The global locking of school gates is unprecedented in scope, duration and likely consequences
IN THE STREETS of Amsterdam, children spend the “corona holiday” whizzing around on scooters; their peers in Paris are mostly stuck at home with video games; those in Dakar look after younger siblings. The one place they are not is at school. Over three-quarters of the world’s roughly 1.5bn schoolchildren are currently out of school, according to UNESCO, a UN agency. In most of China and in South Korea they have not darkened school doors since January.
West Africans readily recall the devastation caused by longer shutdowns. Today’s older schoolchildren will still remember how prolonged school closures during the Ebola outbreak in 2014 led to an increase in unplanned teen pregnancies and in related school dropouts. The difficulties faced by today’s schoolchildren in the rich world may seem trivial in comparison. In fact they, too, are serious and life-changing.
Over the past century, as global attendance at primary schools has risen from 40% to 90%, schools have been engines of social mobility. Closures in Britain could increase the gap in school performance between kids on school meals and those not on school meals, fears Becky Francis, from the Education Endowment Foundation, another charity.
Perhaps the biggest factor in exacerbating inequality in today’s circumstances is the parenting gap. In a recent poll by the Sutton Trust nearly half of British parents in middle-class professions said they were confident about homeschooling, compared with just over a third of working-class parents.
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