the changes were more about addressing the immediate and urgent need of continuing schooling, teaching online, and finding creative ways to reach students at home rather than using this opportunity to rethink education. While understandable in the short term, these changes will very likely be considered insubstantial for the long term.

The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to be a once in a generation opportunity for real change a number of reasons. First, the pandemic was global and affected virtually all schools. As such, it provides the opportunity for educators and children to come together to rethink the education we actually need as opposed to the inflexible and outdated model that we are likely to feverishly cling to. Second, educators across the world demonstrated that they could collectively change en masse. The pandemic forced closure of schools, leaving teachers, children and adults to carry out education in entirely different situations. Governments, education systems, and schools offered remote learning and teaching without much preparation, planning, and in some cases, digital experience (Kamanetz 2020 ; Sun et al. 2020 ). Third, when schools were closed, most of the traditional regulations and exams that govern schools were also lifted or minimally implemented. Traditional accountability examinations and many other high stakes tests were cancelled. Education was given the room to rapidly adapt to the prevailing circumstances.

It is our hope that as we transition out of the COVID-19 pandemic and into an uncertain future that we can truly reimagine education. In light of this rare opportunity, we wish to urge scholars, policy makers, and educators to have the courage to make bold changes beyond simply changing instructional delivery. The changes that we advocate in this paper are not new but they never managed to gain traction in the pre-COVID-19 educational landscape. Our most recent experience, however, has exacerbated the need for us to rethink what is necessary, desirable, and even possible for future generations.

Changes we need

It is incumbant upon all educators to use this crisis-driven opportunity to push for significant shifts in almost every aspect of education: what, how, where, who, and when. In other words, education, from curriculum to pedagogy, from teacher to learner, from learning to assessment, and from location to time, can and should radically transform. We draw on our own research and that of our colleagues to suggest what this transformation could look like.

Curriculum: What to teach

It has been widely acknowledged that to thrive in a future globalized world, traditionally valued skills and knowledge will become less important and a new set of capabilities will become more dominant and essential (Barber et al. 2012 ; Florida 2012 ; Pink 2006 ; Wagner 2008 ; Wagner and Dintersmith 2016 ). While the specifics vary, the general agreement is that repetition, pattern-prediction and recognition, memorization, or any skills connected to collecting, storing, and retrieving information are in decline because of AI and related technologies (Muro et al. 2019 ). On the rise is a set of contemporary skills which includes creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, entrepreneurship, collaboration, communication, growth mindset, global competence, and a host of skills with different names (Duckworth and Yeager, 2015 ; Zhao et al. 2019 ).

For humans to thrive in the age of smart machines, it is essential that they do not compete with machines. Instead, they need to be more human. Being unique and equipped with social-emotional intelligence are distinct human qualities (Zhao 2018b , 2018c ) that machines do not have (yet). In an AI world individual creativity, artistry and humanity will be important commodities that distinguish us from each other.

Moreover, given the rapidity of changes we are already experiencing, it is clear that lifelong careers and traditional employment pathways will not exist in the way that they have for past generations. Jobs and the way we do business will change and the change will be fast. Thus there are almost no knowledge or skills that can be guaranteed to meet the needs of the unknown, uncertain, and constantly changing future. For this reason, schools can no longer preimpose all that is needed for the future before students graduate and enter the world.

While helping students develop basic practical skills is still needed, education should also be about development of humanity in citizens of local, national, and global societies. Education must be seen as a pathway to attaining lifelong learning, satisfaction, happiness, wellbeing, opportunity and contribution to humanity. Schools therefore need to provide comprehensive access and deep exposure to all learning areas across all years in order to enable all students to make informed choices and develop their passions and unique talents.

A new curriculum that responds to these needs must do a number of things. First, it needs to help students develop the new competencies for the new age (Barber et al. 2012 ; Wagner 2008 , 2012 ; Wagner and Dintersmith 2016 ). To help students thrive in the age of smart machines and a globalized world, education must teach students to be creative, entrepreneurial, and globally competent (Zhao 2012a , 2012b ). The curriculum needs to focus more on developing students’ capabilities instead of focusing only on ‘template’ content and knowledge. It needs to be concerned with students’ social and emotional wellbeing as well. Moreover, it needs to make sure that students have an education experience that is globally connected and environmentally connected. As important is the gradual disappearance of school subjects such as history and physics for all students. The content is still important, but it should be incorporated into competency-based curriculum.

Second, the new curriculum should allow personalization by students (Basham et al. 2016 ; Zhao 2012b , 2018c ; Zhao and Tavangar 2016 ). Although personalized learning has been used quite elusively in the literature, the predominant model of personalized learning has been computer-based programs that aim to adapt to students’ needs (Pane et al. 2015 ). This model has shown promising results but true personalization comes from students’ ability to develop their unique learning pathways (Zhao 2018c ; Zhao and Tavangar 2016 ). That is, students can follow their passions and strengths. This not only requires the curriculum to be flexible so that students can choose what they wish to learn, but also requires students to come up with their own learning pathway without being overly constrained by the pre-determined curriculum. Thus national curriculum or curriculum for all students should be a minimal suite of essential knowledge and skills, sufficient for all students to develop the most basic competences and learn the most common norms, expectations, and the societal organizations of a jurisdiction.

Enabling students to co-develop part of the curriculum is not only necessary for them to become unique but also gives them the opportunity to exercise their right to self-determination, which is inalienable to all humans (Wehmeyer and Zhao 2020 ). It provides the opportunities for students to make choices, propose new learning content, and learn about consequences of their actions. Furthermore, it helps students to become owners of their learning and also develop life-long learning habits and skills. It is to help them go meta about their learning—above what they learn and understand why they learn.

Third, it is important to consider the curriculum as evolving. Although system-level curriculum frameworks have to be developed, they must accommodate changes with time and contexts. Any system-level curriculum should enable the capacity for schools to contextualize and make changes to it as deemed necessary. Such changes must be justifiable of course but a system-level curriculum framework should not use national or state level accountability assessments to constrain the changes.

Pedagogy: How to teach

There is increasing call for learners to be more actively engaged in their own learning. The reasons for students to take a more significant role in their own learning are multiple. First, students are diverse and have different levels of abilities and interests that may not align well with the content they are collectively supposed to learn in the classroom. Teachers have been encouraged to pursue classroom differentiation (Tomlinson 2014 ) and students have been encouraged to play a more active role in defining their learning and learning environments in collaboration with teachers (Zhao 2018c ). Second, the recent movement toward personalized learning (Kallick and Zmuda 2017 ; Kallio and Halverson 2020 ) needs students to become more active in understanding and charting their learning pathways.

To promote student self-determination as both a self-evident, naturally born right and an effective strategy for enhanced learning (Wehmeyer and Zhao 2020 ), we need to consider enabling students to make informed decisions regarding their own learning pathway. This generation of learners are much more active and tech-savvy. They access information instantly and have been doing so throughout their daily life. They have different strengths and weaknesses. They also have different passions. Thus, schools should use discretion to start relaxing the intense requirements of curriculum. Schools could start by allowing students to negotiate part of their curriculum instead of requiring all students learn the same content, as discussed earlier. Students should be enabled to have certain levels of autonomy over what they want to learn, how they learn, where they learn and how they want to be assessed (Zhao 2018c ). When students have such autonomy, they are more likely to be less constrained by the local contexts they are born into. The impact of their home background and local schools may be less powerful.

Students should exercise self-determination as members of the school community (Zhao 2018c ). The entire school is composed of adults and students, but students are the reason of existence for schools. Thus, schools and everything in the school environment should incorporate and serve the students, yet most schools do not have policies and processes that enable students to participate in making decisions about the school—the environment, the rules and regulations, the curriculum, the assessment, and the adults in the school. Schools need to create these conditions through empowering students to have a genuine voice in part of how they operate, if not in its entirety. Students’ right to self-determination implies that they have the right to determine under what conditions they wish to learn. Thus, it is not unreasonable for schools to treat students as partners of learning and of change (Zhao 2011 , 2018c ).

It should not be unique to see school practices co-developed with students (Zhao 2018c ). Students not only will be co-owners (with parents and teachers) of their own learning enterprise, but also co-owners of the school community. It is likely to see students having their own personal learning programs and also acting as fully functioning members of the entire school community, contributing to fundamental decisions regarding the curriculum for all, the staff, the students, and the entire environment.

Moreover, with ubiquitous access to online resources and experts, students do not necessarily need teachers to continually and directly teach them. When students are enabled to own their learning and have access to resources and experts, the role of the teacher changes (Zhao 2018a ). Teachers no longer need to serve as the instructor, the sole commander of information to teach the students content and skills. Instead, the teacher serves other more important roles such as organizer of learning, curator of learning resources, counselor to students, community organizer, motivator and project managers of students’ learning. The teacher’s primary responsibility is no longer simply just instruction, which requires teacher education to change as well. Teacher education needs to focus more on preparing teachers to be human educators who care more about the individual students and serve as consultants and resource curators instead of teaching machines (Zhao 2018a ).

Pedagogy should change as well. Direct instruction should be cast away for its “unproductive successes” or short-term successes but long term damages (Bonawitza et al. 2011 ; Buchsbauma et al. 2011 ; Kapur 2014 , 2016 ; Zhao 2018d ). In its place should be new models of teaching and learning. The new models can have different formats and names but they should be student-centered, inquiry-based, authentic, and purposeful. New forms of pedagogy should focus on student-initiated explorations of solutions to authentic and significant problems. They should help students develop abilities to handle the unknown and uncertain instead of requiring memorization of known solutions to known problems.

Organization: Where and when to teach

Technology has made it possible for schools to offer online education for quite some time and the number of students taking online courses has been on the rise, but not until the arrival of COVID-19 has the majority of education been offered through this mode. While there are many good reasons for schools to return to what was refrred to as “normal,” the normalcy may not be easily achieved because of the uncertainty of the virus, and as discussed above, may not even be desirable.

Moving teaching online is significant. It ultimately changed one of the most important unwritten school rules: all students must be in one location for education to take place. The typical place of learning has been the classroom in a school and the learning time has been typically confined to classes. This massive online movement changed the typical. It has forced teachers to experience remote teaching without proximity to the students. It has also given many teachers the opportunity to rethink the purpose of teaching and connecting with students.

When students are not learning in classes inside a school, they are distributed in the community. They can interact with others through technologies. This can have significant impact on learning activities. If allowed or enabled by a teacher, students could be learning from online resources and experts anywhere in the world. Thus, the where of learning changes from the classroom to the world.

Furthermore, the time of learning also changes. When learning goes online and students are not or do not need to be in schools, their learning time vastly expands beyond the traditional school time. They can learn asynchronously at anytime. Equally important is that their learning time does not need to be synchronous with each other or with that of the teacher.

There are many possible ways for schools to deliver remote learning (Zhao 2020 ). The simplest is to simulate that schools are open with traditional timetables with the default model being that all students attend lessons on screen at the same time as they do in schools. In this case, nothing changes except for the fact that students are not in the same location as their classmates and the teacher. While it has been perhaps the most common approach that has been taken by many schools, this approach has not been very effective and successful, resulting in distress, disengagement, and much less personal interaction and learning than traditional face-to-face situations (Darby 2020 ; Dorn et al. 2020 ).

As schools continue to explore online learning, new and more effective models are being explored, innovatively developed, and practiced. The more effective models of online learning have a well-balanced combination of both synchronous and asynchronous sessions that enable more desirable ways of learning. Instead of teaching online all the time, it is possible, for example, to conduct inquiry-based learning. Students receive instructions from online resources or synchronous meetings, conduct inquiry, create products individually or within small groups, and make presentations in large class synchronous meetings. Instead of lecturing to all students, teachers could create videos of lectures or find videos made by others and share them with students. They would also be meeting with small groups of individuals for specific advice and support. The fundamental pursuit is that there is minimal benefit or student engagement for teachers to lecture all the time when more interesting and challenging instructional models can be developed.

Today, being disconnected physically can result in being more broadly connected virtually. Students have been traditionally associated with their schools and schools have typically served local communities. Thus, students typically are connected and socialize with their peers from restricted catchment areas. Despite the possibility to connect globally with people from other lands, most schools’ activities are local. Today, when local connections become less reliable and students are encouraged to have social distancing, it is possible to encourage more global connections virtually. Students could join different learning communities that involve members from different locations, not necessarily from their own schools. Students could also participate in learning opportunities provided by other providers in remote locations. Furthermore, students could create their own learning opportunities by inviting peers and teachers from other locations.

The ideal model of organizing students, based on the COVID-19 experiences, is perhaps a combination of both online and face-to-face learning opportunities. Many schools have already reopened, but when schools reopen it is unnecessary to undo the online aspect of learning developed during COVID-19. Online learning can be effective (Means et al. 2013 ; Rudestam and Schoenholtz-Read 2010 ; Zhao et al. 2005 ), but a well-designed mixed mode delivery of online and face-to-face education should be more effective for learning in general but especially so should there be future instances of virtual learning (Tucker 2020 ). The idea of blended learning or flipped classrooms (Bishop and Verleger 2013 ) has been promoted and researched in recent years as very effective models of teaching. COVID-19 should have made the convincing much easier since many teachers have been forced to move online.

When learning is both online and face-to-face, students are liberated from having to attend classes at specific times. They are also no longer required to be in the same place to receive instruction from teachers. They could work on their own projects and reach out to their teachers or peers when necessary. When students are no longer required to attend class at the same time in the same place, they can have much more autonomy over their own learning. Their learning time expands beyond school time and their learning places can be global.

Education will undoubtedly go through major changes in the next decade as the combined result of multiple major forces. These changes include curricular changes that determine what is to be learned by learners. It is likely that more students will be moving toward competency-based learning that has an emphasis on developing unique skills and abilities. Learning has to become more based on strengths and passions and become personalized. In response, education providers will need to make student autonomy and student agency key to transforming pedagogy and school organizations. Students will prosper by having more say in their own learning and their learning communities. Moreover, schools will have a unique opportunity to positively and proactively change as a result of COVID-19 and the need for global connections. It is possible to see schools rearrange their schedules and places of teaching so that students can at the same time take part in different and more challenging learning opportunities regardless of their physical locations. Relevant online learning will be on the rise and perhaps becomes a regular part of the daily routine for many students.

Of course, we cannot forget that not all students have equal access to technology, both in terms of hardware and digital competency. The issue of digital divide remains a significant issue around the globe. It is important for us to reimagine a better education with technology and find creative ways to make education more equitable, including wiping out the digital divide.

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Contributor Information

Yong Zhao, Email: ude.uk@oahzgnoy .

Jim Watterston, Email: [email protected] .

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Mission: Recovering Education in 2021

THE CONTEXT

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused abrupt and profound changes around the world.  This is the worst shock to education systems in decades, with the longest school closures combined with looming recession.  It will set back progress made on global development goals, particularly those focused on education. The economic crises within countries and globally will likely lead to fiscal austerity, increases in poverty, and fewer resources available for investments in public services from both domestic expenditure and development aid. All of this will lead to a crisis in human development that continues long after disease transmission has ended.

Disruptions to education systems over the past year have already driven substantial losses and inequalities in learning. All the efforts to provide remote instruction are laudable, but this has been a very poor substitute for in-person learning.  Even more concerning, many children, particularly girls, may not return to school even when schools reopen. School closures and the resulting disruptions to school participation and learning are projected to amount to losses valued at $10 trillion in terms of affected children’s future earnings.  Schools also play a critical role around the world in ensuring the delivery of essential health services and nutritious meals, protection, and psycho-social support. Thus, school closures have also imperilled children’s overall wellbeing and development, not just their learning.   

It’s not enough for schools to simply reopen their doors after COVID-19. Students will need tailored and sustained support to help them readjust and catch-up after the pandemic. We must help schools prepare to provide that support and meet the enormous challenges of the months ahead. The time to act is now; the future of an entire generation is at stake.

THE MISSION

Mission objective:  To enable all children to return to school and to a supportive learning environment, which also addresses their health and psychosocial well-being and other needs.

Timeframe : By end 2021.

Scope : All countries should reopen schools for complete or partial in-person instruction and keep them open. The Partners - UNESCO , UNICEF , and the World Bank - will join forces to support countries to take all actions possible to plan, prioritize, and ensure that all learners are back in school; that schools take all measures to reopen safely; that students receive effective remedial learning and comprehensive services to help recover learning losses and improve overall welfare; and their teachers are prepared and supported to meet their learning needs. 

Three priorities:

1.    All children and youth are back in school and receive the tailored services needed to meet their learning, health, psychosocial wellbeing, and other needs. 

Challenges : School closures have put children’s learning, nutrition, mental health, and overall development at risk. Closed schools also make screening and delivery for child protection services more difficult. Some students, particularly girls, are at risk of never returning to school. 

Areas of action : The Partners will support the design and implementation of school reopening strategies that include comprehensive services to support children’s education, health, psycho-social wellbeing, and other needs. 

Targets and indicators

2.    All children receive support to catch up on lost learning.

Challenges : Most children have lost substantial instructional time and may not be ready for curricula that were age- and grade- appropriate prior to the pandemic. They will require remedial instruction to get back on track. The pandemic also revealed a stark digital divide that schools can play a role in addressing by ensuring children have digital skills and access.

Areas of action : The Partners will (i) support the design and implementation of large-scale remedial learning at different levels of education, (ii) launch an open-access, adaptable learning assessment tool that measures learning losses and identifies learners’ needs, and (iii) support the design and implementation of digital transformation plans that include components on both infrastructure and ways to use digital technology to accelerate the development of foundational literacy and numeracy skills. Incorporating digital technologies to teach foundational skills could complement teachers’ efforts in the classroom and better prepare children for future digital instruction.   

While incorporating remedial education, social-emotional learning, and digital technology into curricula by the end of 2021 will be a challenge for most countries, the Partners agree that these are aspirational targets that they should be supporting countries to achieve this year and beyond as education systems start to recover from the current crisis.

