Over 400 million schoolchildren in 23 countries remain affected by school closures as the Covid-19 pandemic enters its third year, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said.

In its report released this week, UNICEF said that with 23 countries yet to fully open schools, many schoolchildren are also at risk of dropping out.

“When children are not able to interact with their teachers and their peers directly, their learning suffers,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement.

Russel also pointed out that when children are not able to interact with their teachers and peers at all, their learning loss may become permanent.

“This rising inequality in access to learning means that education risks becoming the greatest divider, not the greatest equalizer,” Russel said. “When the world fails to educate its children, we all suffer,” she added.

The report “Are children really learning?” featured country-level data on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and related school closures on children. It also contained an updated analysis of the state of children’s learning before the pandemic.

The report pointed out that 147 million children “missed more than half of their in-person schooling” over the past two years. This, UNICEF said, amounts to “two trillion hours of lost in-person learning globally.”

Out-of-school children, poor level of learning

Aside from the data on learning loss, the report also pointed to emerging evidence that shows “many children did not return to school when their classrooms reopened.”

UNICEF said that out-of-school children are some of the “most vulnerable and marginalized children in society” since they are the least likely to be able to read, write or do basic math.

They are also cut off from the safety net that schools provide which puts them at an “increased risk of exploitation” and a “lifetime of poverty and deprivation.”

The report also highlighted that while out-of-school children suffer the greatest loss, pre-pandemic data from 32 countries and territories show a “desperately poor level of learning” --- a situation that has likely been exacerbated by the scale of learning lost to the pandemic.

In the countries analyzed, UNICEF said that the current pace of learning is “so slow that it would take seven years for most schoolchildren to learn foundational reading skills that should have been grasped in two years, and 11 years to learn foundational numeracy skills.”

UNICEF noted that in many cases, “there is no guarantee that schoolchildren learned the basics at all.”

In the 32 countries and territories examined, UNICEF said that a quarter of Grade 8 schoolchildren – around 14 years old – did not have foundational reading skills, and more than half did not have numeracy skills expected of a Grade 2 student, around seven years old.

“Even before the pandemic, the most marginalized children were being left behind,” Russel said.

‘New normal’ in education

Russel said that as the pandemic enters its third year, countries cannot afford to go back to “normal.”

Having a “new normal,” Russel said, means getting children into classrooms, assessing where they are in their learning.

Schoolchildren, she explained, should also be “provided with the intensive support” they need to recover what they missed while they were out of school.

Moreover, countries should also ensure that teachers have the training and learning resources they need.

All these, Russel said, are very crucial because “the stakes are too high to do anything less.”