The longer schools remain closed, the bigger losses it would be for millions of Filipino students nationwide.
This is the concern raised by the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd) as the Philippines marked the first anniversary of face-to-face class suspensions on March 10.
PBEd, in a statement, expressed alarm that Filipino students are “losing thousands of pesos in projected annual future earnings” due to prolonged school closures caused by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
“Our schools have been closed for a year now, and the longer they remain shut, the bigger the economic losses will be for our students – future workers who are not learning properly right now because of inaccessibility and poor quality of education,” said PBEd Executive Director Love Basillote said.
When President Duterte declared class suspensions in Metro Manila in March last year, schools were closed and students in all levels were forced to continue their studies at home.
Even when the new school year and academic year opened for both basic and higher education levels, the government prohibited the conduct of in-person learning.
Distance learning and flexible learning options were implemented by the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Commission of Higher Education (CHED) for SY and AY 2020-2021.
However, PBEd noted that this set-up poses a lot of challenges to students.
In particular, Basillote noted that “graduates who did not learn properly in school are less likely to land higher paying jobs because they lack the skills that would make them competitive in the labor market.”
Citing a World Bank report on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning, PBED said that “the pandemic, which has prompted school closures, could result in a loss of 0.6 years of schooling adjusted for quality.”
Based on the Human Capital Index 2020 report, Filipino children who start school at age four can expect to complete 12.9 years of school by the time they reach 18. “In reality, however, when factoring in what students actually learn, the learning-adjusted years of school is only at 7.5 years for Filipino students,” it added.
The multilateral financial institution added that “shorter learning-adjusted years of school mean bigger economic losses for the individual in the long term.” Based on the World Bank simulation, the Philippines is also in a “pessimistic” territory with school closures lasting for seven months or more. Being in the pessimistic scenario represents at least “$531 in lost annual earnings every year, or around P25,800, which is roughly equivalent to one month’s income of an average Filipino family.”
Accounting for total projected years of work until retirement age, it was noted that the total losses amount to “more than P1 million for each Filipino student.”
Given this, PBED reiterated its call on the national and local governments to work together and come up with a clear and immediate plan to safely reopen the schools so that the students can continue learning.
“We have to do everything in our power to provide flexible learning options, skills training interventions and employability support to our students so that they can live up to their potential,” Basillote ended.