3.   All teachers are prepared and supported to address learning losses among their students and to incorporate  digital technology into their teaching.

Challenges : Teachers are in an unprecedented situation in which they must make up for substantial loss of instructional time from the previous school year and teach the current year’s curriculum. They must also protect their own health in school. Teachers will need training, coaching, and other means of support to get this done. They will also need to be prioritized for the COVID-19 vaccination, after frontline personnel and high-risk populations.  School closures also demonstrated that in addition to digital skills, teachers may also need support to adapt their pedagogy to deliver instruction remotely. 

Areas of action : The Partners will advocate for teachers to be prioritized in COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, after frontline personnel and high-risk populations, and provide capacity-development on pedagogies for remedial learning and digital and blended teaching approaches. 

Country level actions and global support

UNESCO, UNICEF, and World Bank are joining forces to support countries to achieve the Mission, leveraging their expertise and actions on the ground to support national efforts and domestic funding.

Country Level Action

1.  Mobilize team to support countries in achieving the three priorities

The Partners will collaborate and act at the country level to support governments in accelerating actions to advance the three priorities.

2.  Advocacy to mobilize domestic resources for the three priorities

The Partners will engage with governments and decision-makers to prioritize education financing and mobilize additional domestic resources.

Global level action

1.  Leverage data to inform decision-making

The Partners will join forces to   conduct surveys; collect data; and set-up a global, regional, and national real-time data-warehouse.  The Partners will collect timely data and analytics that provide access to information on school re-openings, learning losses, drop-outs, and transition from school to work, and will make data available to support decision-making and peer-learning.

2.  Promote knowledge sharing and peer-learning in strengthening education recovery

The Partners will join forces in sharing the breadth of international experience and scaling innovations through structured policy dialogue, knowledge sharing, and peer learning actions.

The time to act on these priorities is now. UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank are partnering to help drive that action.

Last Updated: Mar 30, 2021

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Search UNICEF

Education in a post-covid world, towards a rapid transformation.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, resulting in disruptions to education at an unprecedented scale. In response to the urgent need to recover learning losses, countries worldwide have taken  RAPID  actions to:  R each every child and keep them in school;  A ssess learning levels regularly;  P rioritize teaching the fundamentals; I ncrease the efficiency of instruction; and  D evelop psychosocial health and wellbeing. 

Marking three years since the onset of the pandemic, this report looks back at policy measures taken during school closures and reopening based on country survey data, initiatives implemented by countries and regions to recover and accelerate learning, and their emerging lessons within each RAPID action. With schools now reopened worldwide, this report also looks ahead to longer-term education transformation, offering policy recommendations to build more resilient, effective and equitable education systems.

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Beyond reopening schools: How education can emerge stronger than before COVID-19

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, emiliana vegas and emiliana vegas former co-director - center for universal education , former senior fellow - global economy and development @emivegasv rebecca winthrop rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development @rebeccawinthrop.

September 8, 2020

• 52 min read

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in at least one positive thing: a much greater appreciation for the importance of public schools. As parents struggle to work with their children at home due to school closures, public recognition of the essential caretaking role schools play in society has skyrocketed. As young people struggle to learn from home, parents’ gratitude for teachers, their skills, and their invaluable role in student well-being, has risen. As communities struggle to take care of their vulnerable children and youth, decisionmakers are having to devise new mechanisms for delivering essential services from food to education to health care.

We believe it is also valuable to look beyond these immediate concerns to what may be possible for education on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is hard to imagine there will be another moment in history when the central role of education in the economic, social, and political prosperity and stability of nations is so obvious and well understood by the general population. Now is the time to chart a vision for how education can emerge stronger from this global crisis than ever before and propose a path for capitalizing on education’s newfound support in virtually every community across the globe.

It is in this spirit that we have developed this report. We intend to start a dialogue about what could be achieved in the medium to long term if leaders around the world took seriously the public’s demand for safe, quality schools for their children. Ultimately, we argue that strong and inclusive public education systems are essential to the short- and long-term recovery of society and that there is an opportunity to leapfrog toward powered-up schools.

A powered-up school could be one that puts a strong public school at the center of a community and leverages the most effective partnerships, including those that have emerged during COVID-19, to help learners grow and develop a broad range of competencies and skills in and out of school. For example, such a school would crowd in supports, including technology, that would allow for allies in the community from parents to employers to reinforce, complement, and bring to life learning experiences in and outside the classroom. It would recognize and adapt to the learning that takes place beyond its walls, regularly assessing students’ skills and tailoring learning opportunities to meet students at their skill level. These new allies in children’s learning would complement and support teachers and could support children’s healthy mental and physical development. It quite literally is the school at the center of the community that powers student learning and development using every path possible (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Powered-up schools

While this vision is aspirational, it is by no means impractical. Schools at the center of a community ecosystem of learning and support is an idea whose time has come, and some of the emerging practices amid COVID-19, such as empowering parents to support their children’s education, should be sustained when the pandemic subsides. In this report we draw upon: 1) the latest evidence emerging on both the dire effects of the pandemic on children’s schooling and on the new strategies that hold promise for strengthening children’s education post-pandemic; 2) a series of dialogues between March to August 2020 with former heads of state and education leaders from around the globe on the big questions facing education in the pandemic response and recovery; and 3) our ongoing research on harnessing innovation to leapfrog education toward a more equitable and relevant learning ecosystem for all young people.

This central question has guided our inquiry: “Is it possible to realistically envision education emerging from the novel coronavirus pandemic stronger than it was before?” To spark the discussion around this question, we describe four key emerging trends resulting from the impact of COVID-19 on education globally and propose five actions to guide the transformation of education systems after the pandemic.

Four emerging global trends in education from COVID-19

1. accelerating e ducation i nequality: education inequality is accelerating in an unprecedented fashion, especially where before the pandemic it was already high.

Even before COVID-19 left as many as 1.5 billion students out of school in early 2019, there was a global consensus that education systems in too many countries were not delivering the quality education needed to ensure that all have the skills necessary to thrive. It is the poorest children across the globe that carry the heaviest burden, with pre-pandemic analysis estimating that 90 percent of children in low-income countries, 50 percent of children in middle-income countries, and 30 percent of children in high-income countries fail to master the basic secondary-level skills needed to thrive in work and life. It is children in the poorest countries who have been left the furthest behind. As economist Lant Pritchett explained in his 2013 book “ The rebirth of education ,” although countries in the developing world had largely succeeded in getting almost all primary-aged children into schools, too many students were not learning even the basic literacy and numeracy skills necessary to continue learning. The World Bank’s “ 2018 World Development Report ” called it a “learning crisis,” and the global community mobilized to seek more funding to support education systems across the world. The Education Commission’s 2016 report, “ The learning generation: Investing in education for a changing world ,” emphasized that technology was changing the nature of work, and that growing skills gaps would stunt economic growth in low- and middle-income countries; it called for increasing investment in education in these countries.

Yet, for a few young people in wealthy communities around the globe, schooling has never been better than during the pandemic. They are taught in their homes with a handful of their favorite friends by a teacher hired by their parents . Some parents have connected via social media platforms to form learning pods that instruct only a few students at a time with agreed-upon teaching schedules and activities. These parents argue that the pods encourage social interaction, improve learning, and reduce the burden of child care during the pandemic. However, they often exclude lower income families, as they can cost up to $100 per hour .

There is nothing new about families doing all they can for their children’s education; one only has to look at the explosion of the $100 billion global tutoring market over the last decade. While the learning experiences for these particular children may be good in and of themselves, they represent a worrisome trend for the world: the massive acceleration of education inequality .

While by mid-April of 2020, less than 25 percent of low-income countries were providing any type of remote learning and a majority that did used TV and radio, close to 90 percent of high-income countries were providing remote learning opportunities. On top of cross-country differences in access to remote learning opportunities, within-country differences are also staggering. For example, according to the U.S. Census Bureau , during the COVID-19 school closures, 1 in 10 of the poorest children in the world’s largest economy had little or no access to technology for learning. And UNICEF estimates that 463 million children—at least one-third of the world total , the majority of whom are in the developing world—had no chance at remote learning via radio, television, or online content. However, this does not take into account the creative use of text messages, phone calls, and offline e-learning that many teachers and education leaders are putting to use in rural and under-resourced communities. Indeed, these innovative practices suggest that the school closures from COVID-19 are setting the stage for leapfrogging in education, as we discuss next.

2. A leapfrog moment: Innovation has suddenly moved from the margins to the center of many education systems, and there is an opportunity to identify new strategies, that if sustained, can help young people get an education that prepares them for our changing times.

This unprecedented acceleration of education inequality requires new responses. In our ongoing work on education innovation, we have argued that there are examples of new strategies or approaches that could, if scaled up, have the potential to rapidly accelerate, or leapfrog, progress. Two years ago, in “ Leapfrogging inequality: Remaking education to help young people thrive ,” we set forth a leapfrog pathway laying out a map to harness education innovations to much more quickly close the gap in education inequality. We argued that at two decades into the 21st century, the goal should be for all children to become lifelong learners and develop the full breadth of skills and competencies—from literacy to problem-solving to collaboration—that they will need to access a changing world of work and be constructive citizens in society. We defined education innovation as an idea or technology that is new to a current context, if not new to the world. And we proposed that those innovations that could help provide a broader menu of options for delivering learning were those with the potential to help leapfrog education, namely: 1) innovative pedagogical approaches alongside direct instruction to help young people not only remember and understand but analyze and create; 2) new ways of recognizing learning alongside traditional measures and pathways; 3) crowding in a diversity of people and places alongside professional teachers to help support learning in school; and 4) smart use of technology and data that allowed for real-time adaptation and did not simply replace analog approaches.

When we surveyed almost 3,000 education innovations across over 160 countries, we found that some innovations had the potential to help leapfrog progress, as defined along our four dimensions, and many did not. We also found that many of the promising innovations were on the margins of education systems and not at the center of how learning takes place. We argued that to rapidly accelerate progress and close the equity gaps in education, the wide range of actors involved in delivering education to young people would need to spend more time documenting, learning from, evaluating, and scaling those innovative approaches that held the most leapfrog potential.

Today we are facing a very different context. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced education innovation into the heart of almost every education system around the globe. Based on a recent 59-country survey of educators and education administrators, Fernando Reimers and Andreas Schleicher note that: “The crisis has revealed the enormous potential for innovation that is dormant in many education systems.” 1 The question is no longer how to scale innovations from the margin to the center of education systems but how to transform education systems so that they will source, support, and sustain those innovations that address inequality and provide all young people with the skills to build a better future for themselves and their communities. By doing this, we ultimately hope not only that those who are left behind can catch up, but that a new, more equal education system can emerge out of the crisis. Fortunately, across the world, communities are increasingly valuing the role that schools play, not only for student learning, but also for the livelihoods of educators, parents, and others, as we discuss below.

3. Rising p ublic s upport: There is newfound public recognition of how essential schools are in society and a window of opportunity to leverage this support for making them stronger

March 2020 will forever be known as the time all the world’s schools closed their doors. As teachers and school leaders around the world struggled with hardly any forewarning to pivot to some form of remote learning, parents and families around the globe who had relied on schools as an anchor around which they organized their daily schedule faced the shock of life without school. An outpouring of appreciation on social media for teachers from parents deciding between caring for their children and earning money quickly followed. To underscore this sentiment of appreciation, Gabriel Zinny of the Buenos Aires government says: “Societies are recognizing that schools and teachers are heroes … that schools are the place not only where we get to learn and progress, fulfill our hopes and dreams, but also where we learn to live in community. Just recently in Buenos Aires, families went out to their balconies to applaud not only doctors and nurses, but teachers.”

This broad recognition and support for the essential role of education in daily life can be found on the pages of newspapers across the globe. It can be found in emerging coalitions of advocates urging that education be prioritized across communities and countries. The global education community is also mobilizing from UNESCO’s broad consortium with the newly formed Save Our Future campaign that brings together a broad coalition of actors in the international development sphere to advocate for sustained education funding, especially among international aid donors, for low- and middle-income countries.

Ultimately, today for the first time since the advent of universal education, the majority of parents and families around the world share the long-standing concerns of the most vulnerable families: They are in urgent need of a safe and good enough school to send their children to. This reality, which is so well known to the families of the 258 million out-of-school children, has brought the issue of education into the living rooms of middle class and elite parents around the globe. And they are forging, at least for a moment, common cause between many of the parents of the 1.9 billion school-aged children around the world. As a result, new stakeholders are getting involved in supporting education, an emerging trend we describe next.

4. New e ducation a llies: The pandemic has galvanized new actors in the community—from parents to social welfare organizations—to support children’s learning like never before.

Alongside increasing recognition of the essential role of public schools, the pandemic has galvanized parts of communities that traditionally are not actively involved in children’s education. As school buildings closed, teachers began to partner with parents in ways never done before, schools formed new relationships with community health and social welfare organizations, media companies worked with education leaders, technology companies partnered with nonprofits and governments, and local nonprofits and businesses contributed to supporting children’s learning in new ways.

The idea of children’s education being supported by an ecosystem of learning opportunities in and outside of school is not new among educationalists. The community schools movement envisions schools as the hub of children’s education and development, with strong partnerships among other sectors from health to social welfare. Schools remain open all day and are centers for community engagement, services, and problem-solving. Proponents of “life-wide” learning approaches point out that children from birth to 18 years of age spend only up to 20 percent of their waking hours at school and argue that the fabric of the community offers many enriching learning experiences alongside school. In our own work on leapfrogging in education, we argue that diversifying the educators and places where children learn can crowd in innovative pedagogical approaches and complement and enrich classroom-based learning. More recently, the concept of local learning ecoystems has emerged to describe learning opportunities provided through a web of collaboration among schools, community organizations, businesses, and government agencies that often pair direct instruction with innovative pedagogies allowing for experimentation.

There is evidence ranging from the U.K . to Nicaragua that young people engaging in diverse learning opportunities outside of school—from classic extracurricular activities such as music lessons to nonformal education programming—can be quite helpful in boosting the skills and academic competencies of marginalized children. But until recently there has been only limited empirical examples of local learning ecosystems. Emerging models are appearing in places such as Catalonia, Spain with its Educacio360 initiative and Western Pennsylvania, where several U.S. school districts have engaged in a multiyear Remake Learning initiative to offer life-wide learning opportunities to families and children. One of the opportunities emerging out of the COVID-19 pandemic may just be the chance to harness the new energies and mindsets between schools and communities to work together to support children’s learning.

Five proposed actions to guide the transformation of education systems

Given these four emerging trends and building on previous research, we put forth five proposed actions for decisionmakers to seize this moment to transform education systems to better serve all children and youth, especially the most disadvantaged. We argue that because of their responsibility to all children, public schools must be at the center of any education system that seeks to close widening inequality gaps. We highlight the creative use of technology—especially through mobile phone communication with parents—as examples of strategies that have emerged amid the pandemic that, if sustained, could complement and strengthen children’s learning in public schools. We acknowledge that the highlighted examples are just emerging, and there is more to learn about how they work and other examples to consider as events unfold. For this reason, we propose guidance for identifying which new approaches should potentially be continued. We argue that innovations that support and strengthen the instructional core, namely the interactions in the teaching and learning process, will have a greater chance at sustainably supporting a powered-up school. We also argue that the urgency of the moment calls for an adaptive and iterative approach to learning what works in real time; hence, improvement science principles should accompany any leapfrogging effort to build evidence and correct course in real time.

1. Leverag e p ublic s chools: Put public schools at the center of education systems given their essential role in equalizing opportunity across dimensions within society

Public schools play a critical role in reducing inequality and strengthening social cohesion. By having the mandate to serve all children and youth regardless of background, public schools in many countries can bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds and needs, providing the social benefit of allowing individuals to grow up with a set of common values and knowledge that can make communities more cohesive and unified.

The private sector has an important role to play in education—from advocating that governments invest in high-quality public schools because they help power economies and social stability to helping test innovative pedagogical models in independent schools. In many low-income countries, low-cost private schools have expanded in recent years, helping to address the challenge that fiscally- and/or capacity-constrained governments have long faced in expanding access to education. Many families in developing countries, ranging from Chile to India to Nigeria to Kenya , opt to send their children to these low-cost, often for-profit, private schools. Indeed, the expansion of private schools in low-income countries has in some locations played a role in increasing universal access to primary education.

However, there are a range of concerns with private schools, both in terms of their effectiveness as well as their impact on inequality. For example, the extent to which private schools might provide a better education, the so-called “private school advantage,” has been a long-standing debate. While it is difficult to isolate the impact of private schools, a recent analysis of over 40 countries that participated in the OECD’s 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) concludes that public schools outperform both publicly subsidized private schools, as well as independent schools, in a majority of countries.

In addition, in many countries, the expansion of private schools has not been accompanied by regulations to guide student selection processes or the fees schools may charge (which also directly affect selection). A troubling unintended consequence of the unregulated expansion of private schooling is an increase in segregation of students by socioeconomic and other background characteristics. In many countries, private schools select students based on multiple factors, including academic ability, religious affiliation, and socioeconomic background. As a result, private schools tend to be less diverse than public schools. Further, entry into private school may not be entirely merit-based. In middle- and high-income countries, the private sector has stepped in to provide services to help students gain admission into selective education institutions. Since these services are costly, they select for wealthier families that can afford the help to get their students into the “right” schools, further excluding low-income families. In the U.S., for example, data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that public schools are much more diverse than private schools: In 2017, 67 percent of private school students were white , compared with just 48 percent of their public school counterparts .

