It is tragic that the great majority of SA children are not back at school full-time. Most of us who are comfortably middle class will be unaware of the damage that is being done, with suburban public and private schools having long negotiated their way around the Covid-19 pandemic.
But out there in the wider SA 85% of children have entered their second year of disrupted schooling. Public schools first closed in March 2020. In June, with the exception of matric, pupils returned on a part-time basis, attending school between one and three days a week. This is still the case.
By the time primary schools return to school full-time on 26 July — a decision made and gazetted last week — they will have attended school for 20% of the usual school time since last March. The losses will be huge, and educationists believe for young children the losses could be permanent. Once behind, children remain behind and learning losses continue to compound year after year.
With our eyes fixed on the questions of mortality and health and damage to the economy such an enormous concern, we have forgotten to look after the children. It will be a neglect that affects not just the country’s development and hard-fought educational progress, but one that individuals at school now will pay for, for the rest of their lives.
Studies of other disasters show long-term damage to children. One well documented example is the case of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, where researchers tracked the progress of children several years afterwards. Global research endeavour Research on Improving Systems of Education (Rise) published a paper in 2020 that showed even though families received financial compensation, infrastructure was repaired and they were left no worse off, four years later schoolchildren close to the fault line scored significantly worse on academic tests. The exception was children with educated mothers. The researchers estimated that affected children could stand to lose 15% of their lifetime earnings.
In SA, research on the impact of the pandemic on learning reveals a dire picture. Two longitudinal studies that are conducted to assess learning outcomes every year show learning losses among young children in poor schools in 2020 to be between 50% and 79%.
The first was an early grade reading study of 130 schools in Mpumalanga, which found that grade 4s experienced learning losses of 79% in home language reading and 52% in English first additional language. A second study of 57 schools in the Eastern Cape — the Funda Wande Evaluation — found learning losses among grade twos of between 53% and 68% in home language reading.
This underlines the importance of mitigation strategies, which the department of basic education has put in place. The curriculum has been adjusted and new annual teaching plans published. The remediation is spread over three years. But will this be enough? At a rate of children going to school on average twice a week, remediation will take many more years than three. There is also no plan yet for pupils from grades 8 to 11 to return to school full-time. Disappointingly, the school calendar for 2022 was gazetted last week, unchanged from what it usually is, with 199 school days and not a single extra day added to the school year.
Children at schools which moved online will also not be completely unaffected. A survey of teachers in eight countries by consultancy McKinsey in 2020 gave online learning a score of five out of 10 compared to in-person school, with the sharpest critics in the US and Japan, where a majority of teachers rated remote learning at between one and three out of 10. This, remarked McKinsey, “barely beats skipping school altogether”.
In SA there is little doubt that we have allowed part-time schooling to continue far too long. By October in 2020 there was already sufficient evidence that children, particularly primary schoolchildren, do not act as transmitters of Covid-19. The danger to staff lies in their own interaction, something that can be mitigated. The evidence led the World Health Organisation to advise more than seven months ago that “school closures should be considered when there is no other alternative”.
If the government is not willing to open schools — particularly high schools — despite the fears of teachers, it should do the next best thing: vaccinate them. As controversial as prioritisation in the vaccine queue is, the pandemic will one day be over. For those who are at school, or should be but are not, the damage will last a lifetime.
• Paton is editor at large.
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