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Lockdown’s impact: Unicef cites poor reading skills among PH kids

Less than 15 percent of schoolchildren in the Philippines, or about three in every
20, can read simple texts in large part due to the longest schools closure of more
than 70 weeks as of the middle of February caused bythe COVID-19 pandemic, the
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in a report. The latest UNICEF
assessment translates to a learning poverty—defined by the World Bank as the
share of 10-year-olds who cannot read or understand a simple story—of more than
85 percent, which is slightly better than the World Bank estimate of as high as 90
percent in November of last year. Learning poverty in 2019, or before the pandemic
happened, was 69.5 percent, according to the World Bank. UNICEF’s latest joint
report with the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) and
the World Bank titled “Where are We on Education Recovery?” showed that schools
in the Philippines had been closed from face-to-face classes the longest among the
122 countries that the report covered. Since the onset of the pandemic in mid-
March 2020, only a few schools in the country have returned to in-person
instruction and the government had piloted face-to-face schooling in public schools,
but in a limited scope as COVID-19 continued to rear its ugly head. Next to the
Philippines with the longest schools closure was Uganda, which was nearing
breaching the 70-week mark. Although with shorter closures than the Philippines,
however, many other poor and developing countries such as Afghanistan,
Cambodia, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gambia, Mozambique,
and Myanmar suffered a similar fate of having only less than 15 percent of children
able to read a simple text. Globally, “two years into the pandemic, schools have
been fully closed for 20 weeks and partially closed for an additional 21 weeks,
on average across countries,” Unicef said. Education disruption “Data from the
Unesco global monitoring of school closures reveal that about one in 10 countries
have fully closed their schools for over 40 weeks. Schoolchildren around the world
have missed an estimated two trillion hours—and counting—of in-person learning
since the onset of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns,”UNICEF added.
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