A growing body of research shows that segregation can have a negative impact on children’s academic and social outcomes . For example, in Chile, where a school choice program was introduced in 1981, there has been a steady exodus from public schools over time, and today more than half of its students are enrolled in private schools. Not only did national average test scores stagnate, but unfettered school choice also led to student segregation into private and public schools based on parental education and income. Achievement gaps between affluent and disadvantaged students began to decline after a reform to the per-student subsidy (or voucher)—called the Preferential School Subsidy Law—was introduced in 2008. The reform introduced higher value per-student subsidies to schools serving low-income students and required schools who accepted the higher value vouchers to take part in a new accountability system. Students from socioeconomically disadvantaged households soon improved their performance, leading to an increase in national average test scores and a reduction in the income-based achievement gaps .

In many countries, a central debate is whether education should be seen as a public good or a private consumable. Advocates of expanding private school choice see education as a private consumable. Advocates who argue that education is a public good put forth that schools are about more than preparing individuals for the labor market, and that they have an irreplaceable role in generating multiple public benefits, including public health and in developing citizens to participate in democratic societies .

We follow Levin (1987) in arguing that schools play a crucial role in fostering the skills individuals need to succeed in a rapidly changing labor market, and they play a major role in equalizing opportunities for individuals of diverse backgrounds. Moreover, schools address a variety of social needs that serve communities, regions, and entire nations. And while a few private schools can and do play these multiple roles, public education is the main conduit for doing so at scale. Hence, we argue that public schools must be at the center of any effort to build back better or, in the words of UNICEF’s chief of education Robert Jenkins, “build back equal,” after the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. A l aser f ocus on t he i nstructional c ore: Emphasize the instructional core, the heart of the teaching and learning process.

To develop powered-up schools, it will be essential to figure out how to identify what strategies, among the many that communities are deploying amid the pandemic, should be sustained to power up a school as the crisis subsides. We argue that decisionmakers should ground their actions on rigorous evidence of what works to improve student learning, as well as how school change happens and ultimately should include a heavy emphasis on the heart of the teaching and learning process, what is often called the instructional or pedagogical core. Indeed, how educators engage with students and instructional materials, including education technology, is crucial for learning given the strong evidence that educators are the most important school-side factor in student learning. 2

In our forthcoming CUE publication co-authored by Alejandro Ganimian, Emiliana Vegas, and Frederick Hess, “ Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all? ,” the authors note that significant research has shown that one of the main reasons many education innovations and reforms have failed, despite serious effort, is that they have paid insufficient attention to the instructional core. While there have been several variations and terms associated with the instructional core, at its heart is the understanding that it is the interactions among educators, learners, and educational materials that matter most in improving student learning. 3 For example, higher quality learning materials—whether they are new online resources or revamped curriculum—will not on their own improve student learning. Only when educators use them to improve their instruction can students have an improved experience. The authors build on this model of the instructional core to integrate parents, given not only their predominant role in children’s lives but also the new ways in which they have supported children’s learning amid the pandemic (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. The instructional core

Using the instructional core as a guide can help us identify what types of new strategies or innovations could become community-based supports in children’s learning journey. Indeed, even after only several months of experimentation around the globe on keeping learning going amid a pandemic, there are some clear strategies that have the potential, if continued, to contribute to a powered-up school, and many of them involve engaging learners, educators, and parents in new ways using some form of technology.

Grounding decisions on existing evidence is necessary, but not sufficient. It will also be essential to ask people—students, families, teachers, school leaders—what their experience has been and what new educational practices they hope will continue post pandemic. The Just Ask Us Movement in the U.S., for example, aims to discover and share at least a million student and family perspectives on how school systems should respond to the pandemic and its effects. Communities will certainly identify important strategies that fall outside the instructional core, such as essential collaboration between health and social protection services, that could be vital to developing a powered-up school. For example, Sierra Leone’s new “radical inclusion” policy aims to bring together health and banking services to help marginalized girls stay in school. Or in the U.S., where David Miyashiro, the superintendent of Cajon Valley, a school district with one of the highest populations of refugee students in California, has heard from parents that they need more help with child care and hence has established a new Extended Day Program .

While we focus in this report primarily on those innovations that support the interactions in the instructional core, we recognize that there will be a myriad of strategies needed to support marginalized children and bring a powered-up school to life. Ultimately, communities should have a view on what these strategies should be. Grounding decisions in the lived experience of the people at the center of education, especially students and teachers, is one of the central principles of designing for scale and will be an essential component of developing a powered-up school. When asked what her one piece of advice would be to heads of state today, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president of Liberia, said “Listen to your people, they may not be educated but they are knowledgeable.”

3. Harness e d ucation t echnology: Deploy education technology to power up schools long term in a way that meets the teaching and learning needs of students and educators; otherwise, technology risks becoming a costly distraction.

Leveraging technology to help with educational continuity is a topic front and center in schools around the world. Countries are using whatever they have at their disposal—from radios to televisions to computers to mobile phones. For many families, accessing educational content through technology is not easy. For example, a nationally representative survey in Senegal conducted approximately three weeks after schools closed found that children were far more likely to continue their education through work assigned by their parents than accessed through any technology. Less than 11 percent of survey respondents said students accessed educational material using either radio, television, or web-based resources. 4

This is not necessarily surprising given education’s past record of using technology to support learning. Indeed, while there has been the expectation that ed tech would radically transform teaching and learning, the impact of ed-tech interventions on student learning has been mostly disappointing. 5 But, as put forth in “ Realizing the promise: How can education technology improve learning for all? ,” this is most likely because most ed-tech interventions have paid limited attention to the instructional core. However, when we consider rigorous evidence on the comparative advantages of technology vis-a-vis traditional instruction, we find that ed tech can help improve learning by supporting the crucial interactions in the instructional core through: (1) scaling up quality instruction (by, for example, prerecorded lessons of high-quality teaching); (2) facilitating differentiated instruction (through, for example, computer-adaptive learning or live one-on-one tutoring); (3) expanding opportunities for student practice; and (4) increasing student engagement (through, for example, videos and games).

While we envision powered-up schools after COVID-19 using technology in these four ways to improve learning, we emphasize the need to support educators to embrace the comparative advantages of technology. Without involving and supporting educators in innovation, efforts will not be sustainable over time. Indeed, throughout the global school closures, we have seen the heroic efforts of educators, many of whom are in poor communities with limited ed-tech resources, and yet have innovated to continue engaging students in learning. For example, from Chile to the United Kingdom, we have seen teachers coming together to rapidly lend their expertise to develop relevant remote-learning content for students. In Chile, a network of teachers came together to develop a series of 30-minute radio lessons for secondary students who had no access to online learning. The initiative, which the teachers dubbed La Radio Enseña , is supported by the civil society organization Enseña Chile, and the radio lessons went from being distributed by a handful of radio stations to over 240 only one month after schools closed. Similarly in the U.K., a group of teachers worried about learning continuity for their students when schools were about to close, developed within two weeks an online classroom and resource hub to help educators and parents help their children learn. As of the end of July, users accessed lessons 17 million times and this initiative, called Oak National Academy, has been a significant feature of the government’s remote learning strategy.

Listening to educators as technology is deployed for learning and responding to their concerns with real-time iteration is also essential in helping make ed-tech rollouts successful. In response to the school closures, Peru’s ministry of education embarked on an ambitious national-scale remote-learning strategy called Aprendo en Casa using multiple channels—television, radio, and online resources. Curriculum-aligned lessons were recorded, and, to make the content engaging, the ministry hired actors to serve as content facilitators. After the initial rollout, the government requested feedback from school leaders, teachers, and parents, which led to the inclusion of a teacher and a student in each lesson. Additionally, reporting requirements of teachers were initially quite onerous leading to overburdening already stretched teachers and were adapted to a more manageable streamlined approach. Feedback from users was solicited regularly, not only on usage (which was reported to be as high as 74 percent among students), but also on quality (59 percent of parents reported being satisfied with the program). In addition, over 90 percent of teachers reported having been in regular communication with principals and students. 6 Interestingly, a very recent study confirms that teachers’ sense of success was higher in school systems that had strong remote working conditions, including communication, training, collaboration, fair expectations, and recognition of their efforts.

These examples are just a few of the education technology experiments underway during the pandemic. Some rely on good internet and connectivity, and the OECD and HundrED have curated a list of online learning resources for schools. Others utilize offline technology or basic cellphones to facilitate learning for those less-resourced communities. Ultimately, the evidence is clear that there is no single “ed-tech” initiative that will achieve the same results everywhere because school systems vary in multiple ways. However, after COVID-19, one thing is certain: School systems that are best prepared to use education technology effectively will be better positioned to continue offering quality education in the face of school closures. Learning about those strategies that have emerged due to the closures and that have forced school leaders, educators, parents, and students to engage with technology in new and productive way will be important for developing powered-up schools in the long term. One such strategy is how technology, often through low-tech texts and phone calls, has helped engage parents in a whole new way, which is where we turn to next.

4. Parent e ngagement: Forge stronger, more trusting relationships between parents and teachers.

Rarely is the topic of parent engagement at the top of the “to do” list for education administrators and educators whose days are filled with numerous decisions—from bell schedules to safety to lesson plans—around how to deliver education to children. In the recent OECD-Harvard survey of educators and education administrators across 59 countries on school reopening strategies, three-quarters of the respondents stated that the reopening plans were developed collaboratively with teachers, but only 25 percent said that collaboration included parents as well.

This limited engagement with parents and families should come as no surprise given that before the COVID-19 pandemic, the topic of parent engagement occupied a relatively marginal place in the education discussions. Practitioners working with schools and families to build strong parent-teacher relationships frequently point out that strategies for community outreach and collaboration are frequently missing in teacher preparation programs and are given short shrift in professional development courses for administrators. Additionally, researchers are much more likely to focus their study on school-based factors such as curriculum development or assessment policies. In a recent search of the Education Resources Information Center database, which has close to 20 years of articles, the citation “teachers” was used almost four times the amount that the citation “parents” was used.

But the coronavirus pandemic has put the topic of engagement with parents and families at the center of today’s education debates, and education leaders across the globe are finding out just what powerful allies parents can be in their children’s learning—including parents from the most marginalized communities. From Asia to Africa to North America, examples are emerging of new ways of partnering with parents and families that provide real promise for supporting children’s learning in and out of school over the long term.

For example, creative mechanisms for real-time guidance to parents on their children’s education are popping up around the globe using the low-tech but, in many places, ubiquitous ability to make a phone call. In Argentina, the government of the State of Buenos Aires developed a call-in center staffed by the Ministry of Education to provide real-time information and guidance to any parent with concerns or information requests about their children’s education during the pandemic. In the first five months, over 100,000 calls were received. 7 In some places, civil society organizations are collaborating to provide this type of live, real-time support to parents. In the U.S. for example, the Pittsburgh Learning Collaborative, a coalition of over 50 local organizations serving families and children, has created a family hotline to help provide parents and families with guidance and resources to assist with their children’s learning. In its first month, the hotline received 1,000 calls.

Mobile phones have also helped parents directly facilitate their children’s learning in India. In Himachal Pradesh, a state of almost 7 million people, the government is using a multilayered approach to remote learning that engages parents in a new way. In response to pandemic-related school closures, in April the government launched the Har Ghar Pathshala initiative. The initiative developed thousands of videos and digital worksheets and then deployed 48,000 teachers to connect to all parents in the state through WhatsApp. The goal was to develop a clear understanding among parents of the materials children should be accessing, including taking a weekly WhatsApp assessment that would come to their phones. Students themselves are unlikely to have electronic devices and a family phone—the main avenue for accessing online learning—so the materials are shared between parents and the children in the household. Over 92 percent of parents engaged with teachers through “ePTMs,” electronic Parent Teacher Meetings, and ultimately 70-80 percent of students in the state have engaged with the digital materials and 50 percent of students are taking the WhatsApp assessments. 8

Perhaps the most significant part of the government’s strategy, and the component that holds the most promise for powering up schools long term, has been building a relationship between students’ caregivers and their teachers and schools. 9 “Until now, in India we have not been able to establish the parent-to-teacher connection for first-generation learners at scale,” said Prachi Windlass, director of India Programs at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. “The pandemic has brought to light how parents of first-generation learners can—and now clearly do—help with their children’s learning.” 10 Parents themselves are eager to continue being allies in their children’s learning, with 88 percent of parents saying they would like to attend future ePTMs.

It is not only the government that is realizing what is possible when they invite parents and families into the teaching and learning process. Civil society organizations such as Pratham pivoted during school closures to engage directly with parents and families on children’s learning by using a combination of daily WhatsApp or text messages and weekly phone calls. “While we are further away physically, we have gotten closer,” says Samyukta Subramanian, a Pratham team lead and former CUE Echidna Global Scholar . The text messages provide activities to keep children engaged in learning and can include fun and interactive activities such as asking children to count how many teeth their parents have or how many buckets of water their family uses and text the answers back. The Pratham staff members call each family once a week to see how the activities are going, and by June they were sending over 100,000 text messages and reaching parents in over 12,000 rural communities. Noting that this approach to engaging parents is something they hope to continue after schools reopen, the Pratham Education Foundation CEO Rukmini Banerji says she hopes “there is a celebration for parents when children return to school to recognize all that they have done to continue their children’s learning and to give parents the confidence to stay engaged.”

The Ministry of Basic Education of Botswana has also learned the power of harnessing mobile phone technology to partner with parents and boost children’s learning. Prior to the school closures, the Ministry had been working closely with a coalition of partners to scale up an approach to teaching numeracy that involved interactive teaching methods geared to students’ learning levels rather than their grade. This Teaching at the Right Level initiative brings together a range of partners, including a Botswanan nonprofit called Young 1ove working with the government and university partners to implement and evaluate the approach, and the Real-Time Scaling Lab team at Brookings to help guide and document the scaling process.

During the closures, Young 1ove worked with the government to rapidly pivot from working with teachers to deliver numeracy lessons to working with parents . They reached out to over 7,000 parents and invited them to take part in remote learning during school closures—60 percent of whom accepted the invitation. While they tested several approaches, the most successful included a weekly math problem sent to parents by text message and followed up with a weekly 15-20 minute phone call. On the phone call, Young 1ove facilitators would ask parents to get their child and put the phone on speaker so they could ask if they had seen the math problem and then discuss it. A rapid and rigorous evaluation of the intervention , which included a control group, showed startling results. For the children whose parents received text messages and phone calls from Young 1ove, the drop in innumeracy levels was 52 percent . Clearly, when invited in as partners to their children’s learning, parents in Botswana also showed how powerful their partnership can be for children’s schooling.

While likely surprising to many, these examples of the capability of low-income or marginalized parents and families to be powerful allies in support of their children’s learning aligns with existing evidence on effective parent engagement and will come as no surprise to the select group of practitioners, researchers, and advocates working on this issue around the globe. In the U.S., for example, several decades of research have shown that parents, especially for low-income students, have a positive influence on student academic achievement largely through equipping parents to support their children’s learning at home. Rigorous evaluations in Ghana and the U.K. also demonstrate this. 11

When a respectful relationship among parents, teachers, families, and schools is at the center of engagement activities, powerful support to children’s learning can occur. A thread running across the above examples is schools inviting families to be allies in their children’s learning by using easy-to-understand information communicated through mechanisms that adapt to parents’ schedules and that provide parents with an active but feasible role. The nature of the invitation and the relationship is what is so essential to bringing parents on board.

Getting this relationship right is no easy task, and there are many dimensions to parental involvement in their children’s schooling, which can also reflect tension and power dynamics active in society writ large. 12 Schools and teachers can find it difficult to navigate the range of expectations, many of them conflicting. At times, engaging parents does not always lead to desirable outcomes for children’s learning. For example, a randomized control trial using longitudinal data in Ghana’s preschools found marked improvement in student outcomes that were sustained over several years in schools that received a yearlong teacher training and coaching program aimed at making classrooms more student-centered. The program incorporated play-based learning approaches and influenced the instructional core by improving teacher-child interactions. 13 But this improvement was only seen when the busy working-class parents of the students were not informed about the shift in the teaching approach. In the schools where the teacher training was paired with discussion sessions with parents about the purpose of the training and what the new teaching methods entailed, the opposite happened. The parent awareness sessions counteracted any of the benefits of the teacher training, and the children’s outcomes were worse than those in the control group. Ultimately, the parents who took part in the information sessions had a cooling effect on the teachers, leading them to stop using many of the techniques learned in the training. The researchers posited that rather than building support for the new pedagogical approach, the information sessions, which were infrequent and passive, raised concern among parents that the teaching was becoming less rigorous. This phenomena is not unique to Ghana. Through our own Brookings research initiative on parents and education, we have found stories of this parental cooling effect in interviews with educators and education leaders across 50 countries.

Ultimately, the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to forge stronger, more trusting relationships between parents and teachers. It is an opportunity for parents and families to gain insight into the skill that is involved in teaching and for teachers and schools to realize what powerful allies parents can be. Parents around the world are not interested in becoming their child’s teacher, but they are, based on several large-scale surveys , asking to be engaged in a different more active way in the future. Perhaps the most important insight for supporting a powered-up school is challenging the mindset of those in the education sector that parents and families with the least opportunities are not capable or willing to help their children learn.

5. An i terative a pproach: Embrace the principles of improvement science required to evaluate, course correct, document, and scale new approaches that can help power up schools over time.

As we have seen above, there are some promising new approaches that have the potential to enable a broader learning ecosystem to support children’s schooling. However, in most countries around the world, there is a long road to travel before we fully understand how to leverage technology or transform parent engagement to realize a powered-up school for each community. The speed and depth of change mean that it will be essential to take an iterative approach to learning what works, for whom, and under what enabling conditions. In other words, this is a moment to employ the principles of improvement science . Traditional research methods will need to be complemented by real-time documentation, reflection, quick feedback loops, and course correction. Rapid sharing of early insights and testing of potential change ideas will need to come alongside the longer-term rigorous reviews. CUE’s own work on system transformation and scaling change in education provides one possible model for doing just this. Through our Real-Time Scaling Labs , teams of practice-oriented researchers are working to scale and sustain transformative change in education systems. These teams learn, document, and share emerging insights in rapid, iterative cycles making sure peers across the different components of an education system are included in the process and that failures, one of the most valuable insights, are documented alongside successes.

