According to the UN Children’s Agency, more than 616 million pupils are still affected by full or partial school closures.
In many countries, in addition to depriving millions of children of the opportunity to learn basic skills, these disruptions have harmed pupils’ mental health, increased their risk of abuse, and prevented them from accessing ‘a regular source of nutrition,’ according to UNICEF.
‘We are looking at a practically insurmountable scale of damage to children’s schooling,’ UNICEF Chief of Education Robert Jenkins stated in a statement roughly two years into the outbreak.
He went on to say that ‘simply reopening schools’ isn’t enough, and that ‘intense support to restore lost education’ is needed.
According to UNICEF, ‘learning losses due to school closures have left up to 70% of 10-year-olds unable to read or understand a simple sentence, up from 53% pre-pandemic’ in low- and middle-income nations.
According to the UN agency, children in Ethiopia learnt only ‘between 30 and 40% of the math they would have learned if it had been a typical school year’in elementary school.
Rich countries are not immune to the effects of globalisation. According to UNICEF, learning losses have been reported in various states in the United States, including Texas, California, and Maryland.
School dropouts are also an issue: between 400,000 and 500,000 South African kids ‘reportedly dropped out of school entirely between March 2020 and July 2021.’
Finally, in addition to rising levels of anxiety and depression among children and young people linked to the pandemic, school closures resulted in the loss of school meals for more than 370 million children worldwide, ‘losing what is for some children the only reliable source of food and daily nutrition.’
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