Need to make education provision more resilient

The occurrence of natural and man-made disasters makes securing the goal even tougher

Achieving the goal of providing quality education for all is complicated enough as it is, especially in countries like Pakistan where illiteracy is still rampant, and where educational spending remains a low priority. The occurrence of natural and man-made disasters makes securing this goal even tougher.

There is ample research to demonstrate how educational provision is seriously hampered by conflict, pandemics, and natural disasters. On the one hand, disasters can destroy school infrastructure and shift public expenditure away from education. On the other hand, such external shocks can lessen academic performance of students and increase the amount of time spent out of school due to sickness, injury or disaster-induced displacements. According to an ADB research, merely 14 weeks of school closure during the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan had led to a learning loss equivalent to 1.5 years of schooling, when this impact was assessed four years later.

Disasters invariably hit poor households harder. Children in poorer households are compelled to work in the aftermath of a disaster to help ensure household survival. Young girls are married off prematurely. World Bank research to assess the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on education in Punjab also found younger girls facing a higher burden of work for being confined at home, and adolescent males dropping out at much higher levels than expected during the school closures.

Interestingly, the mentioned study found that remote learning was not an effective substitute to in-person learning except for the most privileged. Less than 15% of girls and boys were seen to engage in any form of remote learning during initial school closures, and this percentage decreased as the pandemic continued. Moreover, children in an average family were spending only about 12 minutes per day to learn remotely, and even lesser time as the pandemic went on.

The enthusiasm to use generic technological tools to make education more resilient thus needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. However, several measures can be put in place to curb the adverse impact of disasters on education. Researchers at Brookings suggest identifying high risk communities using data pinpointing geographic locations of disaster-hit areas. This can allow for more concentrated mitigation efforts such as providing short-term support for families with school-age children, for example, to lessen the risk of more permanent schooling disruptions.

Educationists are stressing the need to pay more attention to learning losses incurred due to educational disruptions or else learning disparities amongst lower socioeconomic segment of the population will worsen. Pandemic-related simulations estimate that a third of a year’s worth of learning losses caused by school closures resulted in a reduction of children’s long-term learning by a full year. Older students whose formal schooling ends prematurely due to disaster-related disruptions can be significantly disadvantaged when they try to become income earners lest they are given a compensatory opportunity to acquire work skills.

Initiating work-skill training programmes for older children who drop out from school due to disasters thus makes sense. Younger students still have a chance to recover foundational skills needed for future learning even if their learning is adversely impacted by disasters. But this too requires effective support being provided to teachers in impacted schools, including provision of supplemental learning materials. In some cases, simplifying the school curriculum may also be merited.

Policymakers and disaster management agencies need to work with education departments and teachers to formulate flexible and practical learning plans which can help contend with sudden learning disruptions.

It is likely that we will see recurrent and increasingly severe disasters instigated by climate change, which will cause further interruptions to the education system across different parts of the country. It is thus vital that due attention is paid to making our public and private education systems more resilient.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 15^th, 2022.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.