A key principle underlying the Real-time Scaling Labs is that scaling is an iterative process that requires ongoing adaptation based on new data and changes in the broader environment. The disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has indeed brought this reality front and center. In the Real-time Scaling Labs, two categories of adaptation have emerged: (1) adaptations and simplifications to the model being scaled itself and (2) adaptations and adjustments to the scaling approach and strategy. While both are critical to scaling, adapting the scaling strategy is especially challenging, requiring not only timely data, a thorough understanding of the context, and space for reflection, but also willingness and capacity to act on this learning and make changes accordingly.

Conclusion: Having a vision of the change we want to see matters and can help guide discussion, debate, and—ultimately—action.

We acknowledge that emerging from this global pandemic with a stronger public education system is an ambitious vision, and one that will require both financial and human resources. But we argue that articulating such a vision is essential, and that amid the myriad of decisions education leaders are making every day, it can guide the future. With the dire consequences of the pandemic hitting the most vulnerable young people the hardest, it is tempting to revert to a global education narrative that privileges access to school above all else. This, however, would be a mistake. There are enough examples of education innovations that provide access to relevant learning for those in and out of a school building to set our sights higher. A powered-up public school in every community is what the world’s children deserve, and indeed is possible if all stakeholders can collectively work together to harness the opportunities presented by this crisis to truly leapfrog education forward.

Note: The authors are grateful to Brian Fowler for his valuable research assistance in preparing this paper.

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• Fernando M. Reimers and Andrews Schleicher. “Schooling disrupted, schooling rethought: How the Covid-19 pandemic is changing education” OECD, 2020. p.7.
• See Chetty et al. 2005; Chetty, 2014; Rivkin et al., 2005.
• Cohen and Ball, who originated the idea of the instructional core, used the terms teachers, students, and content.  The OECD’s initiative on Innovative Learning Environments later adapted the framework using the terms educators, learners, and resources to represent educational materials and adding a new element of content to represent the choices around skills and competencies and how to assess them. Here we have pulled from elements that we like of both framework using the term instructional core as the relationships between educators, learners, and content and adding parents. 
•  Le Nestour, A., L. Moscoviz, and S. Mbaye. “Phone survey on the Covid crisis in Senegal.” Center for Global Development, 2020. https://www. cgdev. org/blog/five-findings-new-phonesurvey-senegal.
• See Bulman & Fairlie, 2016; Escueta, Nickow, Oreopoulos, & Quan, forthcoming; Tauson & Stannard, 2018.
• See Alberto Munoz-Najar L. “Peru: Aprendo en Casa (I Learn at Home).”
• Personal Communication, Gabriel Sanchez Zinny, May 26, 2020.
• “Parent Engagement: Himachal Pradesh.” Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, Internal report: unpublished, 2020.
• “Large Scale Assessments Common Report.” Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. Internal report: unpublished, 2020.
• Personal Communication, Prachi Jain Windlass, August 28, 2020.
• See for example, Henderson, A. and Mapp, K., “A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School, Family, and Community Connections on Student Achievement.“ National Center for Family and Community Connections with Schools, 2002.; http://www.columbia.edu/~psb2101/BergmanSubmission.pdf. 
• See for example https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/insight4.pdf and https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/nyregion/school-integration-progressives.html?action=click&auth=login-email&login=email&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article. 
• Wolf, Sharon. “Year 3 follow-up of the ‘Quality Preschool for Ghana: interventions on child development.” Developmental Psychology 55.12 (2019): 2587.

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Editorial article, editorial: charting our new path in education in a post-pandemic world.

• 1 Touro University Graduate School of Education, New York, NY, United States
• 2 Teacher Education Department, Weber State University, Ogden, UT, United States

Editorial on the Research Topic Charting our new path in education in a post-pandemic world

In the spring of 2020, and COVID-19 reached pandemic status, the entire education community was forced into an unplanned online learning experiment. With the sudden closure of schools and move to remote instruction and virtual learning with little adjustment, teachers, administrators, and students suddenly found themselves in uncharted territory. Education reporter Mangrum (2020) noted “The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated a lot of problems facing public schools—but it didn't create most of them. Most of the inequities existed long before the pandemic. The only difference is who was affected and who was paying attention.” UNESCO reported that the pandemic has caused educational disruption and school closures for over 1.2 billion students ( Giannini and Brandolino, 2020 ). The effects of this educational disruption are just beginning to be measured and will likely have ripple effects for years to come.

To address this unprecedented, rapid change in education, a Research Topic to inform the broader international educational community was opened for articles related to the conditions and shifts in classrooms related to assessment, standards of education, gaps in learning, innovative approaches to learning, and support of emerging alternative methods of learning. A total of 15 manuscripts were received and assessed for inclusion based on their relevance to the educational challenges during the COVID-19 time period. To help educators make their way in the new challenges of pandemic-disrupted education, we sought articles to illuminate innovative, collaborative, ethical, and effective educational practices in virtual and hybrid teaching contexts. Twelve manuscripts were accepted.

We identified four broad categories of manuscripts from those received: Impact on instructors, impact on student's knowledge and skills, impact on teaching practices, and focus on administrative practices.

Impact on instructors

Besides missing the human connection and contact with students, instructors experienced fatigue with using new technology to teach virtually and asynchronously. They also experienced frustrations related to the factors that stood between them and their ability to support their student's social-emotional growth and wellness as a result of the pandemic. Regardless of these barriers, they also found creative ways to connect with students, extend instruction, and solve problems. Sahito et al. addressed the perception of university teachers about online teaching during COVID-19, the challenges, issues, and problems faced by university teachers and how to cope to overcome the issues, challenges, and problems posed by the pandemic. Zara et al. explored the concept of pedagogical resilience in Thailand and the Philippines concerning teachers' personal, professional, and social attitudes toward teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study highlights the resilience, the mental resistance to difficulties and stresses that teachers exhibited as they planned for how they would respond to the pandemic and both navigate and survive the challenges. Woltran et al. evaluated the perception of Austrian elementary school teachers when distance teaching and the challenges they faced due to COVID-19 that included a lack of personal contact with students; additional workload and more stress, a lack of technical equipment and digital skills; and an inability to offer individual support for students at risk. Finally Sokal and Parmigiani used a newly developed set of global competence rubrics to explore the relationships between 115 teacher candidates' global competence, demographic variables, and programmatic variables within their teacher education program. The restrictions on travel necessitated by the pandemic do not prevent virtual exchanges, and this study illuminates the many online project-based learning activities that allowed teachers to facilitate intercultural collaborative projects and school-based global consciousness learning opportunities. These are noted for their capacity to develop empathy, co-operation, negotiation, leadership, and social awareness.

Impact on students

The impacts on students' knowledge and skills caused by the pandemic include academic, behavioral, and emotional areas in university and K-12 settings. Garrad and Page conducted research on student perceptions of learning of an online postgraduate degree course where the authors examined the impact of the design restructure on student perceptions of learning within the course. Classroom expectations remain integral to positive learning environments, whether virtual or in person. Croce and Salter outlined the importance of teaching classroom expectations and provided four factors to consider in virtual settings to help children transition into brick-and-mortar environments.

Impact on teaching practices

Perspectives and pedagogical methods that influence teaching practices shifted and evolved as a result of the pandemic. Cobo-Rendón et al. gave six recommendations for implementation to ensure blended learning improves teaching practices. Rissanen et al. analyzed the impact of growth mindset pedagogy on the teacher's pedagogical thinking and practices in Finland. They found significant differences between fixed-mindset and growth-mindset teachers. Those teachers who utilized growth mindsets produced deep reflections in ways to use these tools to support students' emotion regulation and generate ideas about how to normalize hardship in learning in unique and useful ways. Notably, GMP offered them tools for working particularly with students whom they had learned to identify as suffering from motivational and emotional problems related to a fixed mindset. Anderson et al. focused attention on two aspects of teacher support and development: creativity and wellbeing and how these are especially important in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the secondary traumatic stress that teachers inevitably experienced. After engaging in online professional development, teachers' creative agency in the classroom increased, replicating some of the results from a pre-pandemic study ( Anderson et al. ). Campillo-Ferrer and Miralles-Martínez examined teachers' development of low-order cognitive skills with content and language integrated learning in Spain. They analyzed three individual cognitive categories used to foster student's understanding of content in both public and private schools in foreign language and content acquisition in non-language areas. They provided teachers perceptions of the daily challenges making adjustments with space, time and materials available.

Impacts on administration

Administrative focus and practices underwent changes as a result of challenges in the post pandemic world. Facing an administrative audit for an academic program is challenging even under normal circumstances. Kline reviewed the challenges posed by pandemic requirements forcing creation of online meetings for participating partners in local and remote areas to facilitate the academic review process. Kline also discussed utilization of online tools for gathering of data needed during the review process. Administrative implications for instructional practices in delivery options for graduate students in master's programs also include implications for evolving policy requirements. Another administrative strategy that emerged during the pandemic was reported by Elfarargy et al. To meet the need of training faculty, use of virtual learning was necessitated during the pandemic. Texas mandated face-to-face training expanded to virtual training to allow for equity and convenience.

As we chart a course forward post pandemic, there are many aspects of education to reconsider. As a result, this is an ideal opportunity to pause, reflect on the lessons learned during this health crisis and work together in partnerships between K-12 schools and teacher preparation programs to collaboratively determine the path ahead. As we collectively consider ways to improve, the researchers in this special issue have provided studies to push our thinking on a number of topics that impact students, teachers, administrators, and pedagogical approaches. Now is the time to reconsider and revise our teaching methods and strategies, our pathways for both teacher and student recruitment, retention and incentive practices, assessment, and accreditation approaches. Citing a Rand study conducted in January of 2021, Zamarro et al. suggested that teachers' levels of stress and burnout have reached all-time highs starting during the pandemic, but are still continuing. “In March 2021, 42% of teachers declared they had considered leaving or retiring from their current position during the last year. Of these, slightly more than half say it was because of COVID-19” ( Zamarro et al., 2022 ). As alarms now sound suggesting there is no end to the steep increases in teacher turnover and growing teacher shortages it is imperative that we consider what opportunities can be found amidst these new challenges for the next phase.

Author contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

Acknowledgments

We want to thank the researchers who submitted to this Research Topic. The impact of the pandemic on education has provided numerous topics, challenges, and solutions to help inform educators around the World.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Giannini, S., and Brandolino, J. (2020). COVID-19–Education Is the Bedrock of a Just Society in the Post-COVID World. UNESCO . Available online at: https://www.unodc.org/dohadeclaration/en/news/2020/05/covid-19-education-is-the-bedrock-of-a-just-society-in-the-post-covid-world.htm

Google Scholar

Mangrum, M. (2020, December 8). Twitter .

Zamarro, G., Camp, A., Fuchsman, D., and McGee, J. B. (2022). Understanding How COVID-19 Has Changed Teachers' Chances of Remaining in the Classroom. Education Reform Faculty and Graduate Students Publications. Available online at: https://scholarworks.uark.edu/edrepub/132/

Keywords: teacher education, educational leadership, pedagogy, COVID-19, ethical responsibilities

Citation: Dacey CM, Dawson S and Napper VS (2023) Editorial: Charting our new path in education in a post-pandemic world. Front. Educ. 7:1110617. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2022.1110617

Received: 29 November 2022; Accepted: 28 December 2022; Published: 06 January 2023.

Edited and reviewed by: Stefinee Pinnegar , Brigham Young University, United States

Copyright © 2023 Dacey, Dawson and Napper. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

This article is part of the Research Topic

Charting our New Path in Education in a Post-Pandemic World

Reinventing Education Post-Pandemic

On December 16, 2021, we hosted a talk by Professor Justin Reich. Professor Reich discussed his research on how the experiences of students and teachers during pandemic schooling are vital to educational recovery and building back better.

Capturing the Perspectives of Teachers and Students 

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, conversations focused on high-level questions about how the pandemic would disrupt education: Will schools stay open, and if so, under what conditions? How will the pandemic impact standardized test performance? However, Professor Justin Reich argues that when researchers simply focus on these two questions, they fail to consider a vital part of education: the day-to-day experiences of the teachers and students in the classroom. 

In the spring of 2021, Reich and his team conducted three research exercises to understand these experiences: 

• They invited 200 teachers to interview their students about the past year and share their findings (the instructions are available at http://bit.ly/imaginingseptember2021 ). 
• They interviewed 50 classroom teachers. 
• They conducted ten multistakeholder design charrettes with students, teachers, school leaders, and family members. 

The spring 2021 research builds on research from Summer 2020, which had focused on understanding the initial school closures and pivots to remote learning in Spring 2020 and working with school communities to design a better experience for Fall 2020. 

Disparate Impacts

Experts in online instruction will attest that high-quality remote learning looks quite different from traditional classroom learning. However, the quick pivot in Spring 2020 and ongoing lack of resources and training for teachers meant that in most cases, pandemic-era remote K-12 education mirrored traditional classroom education. Class time was moved to a video conferencing platform and materials were shared via digital Learning Management Systems rather than on paper, attempting to replicate in-person teaching rather than reshaping the learning experiences to take advantage of the affordances of remote learning while minimizing the drawbacks. Individual teachers also adopted discipline-specific tools that served functions such as collaboration, asynchronous content delivery, and practice. The abundance of tools led to an overwhelming number of logins and platforms for students and parents to manage until schools began to coordinate platforms centrally.   

The remote student experience varied widely, and their academic and social experiences were not necessarily correlated. For example, some students with special needs struggled because they were cut off from needed special education resources, whereas others thrived in an environment with fewer distractions and more control over how they learn. Students shared that they did better academically without their friends around to distract them, but noted that they then struggled to reacclimate themselves to the social environment of the classroom. Other factors like access to broadband, relationships with family, and bullying and racism experienced at school also shaped student experiences of remote schooling. 

For teachers, the experience was almost always exhausting and often demoralizing. Despite making recommendations to administrators and policy-makers, teachers often felt ignored when decisions were made. At the same time, teachers demonstrated tremendous resilience and capacity for innovation, developing new teaching strategies and adapting quickly to ensure their students’ needs were met. 

Hopes for the Future

Reich presented three potential trajectories for post-pandemic education: a return to the status quo, a focus on remediating learning loss, or an organized effort to reinvent education to be more humane. Early efforts to return to the status quo are already demonstrating the problems with doing so, as schools struggle with understaffing and a rise in fighting among stressed students. Remediation, meanwhile, is popular among policymakers but does not resonate at the classroom level. As a deficit-oriented approach, remediation fails to recognize that while certain learning goals were not achieved, students demonstrated incredible resilience and learned a lot from the experience. The third approach, a humane reinvention, builds on the strengths that students and teachers alike have demonstrated.  Though Reich favors this third approach, he recognizes that there are many barriers to change. 

Interviews with teachers have reinforced the idea that teachers are capable of innovation, but the pandemic has left many too exhausted to take on new initiatives. Initiatives can be enjoyable and energizing when teachers are actively involved in shaping change that they believe will benefit them and their students. However, it will be hard to create such a productive environment unless teachers feel supported and trusted by administrators, policymakers, and communities. Another problem is that most of the United States relies on public schools to provide necessary social services for children. While schools have done their best to keep students safe, healthy, and fed, doing social services work can take time and resources away from their core mission of teaching and learning. 

To overcome these barriers as society recovers from the pandemic, Reich supports the idea of “strategic subtraction” in which old practices are “hospiced” to make room for new initiatives. Some changes, like abolishing rules that do more to police student bodies and behaviors than to improve learning, are relatively straightforward. Students who have gotten used to an at-home learning environment and the associated autonomy are quick to point out that they can learn just as effectively while wearing a hoodie or enjoying a snack. Other changes, like remedying long-standing inequities in how schools access resources, will be more challenging. 

Takeaways for Higher Education 

Though his research focused on K-12 schools, Reich notes that it has several implications for higher education. Some of Reich’s findings parallel those seen at MIT and other universities. The loss of a year or more of socialization may impact an elementary school student differently than a college student, but both are returning to the classroom with new social challenges. Loneliness, isolation, and social anxiety have become common, and readjusting to social norms takes time. 

Most importantly, K-12 schools shape the students who will become undergraduates. Incoming first-year students will have weathered a broad spectrum of pandemic-era educational experiences. Rather than focusing on filling gaps in these students’ knowledge, colleges would be wise to appreciate the strengths these students will bring to campus: their resilience, their capacity for self-regulated learning, and their hard work to make the best of an incredibly challenging situation. 

Further Reading 

All reports can be found at: tsl.mit.edu/covid19 , including the specific reports discussed in the talk: 

• Healing Community and Humanity
• The Teachers Have Something to Say

About the Speaker

Justin Reich is an associate professor of digital media in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department at MIT and the director of the Teaching Systems Lab. He is the author of Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, and the host of the TeachLab Podcast . He earned his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and was the Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow. He is a past Fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society. His writings have been published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other scholarly journals and public venues. He started his career as a high school history teacher, and coach of wrestling and outdoor adventure activities. Follow Justin on Twitter or Google Scholar .

Written by Kate Weishaar

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6 things we've learned about how the pandemic disrupted learning

Cory Turner

How did the pandemic disrupt learning for America's more than 50 million K-12 students?

For two years, that question has felt immeasurable, like a phantom, though few educators doubted the shadow it cast over children who spent months struggling to learn online.

Now, as a third pandemic school year draws to a close, new research offers the clearest accounting yet of the crisis's academic toll — as well as reason to hope that schools can help.

1. Surprise! Students learned less when they were remote

But really, this should surprise no one.

Most schools had little to no experience with remote instruction when the pandemic began; they lacked teacher training, appropriate software, laptops, universal internet access and, in many cases, students lacked stability and a supportive adult at home to help.

Even students who spent the least amount of time learning remotely during the 2020-21 school year — just a month or less — missed the equivalent of seven to 10 weeks of math learning, says Thomas Kane of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.

Much of that missed learning, Kane says, was likely a hangover from spring 2020, when nearly all schools were remote and remote instruction was at its worst.

Kane is part of a collaborative of researchers at Harvard, the American Institutes for Research, Dartmouth College and the school-testing nonprofit NWEA, who set out to measure just how much learning students missed during the pandemic.

And notice we're saying "missed," not "lost," because the problem is that when schools went remote, kids simply did not learn as much or as well as they would have in person.

" We try not to say 'learning loss,' because if they didn't learn it, they didn't lose it," explains Ebony Lee, an assistant superintendent in Clayton County, Ga.

Not everyone agrees. Some parents who saw their kids struggle while trying to learn remotely believe "learning loss" fits — because it captures the urgency they now feel to make up for what was lost.

"It would mean so much for parents if somebody would acknowledge it. 'You know, we have learning loss,' " says Sheila Walker, a parent in Northern California. "Like our board, they don't even use those words. We know we have learning loss, so how are we going to address it?"

Kane and his fellow researchers studied the test scores of more than 2 million elementary- and middle-schoolers, comparing the growth they made between fall 2017 and fall 2019 to their pandemic-era growth, from fall 2019 to fall 2021.

Though researchers focused on math, the instructional time students missed in reading was "comparable," Kane says.

One quick caveat: Obviously, test scores can tell us only so much about what students actually learn in a given year (social-emotional skills, for example, are harder to measure). But they're a start.

2. Students at high-poverty schools were hit hardest

Students at high-poverty schools experienced an academic double-whammy: Their schools were more likely to be remote and, when they were, students missed more learning.

The Coronavirus Crisis

How schools can help kids heal after a year of 'crisis and uncertainty'.

Let's break that down.

First, high-poverty schools spent about 5.5 more weeks in remote instruction during the 2020-21 school year than low- and mid-poverty schools, the report says. Researchers also found a "higher incidence of remote schooling for Black and Hispanic students."

And second, in high-poverty schools that stayed remote for the majority of the 2020-21 school year, students missed the equivalent of 22 weeks of in-person math learning.

That's more than half of a traditional school year (roughly 36-40 weeks).

By contrast, students in similarly remote, low-poverty schools missed considerably less learning: roughly 13 weeks, Kane says, and he warns that closing these gaps could take years.

Homeless Families Struggle With Impossible Choices As School Closures Continue

This new data backs up what many teachers and school leaders have been saying.

"It's very disconcerting," says Sharon Contreras, the superintendent of North Carolina's third-largest district, in Guilford County. "Because we know that the students who are most vulnerable saw the most amount of learning loss, and they were already behind."

Why did students in high-poverty schools miss more learning while remote? Recent U.S. Government Accountability Office surveys of more than 2,800 teachers offer some explanations.

Teachers in remote, high-poverty schools were more likely to report that their students lacked a workspace and internet at home, and were less likely to have an adult there to help. Many older students disengaged because the pandemic forced them to become caretakers, or to get jobs.

Making matters worse, as NPR has reported, high-poverty students were also more likely to experience food insecurity , homelessness and the loss of a loved one to COVID-19.

"These gaps are not new," says Becky Pringle, head of the National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest teachers union. "We know that there are racial and social and economic injustices that exist in every system ... what the pandemic did was just like the pandemic did with everything: It just made it worse."

3. Different states saw different gaps

Kane and his fellow researchers found that learning gaps were most pronounced in states with higher rates of remote instruction overall.

For example, in the quarter of states where students spent the most time learning remotely, including California, Illinois, Kentucky and Virginia, "high-poverty schools spent an additional nine weeks in remote instruction (more than two months) than low-poverty schools," the report says.

On the other hand, in the quarter of states where overall use of remote instruction was the lowest, including Texas, Florida and a host of rural states, the report says, high-poverty schools were still more likely to be remote "but the differences were small: 3 weeks remote in high poverty schools versus 1 week remote in low poverty schools."

The report says, "as long as schools were in-person throughout 2020-21, there was no widening of math achievement gaps between high-, middle-, and low-poverty schools."

Kane says he hopes that, instead of relitigating districts' choices to stay remote, politicians and educators can use this data as a call to action.

"That student achievement declined is not a surprise," Kane says. "Rather, we should think of it as a bill for a public health measure that was taken on our behalf. And it's our obligation now, whether or not we agreed with those decisions, to pay that bill. We can't stiff our children."

4. High school graduation rates didn't change much

One more study , from Brookings, looks at the impact all this pandemic-driven turmoil had on high school graduation and college entry rates.

It turns out, for the 2019-20 school year, when graduation ceremonies were canceled and students ended the year at home, high school graduation rates actually increased slightly.

"The message clearly was 'just show up,' " says Douglas Harris, the study's lead researcher and director of the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice at Tulane University.

"So it became pretty easy," Harris says. "Anybody who was on the margin of graduating at that point was going to graduate because the states officially relaxed their standards."

For the 2020-21 school year, Harris says, states and school districts largely returned to pre-pandemic standards and, as a result, the high school graduation rate dipped slightly.

College enrollment plummeted during the pandemic. This fall, it's even worse

5. many high school grads chose to delay college.

While the pandemic appeared to have little impact on students' ability to finish high school, it seemed to have the opposite effect on their willingness to start college.

Harris says entry rates for recent high school grads at four-year colleges dipped 6% and a worrying 16% at two-year colleges. Why?

Harris has a theory: "I think for anybody, regardless of age, starting something new, trying to develop new relationships in the pandemic, was a nonstarter."

6. Schools can do something about it

School leaders are now racing to build programs that, they hope, will help students make up for at least some of this missed learning. One popular approach: "high-dosage" tutoring.

Here's what schools are doing to try to address students' social-emotional needs

"For us, high-dosage means two to three times per week for at least 30 minutes, and ... no more than three students in a group," says Penny Schwinn, Tennessee's state education commissioner.

Schwinn led the creation of the TN ALL Corps, a sprawling, statewide network of tutors who, Schwinn hopes, can reach 150,000 elementary- and middle-schoolers over three years. High school students with busier schedules can access online tutoring anytime, on demand.

In Guilford County, Contreras says the benefits of their tutoring program go well beyond learning recovery. Their new tutoring corps draws heavily from graduate assistants at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a regional HBCU.

" We want to continue to grow the number of Black and brown teachers in the district," Contreras says. "So hiring graduate assistants was a very intentional effort to make sure our students saw themselves, but also to introduce those graduate assistants to the teaching profession."

Multiple superintendents, including Contreras, emphasized that the purpose of these tutoring efforts was not to look backward, over old material, but to support students as they move forward through new concepts.

"We don't want to remediate," Contreras says emphatically. "We want to accelerate learning."

Kane says districts should also consider making up for missed learning by adding more days to the school calendar .

"Schools already have the teachers. They already have the buildings. They already have the bus routes," Kane explains. Extending the school year may be logistically easier than, say, hiring and scheduling hundreds of new tutors.

But that doesn't mean extending the school year is easy.

In Los Angeles, where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho says he would love to expand the next school year by as many as 10 additional days to help address what he calls "unprecedented, historic learning loss." But, he says, "[that idea] ran into a lot of opposition" from parents and teachers alike.

So Carvalho has had to settle for four additional student learning days next year.

Kane acknowledges that adding time to the school year is asking a lot of teachers and some families and would likely require a pay bump above educators' normal weekly rate.

"Everybody is eager to return to normal. And I can appreciate that," Kane says, "but normal is not enough."

If there is a silver lining for districts rushing to create new learning opportunities, it's that many school leaders — and politicians — are realizing they make good sense long-term too.

In Los Angeles, Carvalho says many students attending high-poverty schools "were in crisis prior to COVID-19," academically speaking. And he hopes these new efforts, forced by the pandemic, "may actually catapult their learning experience."

Tennessee's ALL Corps "is now funded forever more," Schwinn says.

"So this isn't going to be a COVID recovery. This is just good practice for kids."

Futures of Education

• Research and knowledge
• New social contract
• Digital learning futures
• The Initiative 2019-2021
• National & local dialogues
• International advocacy

The Futures of Education

Our world is at a unique juncture in history, characterised by increasingly uncertain and complex trajectories shifting at an unprecedented speed. These sociological, ecological and technological trends are changing education systems, which need to adapt. Yet education has the most transformational potential to shape just and sustainable futures. UNESCO generates ideas, initiates public debate, and inspires research and action to renew education. This work aims to build a new social contract for education, grounded on principles of human rights, social justice, human dignity and cultural diversity. It unequivocally affirms education as a public endeavour and a common good.

No trend is destiny...Multiple alternative futures are possible... A new social contract for education needs to allow us to think differently about learning and the relationships between students, teachers, knowledge, and the world.

Our work is grounded in the principles of the 2021 report “Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education” and in the report’s call for action to consolidate global solidarity and international cooperation in education, as well as strengthen the global research agenda to reinforce our capacities to anticipate future change.

The report invites us to rebalance our relationship with:

• each other,
• the planet, and
• technology.

Summary of the Report

The international commission.

In 2019 UNESCO Director–General convened an independent International Commission to work under the leadership of the President of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, H.E. President Sahle-Work Zewde, and develop a global report on the Futures of Education. The commission was charged with carefully considering inputs received through the different consultation processes and ensuring that this collective intelligence was reflected in the global report and other knowledge products connected with the initiative.

Our thematic research priorities

Featured highlights.

Sustainable development challenges and the role of education

Our foresight work, looking towards 2050, envisions possible futures in which education shapes a better world. Our starting point is observation of the multiple, interlocking challenges the world currently faces and how to renew learning and knowledge to steer policies and practices along more sustainable pathways.The challenges are great. But there are reasons for optimism, no trend is destiny.

Our work responds to the call of the International Commission on the Futures of Education to guide a new research agenda for the futures of education. This research agenda is wide-ranging and multifaceted as a future-oriented, planet-wide learning process on our futures together. It draws from diverse forms of knowledge and perspectives, and from a conceptual framework that sees insights from diverse sources as complementary rather than exclusionary and adversarial.

Linking current trends and the report of the International Commission on the Futures of Education.

• The global population is projected to reach a peak at around 10.4 billion people during the 2080s , nearly double the global population of 1990 (5.3 billion)
• There will be an estimated  170 million displaced people by 2050 , equivalent to 2.3% of the global population
• Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to be home to some 1/3 of the global population  by 2050

"A new social contract for education requires renewed commitment to global collaboration in support of education as a common good, premised on more just and equitable cooperation among state and non-state actors. Beyond North-South flows of aid to education, the generation of knowledge and evidence through South-South and triangular cooperation must be strengthened."

• The number of persons aged 65 years or older worldwide is expected to double over the next three decades, reaching 1.6 billion in 2050 (16% of global population)

"Human longevity may also increase and perhaps with it, at least for some, the extension of the work period of life. If older people can remain active and engaged, they will enrich society and the economy through their skills and experience."

• Global temperatures are expected to increase  2.7 degrees by 2100 , leading to devastating global consequences
• Humans currently use as as many ecological resources as is we lived on 1.75 Earths

"The planet is in peril (...) Here children and youth already lead the way, calling for meaningful action and delivering a harsh rebuke to those who refuse to face the urgency of the situation. (...) One  of  the  best  strategies  to  prepare  for  green  economies  and  a  carbon-neutral  future  is  to  ensure  qualifications, programmes and curricula deliver ‘green skills’, be they for newly emerging occupations and sectors or for those sectors undergoing transformation for the low-carbon economy."

• Global freedom has been declining for more than 15 years  

"There has been a flourishing of increasingly active citizen participation and activism that is challenging discrimination and injustice worldwide (...) In educational content, methods and policy, we should promote active citizenship and democratic participation."

• There will be an estimated 380 million higher education students by 2030, up from roughly 220 million students were enrolled in formal post-secondary education in 2021

"Future policy agendas for higher education will need to embrace all levels of education and better account for non-traditional educational trajectories and pathways. Recognizing the interconnectedness of different levels and types of education, speaks to the need for a sector-wide, lifelong learning approach towards the future development of higher education."

• Less than 10% of school and universities have guidance on educational uses of AI

"The challenge of creating decent human-centered work is about to get much harder as Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation and structural transformations remake employment landscapes around the globe. At the same time, more people and communities are recognizing the value of care work and the multiple ways that economic security needs to be provisioned.”

• Fake news travel 6 times faster than true stories via Twitter - such disinformation undermines a shared perception of truth and reality

"Digital technologies, tools and platforms can be bent in the direction of supporting human rights, enhancing human capabilities, and facilitating collective action in the directions of peace, justice, and sustainability (...) A primary educational challenge is to equip people with tools for making sense of the oceans of information that are just a few swipes or keystrokes away."

• Employers anticipate a structural “labour market churn” (or disruption) of 23% of jobs in the next five years, resulting in a net decrease of 2% of current employment due to environmental, technological and economic trends.

"Underemployment, the inability to find work that matches one’s aspirations, skillset and capabilities, is a persistent and growing global problem, even among university graduates in many of the world’s wealthiest countries. This mismatch is combustible: social scientists have shown that a highly educated population unable to apply its skills and competencies in decent work, leads to discontent, agitation and sometime sparks political and civil strife... Learning must be relevant to the world of work. Young people need strong support upon educational completion to be integrated into labour markets and contribute to their communities and societies according to their potential."

• CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS: Global population in 2080s: 10.4 billion ( UNDESA  World Population Prospects, 2022) /Africa 1/3 population ( UNDESA  World Population Prospects, 2022)
• AGING POPULATIONS: 1.6 billion people over 65 in 2050 (UNDESA World Social Report , 2023)
• PLANETARY CRISIS: Humans use 1.75 Earths ( Global Footprint Network ) / Global temperatures to increase 2.7 degrees by 2100   ( UNFCCC  Synthesis Report, 2021)
• DEMOCRATIC BACKSLIDING: Global freedom has been declining for more than 15 years ( Freedom House  Freedom in the World report, 2023)

*  All figures correct as of 2023.

• TECHNOLOGY: Less that 10% of school and universities have guidance on educational uses of AI ( UNESCO study, 2023)
• DISINFORMATION: Fake news travel 6 times faster than true stories via Twitter ( MIT  study, 2018)
• UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF WORK: Net decrease of 2% of employment over next 5 years ( WEF  Futures of Work report, 2023) 
• CHANGING LIFELONG EDUCATION APPROACHES: 320 million students by 2030 ( World Bank  blog, 2022)

The third in a series of major visioning exercises for education

Reimagining our future together: a new social contract for education  is the third in a series of UNESCO-led once-a-generation foresight and visioning exercises, conducted at key moments of historical transition. 

In 1972, the  Learning to Be: the world of education today and tomorrow  report already warned of the risks of inequalities, and emphasized the need for the continued expansion of education, for education throughout life and for building a learning society.

This was followed by the 1996 Learning: The treasure within report that proposed an integrated vision of education around four pillars: learning to be, learning to know, learning to do, and learning to live together in a lifelong perspective.

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Educational damage caused by the pandemic will mean poorer GCSE results for pupils well into the 2030s

Without a raft of equalising policies, the damaging legacy from COVID-19 school closures will be felt by generations of pupils.

The educational damage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic will impact on children well into the 2030s, with generations of pupils set for the biggest declines in GCSE results for decades.

These are the devastating conclusions of a major new study from LSE, the University of Exeter and the University of Strathclyde. The report predicts that less than four in ten pupils in England in 2030 will achieve a grade 5 or above in English and Mathematics GCSEs – lower than the 45.3 per cent of pupils who achieved this benchmark in 2022/23.

The research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, is the first to chart how school closures during COVID-19 hindered children’s socio-emotional and cognitive skills at age 5, 11, and 14, and predict how these will impact on future GCSE prospects and later life outcomes.

Socio-emotional skills include the ability to engage in positive social interactions, regulate emotions and maintain attention. Cognitive skills are measured by how well children perform in academic tests, reflecting maths, reading and writing skills.

The research finds that socio-emotional skills are just as important as cognitive skills for young people’s GCSE results. For example, 20 per cent of the best performing pupils in cognitive tests at age 14 but who had average socio-emotional skills fail to go on to attain five good GCSEs including English and Maths. Teenagers with strong socio-emotional skills were much more likely to achieve basic GCSEs.

A gender divide in the importance of different skills emerges in the teenage years. For boys, cognitive skills at age 14 are twice as important as socio-emotional skills in determining future GCSE prospects; for girls the opposite is true, with socio-emotional skills 50 per cent more impactful than cognitive skills.

The analysis uses the latest econometric techniques to develop a model of skill formation, based on just under 19,000 pupils in the Millennium Cohort Study. This was applied to later pupil cohorts to predict how GCSE results will be impacted by disruption from school closures during the pandemic.

Alongside an overall fall in GCSE results, the model points to a significant widening in socio-economic inequalities in GCSE results. The researchers use these results to estimate that the UK’s relative income mobility levels will decline by 12-15 per cent for generations of pupils leaving school over the next decade, a significant drop by international standards.

An international review as part of the work concludes that COVID-19 amplified long-term persistent education gaps across a range of OECD countries including the UK. Compared with most other nations, England’s pandemic response was heavily focused on academic catch-up with less emphasis on socio-emotional skills, extracurricular support, and wellbeing.

The report “A generation at risk: Rebalancing education in the post-pandemic era” was produced by Lee Elliot Major, Professor of Social Mobility at the University of Exeter; Andy Eyles; Professor Steve Machin from the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics; and Esme Lillywhite from the University of Strathclyde. It proposes several low-cost policies with the potential to improve children’s outcomes, including:

• A national programme of trained undergraduate student tutors helping to boost the foundational skills of pupils, and enabling undergraduates to consider a career in teaching.
• Rebalancing Ofsted inspections to explicitly focus on how schools are performing for pupils from under-resourced backgrounds and credit schools excelling when serving under-resourced communities.
• Rebalancing the school calendar to improve teacher wellbeing, prevent holiday hunger, improve pupil prospects and help parents with child-care during the long summer break.

Professor of Social Mobility at the University of Exeter and LSE CEP Associate Professor Elliot Major said : “Without a raft of equalising policies, the damaging legacy from COVID-19 school closures will be felt by generations of pupils well into the next decade. Our review shows that COVID amplified long-term persistent education gaps in England and other countries.

“The policies we propose would rebalance the school system so that it supports all children irrespective of their backgrounds. A particular worry is a group of pupils who are falling significantly behind, likely to be absent from the classroom and to leave school without the basic skills needed to function and flourish in life. The decline in social mobility levels threatens to cast a long shadow over our society.”

LSE CEP Associate Andy Eyles added : “To our knowledge, this is the first time this type of analysis has been used in this way to assess the consequences of the pandemic in England. Our results suggest that to improve child outcomes, much greater emphasis is needed in schools on activities that improve both socio-emotional and cognitive skills.”

Esme Lillywhite from the University of Strathclyde and a research assistant at LSE CEP said: “Compared with most other nations, England’s pandemic response was heavily focused on academic catch-up with less emphasis on socio-emotional skills, extracurricular support, and wellbeing. Much more could be gained by closer international collaboration to learn what approaches have been promising elsewhere.”

Dr Emily Tanner, Programme Head at the Nuffield Foundation said : "The mounting evidence on the long-term impact of learning loss on young people's development shows how important it is for students to develop socio-emotional skills alongside academic learning. The insights from this report on timing and gender provide a useful basis for targeting effective interventions."

Behind the article

The Nuffield Foundation is an independent charitable trust with a mission to advance social well-being. It funds research that informs social policy, primarily in Education, Welfare, and Justice. The Nuffield Foundation is the founder and co-funder of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory. The Foundation has funded this project, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the Foundation.

School reopening concerns amid a pandemic among higher education students: a developing country perspective for policy development

• Original Article
• Published: 20 April 2024

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• Manuel B. Garcia   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2615-422X 1 , 2  

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School reopening is essential for restoring normalcy after a period of disruption. However, executing this endeavor during a pandemic requires a comprehensive strategy to ensure success. Consulting stakeholders is consequently crucial for informed and inclusive policies. Prior works recruited public officials, health authorities, teachers, and parents. Unfortunately, students were often not involved in such consultations. The present study addressed this gap by uncovering the sentiments and concerns on school reopening among higher education students. A total of 223 students enrolled in public and private universities from rural and urban areas participated in the study. Based on their reflective essays, students have mixed sentiments about returning to school during the pandemic and highlight safety, academic, health, and financial concerns as major areas requiring attention. It is now incumbent upon governments, schools, policymakers, and education leaders to carefully analyze and incorporate the findings of this study into their back-to-school guidelines and strategies. With informed decision-making and evidenced-based policy, we can build back a stronger and more resilient education system that equitably serves all students in the post-pandemic world.

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Factors that influence mental health of university and college students in the UK: a systematic review

Social support in schools and related outcomes for LGBTQ youth: a scoping review

Wellbeing in schools: what do students tell us, data availability.

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Higher education in the post-COVID world

April 25, 2021 Higher-education institutions face fierce headwinds today: many universities were contending with declining enrollment and budget shortfalls even before the pandemic, and these challenges have now been exacerbated. Explore a special collection on higher education , or dive deeper with several recent articles for a lens on the issues and how to address them, including:

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Online education in the post-COVID era

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The coronavirus pandemic has forced students and educators across all levels of education to rapidly adapt to online learning. The impact of this — and the developments required to make it work — could permanently change how education is delivered.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the world to engage in the ubiquitous use of virtual learning. And while online and distance learning has been used before to maintain continuity in education, such as in the aftermath of earthquakes 1 , the scale of the current crisis is unprecedented. Speculation has now also begun about what the lasting effects of this will be and what education may look like in the post-COVID era. For some, an immediate retreat to the traditions of the physical classroom is required. But for others, the forced shift to online education is a moment of change and a time to reimagine how education could be delivered 2 .

Looking back

Online education has traditionally been viewed as an alternative pathway, one that is particularly well suited to adult learners seeking higher education opportunities. However, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has required educators and students across all levels of education to adapt quickly to virtual courses. (The term ‘emergency remote teaching’ was coined in the early stages of the pandemic to describe the temporary nature of this transition 3 .) In some cases, instruction shifted online, then returned to the physical classroom, and then shifted back online due to further surges in the rate of infection. In other cases, instruction was offered using a combination of remote delivery and face-to-face: that is, students can attend online or in person (referred to as the HyFlex model 4 ). In either case, instructors just had to figure out how to make it work, considering the affordances and constraints of the specific learning environment to create learning experiences that were feasible and effective.

The use of varied delivery modes does, in fact, have a long history in education. Mechanical (and then later electronic) teaching machines have provided individualized learning programmes since the 1950s and the work of B. F. Skinner 5 , who proposed using technology to walk individual learners through carefully designed sequences of instruction with immediate feedback indicating the accuracy of their response. Skinner’s notions formed the first formalized representations of programmed learning, or ‘designed’ learning experiences. Then, in the 1960s, Fred Keller developed a personalized system of instruction 6 , in which students first read assigned course materials on their own, followed by one-on-one assessment sessions with a tutor, gaining permission to move ahead only after demonstrating mastery of the instructional material. Occasional class meetings were held to discuss concepts, answer questions and provide opportunities for social interaction. A personalized system of instruction was designed on the premise that initial engagement with content could be done independently, then discussed and applied in the social context of a classroom.

These predecessors to contemporary online education leveraged key principles of instructional design — the systematic process of applying psychological principles of human learning to the creation of effective instructional solutions — to consider which methods (and their corresponding learning environments) would effectively engage students to attain the targeted learning outcomes. In other words, they considered what choices about the planning and implementation of the learning experience can lead to student success. Such early educational innovations laid the groundwork for contemporary virtual learning, which itself incorporates a variety of instructional approaches and combinations of delivery modes.

Online learning and the pandemic

Fast forward to 2020, and various further educational innovations have occurred to make the universal adoption of remote learning a possibility. One key challenge is access. Here, extensive problems remain, including the lack of Internet connectivity in some locations, especially rural ones, and the competing needs among family members for the use of home technology. However, creative solutions have emerged to provide students and families with the facilities and resources needed to engage in and successfully complete coursework 7 . For example, school buses have been used to provide mobile hotspots, and class packets have been sent by mail and instructional presentations aired on local public broadcasting stations. The year 2020 has also seen increased availability and adoption of electronic resources and activities that can now be integrated into online learning experiences. Synchronous online conferencing systems, such as Zoom and Google Meet, have allowed experts from anywhere in the world to join online classrooms 8 and have allowed presentations to be recorded for individual learners to watch at a time most convenient for them. Furthermore, the importance of hands-on, experiential learning has led to innovations such as virtual field trips and virtual labs 9 . A capacity to serve learners of all ages has thus now been effectively established, and the next generation of online education can move from an enterprise that largely serves adult learners and higher education to one that increasingly serves younger learners, in primary and secondary education and from ages 5 to 18.

The COVID-19 pandemic is also likely to have a lasting effect on lesson design. The constraints of the pandemic provided an opportunity for educators to consider new strategies to teach targeted concepts. Though rethinking of instructional approaches was forced and hurried, the experience has served as a rare chance to reconsider strategies that best facilitate learning within the affordances and constraints of the online context. In particular, greater variance in teaching and learning activities will continue to question the importance of ‘seat time’ as the standard on which educational credits are based 10 — lengthy Zoom sessions are seldom instructionally necessary and are not aligned with the psychological principles of how humans learn. Interaction is important for learning but forced interactions among students for the sake of interaction is neither motivating nor beneficial.

While the blurring of the lines between traditional and distance education has been noted for several decades 11 , the pandemic has quickly advanced the erasure of these boundaries. Less single mode, more multi-mode (and thus more educator choices) is becoming the norm due to enhanced infrastructure and developed skill sets that allow people to move across different delivery systems 12 . The well-established best practices of hybrid or blended teaching and learning 13 have served as a guide for new combinations of instructional delivery that have developed in response to the shift to virtual learning. The use of multiple delivery modes is likely to remain, and will be a feature employed with learners of all ages 14 , 15 . Future iterations of online education will no longer be bound to the traditions of single teaching modes, as educators can support pedagogical approaches from a menu of instructional delivery options, a mix that has been supported by previous generations of online educators 16 .

Also significant are the changes to how learning outcomes are determined in online settings. Many educators have altered the ways in which student achievement is measured, eliminating assignments and changing assessment strategies altogether 17 . Such alterations include determining learning through strategies that leverage the online delivery mode, such as interactive discussions, student-led teaching and the use of games to increase motivation and attention. Specific changes that are likely to continue include flexible or extended deadlines for assignment completion 18 , more student choice regarding measures of learning, and more authentic experiences that involve the meaningful application of newly learned skills and knowledge 19 , for example, team-based projects that involve multiple creative and social media tools in support of collaborative problem solving.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, technological and administrative systems for implementing online learning, and the infrastructure that supports its access and delivery, had to adapt quickly. While access remains a significant issue for many, extensive resources have been allocated and processes developed to connect learners with course activities and materials, to facilitate communication between instructors and students, and to manage the administration of online learning. Paths for greater access and opportunities to online education have now been forged, and there is a clear route for the next generation of adopters of online education.

Before the pandemic, the primary purpose of distance and online education was providing access to instruction for those otherwise unable to participate in a traditional, place-based academic programme. As its purpose has shifted to supporting continuity of instruction, its audience, as well as the wider learning ecosystem, has changed. It will be interesting to see which aspects of emergency remote teaching remain in the next generation of education, when the threat of COVID-19 is no longer a factor. But online education will undoubtedly find new audiences. And the flexibility and learning possibilities that have emerged from necessity are likely to shift the expectations of students and educators, diminishing further the line between classroom-based instruction and virtual learning.

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Lockee, B.B. Online education in the post-COVID era. Nat Electron 4 , 5–6 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-00534-0

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• Education, training and skills
• Inspections and performance of education providers
• Inspection and performance of schools

Education recovery in schools: spring 2022

Published 4 April 2022

Applies to England

© Crown copyright 2022

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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/education-recovery-in-schools-spring-2022/education-recovery-in-schools-spring-2022

The picture overall

In December 2021, we published a briefing on the continued effects of the pandemic and education recovery in schools . The effects of the pandemic on pupils, staff and leaders were evident. It was clear that many schools were working hard to respond to these challenges, including helping pupils to catch up academically.

In this briefing, we draw on evidence from a sample of inspections and from discussions with school inspectors to understand how schools are responding to the ongoing challenges of the pandemic. It is promising that leaders were noticing improvements in pupils’ learning, well-being and behaviour this term. We also saw how schools were using effective strategies to check what pupils have learned and to appropriately adapt the curriculum to meet their needs.

However, the pandemic continued to hinder pupils’ learning and personal development. In January 2022, many schools said that COVID-19 had reduced pupils’ attendance. This was a particular challenge for special schools. Leaders also continued to mention the negative impact of the pandemic on pupils’ well-being and behaviour. This term, more leaders have noticed improvements in these areas. But many also reported that pupils in Reception needed more support to develop social skills such as taking turns and listening.

The pandemic has also continued to affect pupils’ knowledge and skills, either because content had not been taught when schools were partially closed or because pupils did not learn well remotely. The leaders that we spoke to this term were identifying similar issues to those reported in autumn , including knowledge gaps in phonics, mathematics and writing stamina. Some schools also reported a decline in pupils taking certain subjects for GCSE and A level, including triple science and English Baccalaureate subjects.

Schools were using a range of informal assessment practices to identify what knowledge pupils have (and have not) remembered from their teaching during lockdowns. Assessment practices were more effective in schools where staff had a strong vision and clear intent for their curriculum. This meant that they were clear what knowledge needed to be assessed. We saw less effective practice when leaders were assuming pupils had gaps in knowledge but were not identifying what specific knowledge was missing; when they were focusing disproportionately on core subjects; and when they were using standardised, high-level assessments that did not check that pupils have learned what has been taught.

Some schools were using information from assessment to adapt their curriculum. Adaptations this term were similar to those in autumn. Schools were dedicating time to revisiting concepts that pupils had not learned well remotely, and leaders were adapting their curriculum to prioritise knowledge that was crucial for pupils to move forward.

Assessment and curriculum adaptations will vary by subject. In subjects where knowledge is taught in a sequence, such as phonics, the adaptations help ensure that pupils learn crucial knowledge needed to progress. In other subjects, like history, progression may not rely so heavily on previous knowledge. [footnote 1]

Schools were also using assessment to identify individuals or groups of pupils who needed additional support, such as one-to-one interventions. Some were using tutoring to help pupils catch up. Most schools chose to use the school-led route offered by the National Tutoring Programme and trained their own staff internally or across academy trusts in tutoring.

In the spring term, staff absence due to COVID-19 had been an issue and was made more difficult by the challenge of recruiting supply teachers. This has increased the staff workload. Around a quarter of planned school inspections before the spring half term were deferred, predominantly due to staffing issues related to COVID-19.

Schools have faced external barriers, such as delays accessing external services, particularly in relation to mental health. Special schools have been especially challenged by this as they rely on a lot of services from external agencies. However, many leaders have also had support from academy trusts and local authorities.

Methodological note

In this briefing, we draw on evidence collected during routine inspections and through focus group discussions with school inspectors. We use this to illustrate:

• how the pandemic continues to impact on pupils’ learning and personal development
• how schools are finding out what pupils do and do not know
• effective approaches that schools are using to help pupils catch up

We used evidence gathered from routine inspections of 43 primary schools, 48 secondary schools and 14 special schools in England between 22 November 2021 and 28 January 2022.

We held focus group discussions with 23 Ofsted colleagues: 17 His Majesty’s Inspectors ( HMI ) and 6 Senior HMI . Participants in focus group discussions had personal experience of inspecting schools in the 2021/22 academic year and/or had overseen the work of HMI in their region. They had a range of inspection experience including primary, secondary and special schools. There was representation from all 8 Ofsted regions .

The data collected cannot be assumed to be representative of the whole sector. During January, there were fewer school inspections than usual, which reduced the amount of evidence we could draw on. A small number of inspectors participated in the research, meaning that their observations are not conclusive. They do, however, help to triangulate and enrich findings from the inspection evidence.

Our overall findings in this briefing illustrate the challenges that some schools are experiencing and the approaches they are taking.

The current state of children’s education and personal development

Ongoing covid-related absence.

During January 2022, the pandemic continued to reduce pupils’ attendance in many schools. Data from the Department for Education ( DfE ) shows an increase in pupils not attending school for COVID-related reasons during January, but this reduced before the spring half term. [footnote 2] During January, we saw a larger proportion of pupils being absent during inspections than during the autumn term. In some schools, this was a few pupils; in others, many pupils were off with COVID-19. Some leaders of special schools said that attendance had been a challenge for them, particularly among pupils with complex health needs.

COVID-related anxiety among parents continued to be a challenge for some school leaders this term. Some parents were not sending their children to school because of their concerns. Anxiety around COVID-19 was thought to be higher among certain communities, including Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

A few schools faced challenges from parents about pupils’ attendance. There was push-back from some parents when schools communicated high expectations and the importance of attendance. We recently published a short report on schools’ approaches to improving and maintaining attendance .

Some schools also talked about their contingency plans for online learning in case of further lockdowns or to accommodate high levels of absence. However, compared with the national lockdowns, fewer schools were offering comprehensive remote learning for small numbers of pupils who were not at school.

Knowledge and skills

Our December briefing reported that pupils’ subject-specific knowledge and skills continued to be affected by the pandemic. This was either because content had not been taught when schools were partially closed or because pupils did not learn well remotely. In January 2022, school leaders described similar gaps in:

• mathematics
• writing stamina and handwriting
• languages, particularly in pupils’ speaking and listening skills
• physical education ( PE )

Leaders tended to mention subjects where the knowledge that was missing was essential for pupils to progress in the subject. This does not mean that other subjects, such as geography and history, have not been impacted. However, the knowledge gaps in these subjects may not be as critical for pupils’ progression. [footnote 3]

Many leaders highlighted their concerns about the Reception Year cohort, particularly in relation to children’s weaker speech and language development. Similar to in the autumn term, they also identified pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities ( SEND ) and disadvantaged pupils as being hardest hit by the pandemic.

Compared with last term, more leaders said that pupils’ gaps in knowledge and skills were closing or had closed in some subjects, and that pupils were ‘where they should be’. They attributed this to providing effective remote learning during lockdowns, which meant gaps in knowledge were small, and/or to having successful strategies in place to help pupils catch up. On inspection, we have also seen pupils recovering skills and knowledge that teachers said had been affected by lockdowns. For instance, we have seen strong progression in pupils’ writing since the start of this academic year.

In some schools, pupils’ knowledge gaps were not solely attributable to missed teaching or pupils not learning well remotely during lockdowns. Other factors such as previous teaching, a previous curriculum or non-COVID-related staff absence had played a part.

Some schools said that the pandemic has influenced pupils’ subject choices at GCSE and A level. For example, a few schools reported decreases in pupils opting for triple science and others had noted declines in the number of pupils taking English Baccalaureate subjects. One leader thought that the latter was due to pupils’ lower level of confidence in languages following lockdowns.

Mental health and well-being

Many leaders said that the pandemic has had a negative impact on some pupils’ mental health and emotional well-being. As reported in our December briefing, they continued to have concerns about pupils having lower resilience and confidence and greater anxiety. For some pupils, the impact of the pandemic had been most noticeable when they first went back to school, but others were still experiencing poorer well-being in the spring term. In some schools, safeguarding concerns and disclosures had increased. These school leaders spoke about more concerns relating to domestic abuse.

Schools were supporting pupils’ mental health and well-being in several ways. A common approach was to increase the focus on mental health in the curriculum for all pupils, often through personal, social and health education. Schools were also providing therapeutic interventions for individual pupils, often by either training their own staff or employing staff with therapeutic qualifications. Some schools were adding these roles to their pastoral teams because it has been difficult to access external services, which often had long waiting times.

A few school leaders said that they had already seen that their approaches were successful. In one primary school, parents had spoken positively about a programme for those needing additional emotional support. In the spring term, a few leaders were optimistic that pupils’ well-being was ‘improving’ and ‘getting back to normal’.

Opportunities for pupils to take part in enrichment activities, such as clubs and trips, continued to vary between schools this term. Most schools were offering some activities, and a few were back to their full programme. A few schools seemed to find trips more challenging to organise compared with clubs on school premises and talks from external speakers. For example, one school had found that some parents were not comfortable with their child going out of school. On occasion, enrichment activities were hindered by staff absence.

Pupils’ behaviour

Many more leaders this term said that poor behaviour following lockdowns had been addressed, or that they had seen improvements. Since September 2021, leaders had spent time re-establishing boundaries and communicating behavioural expectations to pupils. Staff were often modelling positive behaviours to develop the youngest pupils’ understanding of sharing and listening skills. In a few schools, staff said that staggered lunch times, originally set up as a COVID-19 safety precaution, were still in place. They found that these had a positive effect on pupils’ behaviour because they limited the number of pupils in an area at one time, which helped to create a ‘calm atmosphere’.

However, some schools were finding that behaviour continued to be a challenge in January 2022. Leaders said that pupils’ level of engagement and ability to stay on task continued to be worse than pre-pandemic. Several leaders mentioned that children in Reception were not as used to sharing and taking turns, and more work was needed to develop their listening skills. This was thought to be because pupils had had fewer pre-school social experiences. The early years briefing gives further detail.

Identifying gaps in learning

Assessment practices.

Pandemic disruption resulted in gaps in many pupils’ learning, either because content had not been taught during lockdowns or because pupils did not learn well remotely. Schools were using assessment to understand what pupils have (and have not) remembered. This information helped leaders and teachers to adapt the curriculum appropriately so that pupils had the secure base they needed to access new content. In addition, most leaders were using assessment information to identify and target pupils who needed additional support to catch up.

A few leaders also referred to the importance of assessment information, both formative and summative, in monitoring successes. For example, where curriculum adaptations were having an impact, gaps in learning were closing and pupils were back on track so that the curriculum could continue as originally planned.

Assessment can take many forms. Inspection evidence showed that most teachers were continuing to use established informal assessment practices to understand pupils’ enduring gaps in learning. Following initial assessments when pupils returned to school after lockdown, many teachers were extracting diagnostic information from assessments routinely built into the curriculum to reinforce pupils’ learning and retention, such as:

• regular knowledge retrieval activities
• targeted questioning
• low-stakes quizzes
• revision tasks to carry out their prior learning checks

Some leaders had done baseline assessments and repeated these at intervals to monitor how well their adapted curriculum was filling the gaps and enabling pupils to catch up. This was prevalent in mathematics.

A few schools, primary and secondary, reported that they had changed assessment practices due to the impact of the pandemic, paying greater attention to formative assessment. Leaders in these schools said they were now ‘tightening up’ their assessment processes to focus on the gaps. Examples of changes they had made include:

• checking prior learning more carefully before moving to new units
• looking more closely at the key objectives to ensure more precise assessment
• reviewing routinely what pupils had learned in previous years, not just in recent units
• focusing on identifying pupils who require bespoke support
• introducing informal assessment in a broader range of subjects
• providing more feedback to pupils
• using more peer- and self-assessment

We also found that some leaders were purchasing new assessment packages, for example Year 7 baseline tests, and that activities at the start of lessons to check learning were taking longer as teachers checked for a wider range of gaps.

Facilitating effective assessment practices to identify gaps in learning

Teachers were using their normal practices to identify gaps. Understanding what makes assessment effective for identifying gaps, and therefore helping pupils catch up, is especially important in the context of education recovery. However, the findings may apply more widely than recovery from the pandemic. What is appropriate in terms of assessment will also vary by subject area. [footnote 4]

We have seen the importance of strong leadership for effective assessment. Strong leaders tended to have a clear strategic plan, including what essential knowledge teachers should focus assessment on. They were setting expectations for how assessment should inform curriculum adaptations. Similarly, some leaders referred to the importance of their oversight of assessment information and what it was telling them about pupils’ knowledge: what was still missing and how well gaps were being filled.

Having a well-informed understanding of the curriculum and strong subject knowledge helped schools use assessment effectively to identify gaps in pupils’ knowledge. When teachers were clear about the knowledge that pupils needed to learn, they understood what knowledge needed to be assessed. They also had a greater understanding of where pupils should be, so they were more able to identify knowledge that needed consolidation and could precisely match curriculum adaptations to pupils’ needs. For example, we often found mathematics was being assessed more effectively than other subjects. Many leaders knew the curriculum well and were clear about what pupils should know at each stage. Teachers were then able to benchmark pupils’ current learning against these expectations. In schools where leaders were less clear about curriculum content and end-points, assessment was used less effectively.

In the best examples of assessment practice, leaders were focused on checking that pupils were building secure knowledge necessary to progress by continually tracking, in-class, what they knew at different points. Effective assessment resulted in teachers using the information they gathered to inform their teaching and to fill gaps, allowing for a return to a more usual curriculum.

We found that some schools needed to do further work to use assessment productively to strengthen pupils’ knowledge. Others had not yet done enough assessment in some areas of the curriculum.

We also found that some primary schools were focusing assessment narrowly on the core curriculum and paying less attention to foundation subjects. This could be due to:

• a strategic focus on English and mathematics
• a lack of training for teachers resulting in weaker subject knowledge or confidence in assessing foundation subjects

Taking a narrow assessment focus and not checking what pupils know in foundation subjects may mean that schools have not yet clearly identified gaps in these areas. However, some leaders were aware of what content had been missed during remote learning, so assessment may not have been a priority.

In secondary schools, foundation subject teachers were assessing more clearly and understood what the learning gaps were. Their knowledge of the curriculum meant they were able to identify gaps.

We often had concerns with assessment practices when leaders had acknowledged that pupils had learning gaps but had not yet pinpointed the specific knowledge that was missing or weak. In some schools, leaders were ‘assuming but not assessing’ for gaps. However, appropriate assessment varies by subject and, in some areas, it may not be critical to identify gaps for pupils’ progression. [footnote 5]

Some schools referred to using standardised testing. A few repeated these assessments at intervals to monitor progress. When schools relied on this type of assessment, specific gaps in learning were not identified as effectively or as quickly as they were in schools that took a more granular approach, checking precisely what knowledge was missing and what was secure. We found that when assessments provided scores, rather than identified gaps, it was unclear how the assessment supported the recovery of pupils’ learning. A few schools analysed pupils’ responses to individual questions to help identify gaps in learning and offer targeted support. However, we would be concerned about an over-reliance on standardised assessment. It may not check the taught curriculum and so may not be an accurate reflection of whether pupils are learning what the school intends.

Other schools with weak assessment practice had identified gaps in learning and pupils’ needs but this did not then lead to sufficient or timely curriculum adaptation. The pandemic appears to have amplified the impact of weak legacy assessment practices. Where assessment was already disjointed, inconsistent or overused summative tests, curriculum adaptations were less effective. However, some weaker schools had improved assessment practices in response to the need to identify learning gaps.

Preparing for national assessments

We found that there was a strong but understandable focus on assessing pupils in Years 11 and 13. The uncertainty over summer exams had led to some schools focusing significantly on collecting evidence of pupils’ attainment in case it was required by exam boards for teacher-assessed grades. Ofqual has now released more information on this, which has provided some clarity for schools. [footnote 6]

Schools were also preparing pupils for their first external exams. Inspection evidence showed that some teachers of Year 11 and Year 13 cohorts were focusing on exam preparation. They were using extra formal assessments and practice questions, targeted on gaps emerging from mock assessments. It was a challenge for teachers in these year groups as they filled gaps in learning alongside helping pupils get ready for exams. In some schools, assessment practices for these year groups had been adjusted to account for this. However, inspectors pointed out that the potential for pupils being ‘more weighed than fed’ and the focus on assessment could mean learning suffers as a result.

Catch-up strategies

Adaptations to the curriculum.

This term, many schools are continuing to adapt their curriculum. We saw a continuation of a lot of the practice that we reported in our December briefing. Leaders described how they would take time to fill gaps and ensure that key concepts were secure before continuing learning, and ‘not just plough on’.

Some schools are continuing to adapt their curriculum by:

• teaching what has been missed
• providing opportunities across the curriculum for a lot of repetition, retrieval and revision of previous learning
• focusing on the core subjects for their catch-up work (particularly phonics, reading and mathematics in primary schools)
• investing in additional resources to support catch-up (staff, programmes and classroom resources)
• providing interventions to support catch-up for targeted pupils and groups of pupils
• prioritising practical work in science and technology
• prioritising PE , extra-curricular activities and enrichment opportunities

Most leaders said they were using assessment information in some subjects to inform their curriculum adaptations and decide where to target support to help pupils catch up. Some leaders referred to frequent – often daily – assessment, which meant adaptations were responsive and quick. This was common in mathematics and phonics. Many leaders highlighted the importance of timely attention to pupils’ needs and adaptive teaching when gaps are identified. We have seen good practice in schools that were responding and adapting quickly.

In other subjects, leaders were aware of what content has been missed and used this information to adjust the curriculum. For example, one leader said that geography content that had not been taught remotely during lockdown was instead covered during this academic year in a related topic.

In addition to the continuing trends from last term, some schools this term made new adaptations to respond to gaps in skills. For example, some schools were:

• providing time for pupils to practise extended independent writing to build up their writing stamina, and working on pencil grip for younger pupils
• introducing daily grammar revision to fill gaps in grammatical skills
• focusing on swimming lessons as these had been stalled by the pandemic

Some secondary school leaders said that careers education was disrupted when pupils were learning remotely. Some had resumed face-to-face work experience but others said that this is still being done virtually. In a few schools, Year 10 and 11 pupils said they had missed out on work experience because of the pandemic. However, leaders said they want to prioritise this soon and they are working to rebuild links with external partners. In special schools, leaders were keen to re-establish activities outside of the classroom to prepare pupils for adulthood, such as work experience and travelling on public transport.

A few schools had bolstered their teaching provision for online safety following pupils’ increasing use of online technology. Alongside this, some schools have been reminded how much pupils rely on technology. This led them to review their computing curriculum and consider how best to make it relevant to their pupils. For example, one school noted that pupils were only comfortable using touch-screen devices, so they have addressed this by focusing on using desktop computers.

We have seen examples of both good and bad practice in curriculum adaptations. We found that, for most pupils, curriculum or GCSE options had not been narrowed. In focus group discussions, participants suggested that the education inspection framework, with its focus on a broad and balanced curriculum, had helped to dissuade schools from doing this.

We have commonly seen pupils with SEND taken out of foundation subjects to receive additional teaching in core subjects. This may be appropriate if, for example, the interventions are helping pupils catch up with learning to read. However, leaders need to be sure that their choices do not lead to unnecessary narrowing of the curriculum for these pupils.

We have seen some effective curriculum development across subjects. Some schools had adapted their curriculums to focus on the most crucial knowledge pupils needed to move forward with learning new content. This occurred in primary and secondary schools but was done particularly well in schools with strong subject knowledge and leadership.

Some schools used lockdowns to think about the school’s context and the pupils they have, which they then used when adapting the curriculum. They had sharpened their curriculum design and built links across the curriculum to help pupils to retain knowledge and make more sense of what they are learning.

Targeted support and tutoring

Schools used assessment to identify pupils or groups of pupils for focused support. This was often through group or one-to-one interventions. For example, some offered additional teaching in an afternoon session or through ‘pre-teaching’ before a whole-class lesson. Frequent assessment ensured that these groupings were constantly adjusted and responded to pupils’ specific needs. This was particularly common in phonics and mathematics, but also in other subjects to help pupils who have been absent for COVID-related reasons to catch up this term.

Some schools were using tutoring as part of their catch-up strategy, using the different routes offered by the National Tutoring Programme. [footnote 7]

Many schools using tuition partners had found that there was a lack of available tutors. Some schools had found that tutors did not follow their schools’ teaching approaches and said there was not enough evidence about the quality of the tutoring, leading them to conclude that the additional tutoring may not benefit pupils.

Instead, many schools had chosen the school-led route and trained their own staff as tutors, internally or across academy trusts. We have seen some good practice in using trained teaching assistants as tutors but using internal staff has placed additional pressure on already strained school staff.

Most of these schools were directing their attention towards tutoring for mathematics and English, in particular phonics and reading. Most schools said they had targeted pupils for tutoring, for example those with specific gaps in learning, those not meeting expectations, pupils with SEND or those entitled to pupil premium funding. Some schools were holding tutoring sessions outside of normal teaching hours, either before or after school.

We are doing a separate review of tutoring in schools and 16 to 19 providers and will publish a report following this.

School leadership

Staff absence, primarily due to COVID-19 cases, hit schools particularly hard in the spring term. Data from the DfE shows that staff absence increased between December 2021 and January 2022. Around 5% of teachers and school leaders were estimated to be absent in January due to COVID-related reasons. [footnote 8] This has been compounded by the existing national shortage of teaching staff, [footnote 9] along with challenges finding cover.

Some schools filled staff absence by employing supply teachers. However, sourcing classroom cover was often a challenge due to the current high demand and because some supply teachers were working as tutors in the National Tutoring Programme instead. A few leaders also expressed concern that supply teachers may not know the school’s expectations and teaching practices. Special schools found this particularly problematic because unfamiliar staff can be difficult for pupils who prefer routine and familiarity. Many schools used their own staff to cover lessons, including leaders, teachers and higher-level teaching assistants. This had increased staff workloads.

Around a quarter of school inspections planned before the spring half term were deferred due to COVID-related reasons, predominantly because of staffing issues. In these schools, covering lessons took up time that leaders would usually have had for operational and management duties, including engaging in inspection activities.

We found that in some secondary schools, difficult decisions had been made about which year groups to prioritise. For example, some had prioritised exam year groups by ensuring that they were taught by subject specialists, which left other year groups without specialist teachers.

A few secondary schools had felt forced by staff absence to send some children back to remote learning. In some cases, teachers who were self-isolating continued to teach lessons from home to pupils in the classroom.

During the spring term, staff absence and the increased workloads to cover this were causing some schools to delay implementing targeted support. For example, some had postponed intervention groups, programmes for phonics and mathematics, and staff training for tutoring.

We found that staff absence, increased workloads and competing demands had also prevented some leaders from monitoring teaching and learning as thoroughly as before the pandemic. Some school governors and trustees said their ability to monitor schools has also been hindered. With fewer opportunities to visit schools and meet face to face, they have not been able to challenge leaders as usual. A few schools said that governors and trustees had restarted visits in the autumn term.

External barriers

Circumstances outside schools’ control have affected or continue to affect how they help pupils to catch up. These include:

• delays and changes to external services
• changing COVID-19 guidance and advice
• additional COVID-related duties
• challenging community contexts

Schools have had difficulties accessing external services such as mental health services, therapists and local authorities because they have been unable to come into schools or have long waiting lists. Accessing expertise to diagnose SEND or getting education, health and care plans drawn up by the local authority have been challenging for schools. In some cases, they have not been able to happen at all. Special schools have been particularly challenged as they rely on many services from external agencies.

When these services have been able to come into schools, in some cases they have been unable to provide the same quality of service due to COVID-19 precautions. For example, one inspector observed personal protective equipment hindering a speech and language therapist delivering therapy.

The lack of clarity over the continued implementation of COVID-19 measures in schools has also been a challenge. In January 2022, leaders were applying COVID-19 measures in varying ways. We have seen that this has resulted in very different practice across schools and therefore very different experiences for pupils.

We found that staff time and schools’ resources have been put under pressure by the requirement to organise COVID-19 testing in schools. To manage this, some school leaders have had to take on more of a management role rather than a leadership role. Inspectors suggested that this has been detrimental to schools, even where there has been a track record of strong leadership.

The community context in which schools operate has also been difficult for some leaders. Disadvantaged communities have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic and some schools have provided additional support to parents with mental health or substance abuse issues. Across a range of different community contexts, schools have reported that they have had to help parents deal with COVID-related anxiety.

However, the pandemic had strengthened some schools’ relationships with parents. The support they offered parents has helped to foster more collaborative relationships. When face-to-face meetings with parents have not been possible, schools have adapted to ensure that engagement continues. For example, some used online communication portals or talked to parents in the playground.

Although schools are still facing some significant external barriers, they have been supported in their recovery by academy trusts and local authorities.

We found that most academy schools have been supported by their trust or multi-academy trust ( MAT ). Some MATs provided centralised assistance, including:

• pooling resources
• using trust-wide curriculums to identify the sequence and progression of subjects
• using trust-wide moderation to identify gaps in pupils’ knowledge

Others offered less centralised support, such as having termly meetings to discuss catch-up and trust leaders taking learning walks with school leaders.

Maintained schools have also been supported by local authorities. Leaders gave examples of:

• using local authority resources to improve attendance
• local authorities playing an advising role in schools’ catch-up work
• local authorities providing specialist teams to support pupils with social, emotional, and mental health needs

The government has also provided extra funding to schools to spend on catch-up. [footnote 10] Schools have spent the funding on a range of initiatives, most commonly: interventions, tutoring, additional staff (for academic and pastoral purposes), extended school hours and extra-curricular opportunities. As recommended by the DfE , many schools said they had prioritised using the funding to support vulnerable pupils and those in receipt of pupil premium.

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‘Teaching a broad and balanced curriculum for education recovery’ , Department for Education, July 2021.  ↩

‘Attendance in education and early years settings during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic’ , Department for Education, March 2022.  ↩

‘Subject-by-subject support for GCSE, AS and A level students in 2022’ , Ofqual, February 2022.  ↩

‘National tutoring programme (NTP)’ , Department for Education, September 2021.  ↩

‘Teacher shortages in England: analysis and pay options’ , Education Policy Institute, March 2020.  ↩

‘Catch-up premium’ , Department for Education, April 2021.  ↩

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Challenges and Opportunities in the Post-COVID-19 World

The COVID-19 crisis has affected societies and economies around the globe and will permanently reshape our world as it continues to unfold. While the fallout from the crisis is both amplifying familiar risks and creating new ones, change at this scale also creates new openings for managing systemic challenges, and ways to build back better. This collection of essays draws on the diverse insights of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report Advisory Board to look ahead and across a broad range of issues – trade, governance, health, labour, technology to name a few – and consider where the balance of risk and opportunity may come out. It offers decision-makers a comprehensive picture of expected long-term changes, and inspiration to leverage the opportunities this crisis offers to improve the state of the world.

World Economic Forum reports may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License , and in accordance with our Terms of Use .

Further reading All related content

Will COVID-19 change how we think about migration and migrant workers?

Migrant workers are key to the pandemic response, but the focus on health security could have long-term implications for migrants and migration policy.

The COVID-19 pandemic is not a break for nature – let’s make sure there is one after the crisis

Nature is facing increased pressure due COVID-19 crisis – and to our health and our economy, governments must also prioritize healing our planet, too.

The paradigm shift for educational system continuance in the advent of COVID-19 pandemic: Mental health challenges and reflections

Affiliations.

• 1 Head of the Department of Behavioral Sciences, Fatima Jinnah Women University, The Mall, Old Presidency Rawalpindi, 46000 Pakistan.
• 2 Antai College of Economics and Management (ACM), School of Media and Communication (SMC), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), No. 800 Dongchuan Road, Minhang District, 200240 Shanghai, China.
• 3 Director of Gazail Mental Health Services, Ltd. Surrey, United Kingdom.
• 4 School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), No. 92 West Dazhi Street, Nangang District, 150001 Heilongjiang, Harbin, China.
• PMID: 38620741
• PMCID: PMC7832654
• DOI: 10.1016/j.crbeha.2020.100011

Background: The coronavirus pandemic appeared as the worst global health disaster of the century. Since the advent of the Second world war-2, humankind has experienced the most challenging health emergencies. The novel respiratory disease (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in Wuhan at the end of December 2019.

Aim: The study focuses on providing education through the educational system with a mode of delivery using digital solutions with a new paradigm method.

Method: This research incorporates the statistical data related to the Pakistani Ministry of Health's coronavirus epidemic to draw the results.

Results: WHO reported more than 51.949 million confirmed COVID-19 patients in more than 200 territories and countries. This epidemic caused more than 1.282 million deaths; however, more than 36.49 million people have recovered from the infection of the deadly disease COVID-19, as of November 11, 2020. The COVID-19 has put forward unique challenges in personal and social life spheres. The precautionary measures, including social distancing, called for abrupt closure of educational institutions, leaving the digital solutions as the primary mean of continuity in educational activities.

Conclusion: The current review looks into the dynamics of embracing the change in the educational system, ranging from delivery mode to shifting to a new paradigm moving to digital solutions. This study looks into the challenges, issues, barriers, and success parameters of Pakistan's online learning management system. From the preparedness phase to the actual implementation of the learning system at higher education, the level is noteworthy. The private sector has provided higher, secondary, and primary levels; the private sector came forward to maintain learning continuity. The review suggests a way forward ahead for the educational system's continuity and sustainability in the coronavirus pandemic and educational institutions' crises.

Keywords: COVID-19; E-learning; Higher education; Social challenge; Social distancing.

© 2020 The Authors.

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10 facts about today’s college graduates

Having a bachelor’s degree remains an important advantage in many sectors of the U.S. labor market. College graduates generally out-earn those who have not attended college, and they are more likely to be employed in the first place. At the same time, many Americans say they cannot afford to get a four-year degree – or that they just don’t want to.

Here are key facts about American college graduates.

This Pew Research Center analysis about U.S. college graduates relies on data from sources including the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Student Clearinghouse and the Federal Reserve Bank, as well as surveys conducted by the Center.

Everyone who took the Pew Research Center surveys cited is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about  the ATP’s methodology .

Nearly four-in-ten Americans ages 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree, a share that has grown over the last decade. As of 2021, 37.9% of adults in this age group held a bachelor’s degree, including 14.3% who also obtained a graduate or professional degree, according to data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. That share is up 7.5 percentage points from 30.4% in 2011.

An additional 10.5% had an associate degree in 2021. About four-in-ten Americans ages 25 and older had a high school diploma with no further education (25.3%) or completed some college but didn’t have a degree (14.9%).

In a reversal, women are now more likely than men to graduate from college, according to the Current Population Survey . In 2021, 39% of women ages 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree or more education, compared with 37% of men in the same age range. The gap in college completion is even wider among adults ages 25 to 34: 46% of women in this age group have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 36% of men.

In an October 2021 Pew Research Center survey of Americans without a degree, 34% of men said a major reason why they have not received a four-year college degree is that they just didn’t want to. Only one-in-four women said the same. Men were also more likely to say a major reason they didn’t have a four-year degree is that they didn’t need more education for the job or career they wanted (26% of men said this vs. 20% of women).

Women (44%) were more likely than men (39%) to say not being able to afford college was a major reason they don’t have a bachelor’s degree. Men and women were about equally likely to say a major impediment was needing to work to help support their family.

There are racial and ethnic differences in college graduation patterns, as well as in the reasons for not completing a degree. Among adults ages 25 and older, 61% of Asian Americans have a bachelor’s degree or more education, along with 42% of White adults, 28% of Black adults and 21% of Hispanic adults, according to 2021 Current Population Survey data. The share of bachelor’s degree holders in each group has increased since 2010. That year, 52% of Asian Americans had a four-year degree or more, compared with a third of White adults, 20% of Black adults and 14% of Hispanic adults.

The October 2021 Center survey found that among adults without a bachelor’s degree, Hispanic adults (52%) were more likely than those who are White (39%) or Black (41%) to say a major reason they didn’t graduate from a four-year college is that they couldn’t afford it. Hispanic and Black adults were more likely than their White counterparts to say needing to work to support their family was a major reason.

While a third of White adults said not wanting to go to school was a major reason they didn’t complete a four-year degree, smaller shares of Black (22%) and Hispanic (23%) adults said the same. White adults were also more likely to cite not needing more education for the job or career they wanted. (There weren’t enough Asian adults without a bachelor’s degree in the sample to analyze separately.)

Only 62% of students who start a degree or certificate program finish their program within six years, according to the most recent data from the  National Student Clearinghouse , a nonprofit verification and research organization that tracked first-time college students who enrolled in fall 2015 with the intent of pursuing a degree or certificate. The degree completion rate for this group was highest among students who started at four-year, private, nonprofit schools (78.3%), and lowest among those who started at two-year public institutions (42.2%).

Business is the most commonly held bachelor’s degree, followed by health professions.  According to the  National Center for Education Statistics , about a fifth (19%) of the roughly 2 million bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2019-20 were in business. Health professions and related programs were the second most-popular field, making up 12.6% of degrees conferred that year. Business has been the single most common major since 1980-81; before that, education led the way.

The  least  common bachelor’s degrees in 2019-20 were in military technologies and applied sciences (1,156 degrees conferred in 2019-20), library science (118), and precision production (39).

There is a growing earnings gap between young college graduates and their counterparts without degrees. In 2021, full-time workers ages 22 to 27 who held a bachelor’s degree, but no further education, made a median annual wage of $52,000, compared with $30,000 for full-time workers of the same age with a high school diploma and no degree, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This gap has widened over time. Young bachelor’s degree holders earned a median annual wage of $48,481 in 1990, compared with $35,257 for full-time workers ages 22 to 27 with a high school diploma.

The unemployment rate is lower for college graduates than for workers without a bachelor’s degree, and that gap widened as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. In February 2020, just before the COVID-19 outbreak began in the U.S., only 1.9% of college graduates ages 25 and older were unemployed, compared with 3.1% of workers who completed some college but not a four-year degree, and 3.7% of workers with only a high school diploma. By June 2020, after the pandemic hit, 6.8% of college grads, 10.8% of workers with some college, and 12.2% of high school grads were unemployed.

By March 2022, the unemployment rate had nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels for college graduates (2%) while dropping to 3% among those with some college education but no four-year degree, and 4% among those with only a high school diploma.

Recent college graduates are more likely than graduates overall to be underemployed – that is, working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree, according to an analysis of Census Bureau and BLS data by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York . As of December 2021, 41% of college graduates ages 22 to 27 were underemployed, compared with 34% among all college graduates. The underemployment rates for recent college grads rose in 2020 as the COVID-19 outbreak strained the job market, but have since returned to pre-pandemic levels.

As of the end of 2021, only 34% of underemployed graduates ages 22 to 27 worked what the Fed defines as “good non-college jobs” – those paying at least $45,000 a year – down from around half in the 1990s. The share of underemployed graduates ages 22 to 27 in low-wage jobs – those earning less than $25,000 annually – rose from about 9% in 1990 to 11% last year.

When it comes to income and wealth accumulation, first-generation college graduates lag substantially behind those with college-educated parents, according to a May 2021 Pew Research Center analysis . Households headed by a first-generation college graduate – that is, someone who has completed at least a bachelor’s degree but does not have a parent with a college degree – had a median annual income of $99,600 in 2019, compared with $135,800 for households headed by those with at least one parent who graduated from college. The median wealth of households headed by first-generation college graduates ($152,000) also trailed that of households headed by someone with a parent who graduated from college ($244,500). The higher household income of the latter facilitates saving and wealth accumulation.

The gap also reflects differences in how individuals finance their education. Second-generation college graduates tend to come from  more affluent families , while first-generation college graduates are more likely to incur education debt than those with a college-educated parent.

Most Americans with college degrees see value in their experience. In the Center’s October 2021 survey , majorities of graduates said their college education was extremely or very useful when it came to helping them grow personally and intellectually (79%), opening doors to job opportunities (70%) and developing specific skills and knowledge that could be used in the workplace (65%).

Younger college graduates were less likely than older ones to see value in their college education. For example, only a third of college graduates younger than 50 said their college experience was extremely useful in helping them develop skills and knowledge that could be used in the workplace. Among college graduates ages 50 and older, 45% said this.

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Katherine Schaeffer is a research analyst at Pew Research Center

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Appleton Area Schools see drop in student absences, but work is still needed

Editor's note: The original version of this story misstated the percentage for chronic absenteeism. That percentage has been updated.

More kids in Appleton are staying in school thanks to efforts from the district and other organizations, but, as in many districts across the state, the pandemic is still having an effect on school attendance and chronic absenteeism.

When we looked at the latest data last month , the rate of chronic absenteeism in the Appleton Area School District had dropped to 17% for the 2022-23 school year, down from 21% for 2021-22. "Chronic absenteeism" is defined as students missing more than 10% of days in a given school year.

The district has "allocated a significant number of resources into supporting our students that are struggling with consistent attendance," said AASD superintendent Greg Hartjes, so they're "pleased to see improvement."

But there's still work to be done, Hartjes added, because absenteeism is still twice what it was pre-pandemic. In the 2018-19 school year, AASD's chronic absenteeism rate was 7%, according to data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

We talked with AASD last year about efforts they were making to help kids stay in school. Here's how those efforts have fared.

What's been working: incentives, community education and building one-on-one relationships

Efforts to help kids stay in school began right away during the school year, said AASD attendance coordinator Stephanie Marta. It started with an "attendance campaign" to educate the community about the importance of attending and staying in school, including yard signs, posters and postcards.

During the school year, the district continued to work with attendance teams to connect with families and students, Marta said. Usually, one of the first steps is to offer an incentive to keep coming to school. Some incentives are for individual students setting goals for themselves, while other incentives include schoolwide celebrations to recognize those students who are doing well.

Other students that need more support will work with mentors, Marta said. The district has trained staff in Check & Connect , an evidence-based program from the University of Minnesota to help students stay in school.

"They'll meet once a week or more with students," Marta said. "They'll talk about grades and keep the lines of communication open between home and school."

The Boys and Girls Club of Appleton helps with student mentorship through its Truancy Reduction & Assessment Center. In TRAC, three case managers receive referrals from the school and use a version of Check & Connect to help build positive relationships between the student and their school.

This year, said senior director Kayla McNamara, TRAC continued to work on cases from the previous year. That meant they "were able to pick back up and not really miss a beat" in September with students who needed extra help last year.

"We're sitting down with a young person, asking them questions, and trying to get to know them and what their life is like, what they want to do some day," McNamara said. "We want to understand what that student needs to get back on track."

She said TRAC served 284 students last school year and 235 this year, though she expects to see about 40 more students needing help before the end of this school year.

Mental health issues from the pandemic continue to affect student attendance; work still needed

While community partnerships and relationship-building play a critical role in helping students, both McNamara and Marta said they're still seeing long-term effects of the pandemic play a role in attendance issues.

A number of students are suffering from anxiety and other mental health issues as a result of the pandemic, McNamara said. "There's been an increase in mental health concerns across the nation and locally, it's no different," she said.

As a result, Marta said, some kids have trouble with wanting to come to school at all. To help them, the district is "trying to come up with different strategies and alternatives for those students who have school anxiety." Often, she added, it starts with getting them in school for a little bit of time "and building on that."

Other kids struggle with economic circumstances, Marta said, in the case of families who don't have reliable housing or transportation. And, in some cases, McNamara said, "(Older students) may need to provide care for a younger sibling or have to work late into the night."

Still, AASD has a concrete goal for its attendance rates: "We really would like to get rates back to what they were prior to the pandemic," Marta said.

At the end of the day, however, the goal is to help students attend school regularly, and partnerships between students, schools, families and community organizations are key to that, she said.

"Whether you're missing school through excused (absences) or not, we want students there to receive instruction," Marta said.

"We receive a lot of support and communication from principals in Appleton because they care," McNamara said. "They are setting it up so that a young person can know there's another person that cares for you."

Rebecca Loroff is a K-12 education reporter for the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. She welcomes story tips and feedback. Contact her at 920-907-7801 or [email protected]. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @RebeccaLoroff.

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Too hard, too fast? One in three campuses now making redundancies

Number of institutions making redundancies passes 50, reflecting scale of financial challenge facing sector, but even some senior leaders fear rush into irreversible changes will do long-term harm.

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The number of UK universities cutting jobs has passed 50, with leaders claiming drastic action is required to prevent institutions going under, but some are worried that the speed and scale of the restructuring has gone too far with no way back even if financial conditions improve.

A fresh wave of restructuring programmes – announced either side of Easter – means that a third of the country’s universities are now formally making redundancies, with many losing departments and services as a result, according to an  influential list compiled by the Queen Mary University of London branch of the University and College Union.

Liesbeth Corens, a senior lecturer in history who has been collating the figures, said they were likely just the tip of the iceberg, given the tally only includes those cutting permanent staff and not other cost-cutting measures such as opting against renewing temporary contracts.

She said institutions were collectively losing hundreds of academics and professional staff but claimed that “short-term cuts are not the answer” and will do little to address the structural issues in the sector.

“It’s a knee-jerk reaction,” she said. “And one we have seen before. But the universities that went first are now not recruiting students, of course they are not. Why would you go to a university that is shrinking? When the programmes you wanted to attend are gone? It is a vicious cycle and a bunch of those on the list are risking that.”

The fear that cuts being made now will have long-term repercussions is shared even by some university leaders.

Larra Anderson, pro vice-chancellor (education) at the University of Essex , stressed that the changes at her institution – such as a freeze on promotions – were being made with a view that things could turn around.

“We are not in deficit at the moment but if the worst came to pass, we would be able to protect jobs and disciplines and still have a necessary surplus to fulfil our covenants,” she said, of why it was taking action. 

“If that doesn’t happen, we can reverse those measures, whereas other institutions that are cutting disciplines or utilising voluntary or even restructuring redundancies will not be in that position where they can rebound; we do see the sector improving in the next few years and we want to be prepared for that. There is no point in taking drastic measures and then having to rebuild a university.”

Other sector experts were less convinced that universities can ride out the current turmoil with much of their faculty and course offering intact. Unlike in Australia, where universities  cut thousands of jobs  during the pandemic only to have to  rehire many again  when lockdowns eased, the UK’s issues are more long-term.  

“This is a problem that is not going to go away, it is not a blip that we have got to weather for six months, so institutions have got to take some proper action,” said John Rushforth, executive secretary of the Committee of University Chairs, who added that in extreme cases the alternative could be universities  going out of business .

“Doing these things properly through voluntary redundancies is way more preferable than waiting until things get out of control and having to do massive compulsory redundancies,” he said.

“Part of what this is about is ultimately protecting jobs in the longer term because it is about ensuring universities are sustainable and are still there in 10, 15, 20 years’ time.

“I’d much rather that than end up in a bankrupt situation, for example, where, under current bankruptcy law, institutions cannot put interests of staff or students above creditors. That would be far worse.”

Mr Rushforth said because staff costs were such a high proportion of most institutions’ outgoings, cost savings will inevitably have to focus on redundancies, especially as the “broken” funding system leaves institutions little room to manoeuvre.

With the future so uncertain, he said most had made a “realistic assessment” that there was “ no suggestion  someone is going to come riding over the hill with a vast cheque and sort university finances out”.

Most universities are also conducting full course reviews, he added, and using the moment to take stock of what they are good at and what they think future demand is going to be before making decisions about what to invest in and what to scrap.

But Dr Corens said staff often feel these processes are happening at breakneck speed and, although they want to be involved in coming up with creative solutions to the issues the sector faces, there are limited opportunities to meaningfully shape what’s happening.

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