Pupils in poor areas learnt at least 50% less last year

The Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown have had a devastating effect on schooling, with new research showing that primary schoolchildren in poor areas learnt between 50% and 75% less in 2020 than they did the year before.

Research also shows that neither primary nor high schools are primary sites of infection and that the teacher deaths that occurred in 2020 were unrelated to whether schools were open.

The research was published on Wednesday by the National Income Dynamics Study Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (Nids-Cram) research project, a consortium of 31 academics from several SA universities. The study tracks the effect of the pandemic on the livelihoods of South Africans, including the dramatic rise in hunger and unemployment and the effect of welfare interventions.

The latest report includes findings of two new independent studies that show extensive learning losses in no-fee schools. Seventy percent of schools cater to the poor, and no fees are paid.

An Early Grade Reading Study of 130 schools in

Mpumalanga, which has compared reading skills over four years since 2017, found that grade 4s in 2020 experienced learning losses of 79% in home language reading and 52% in English first additional language.

A second study of 57 schools in the Eastern Cape the Funda Wande Evaluation found learning losses among grade 2s of between 53% and 68% in home language reading.

The report makes the distressing finding that the gains that SA has made to improve the reading scores of young children when compared with their international counterparts have been eroded by the pandemic. While a grade 2 child would, on the previous performance trajectory, have been able to identify 48 letters correctly at the end of the year, this fell to 36 in tests done among an Eastern Cape cohort of children.

Schools closed on March 17 2020 and reopened again only in the first week of June. Since then pupils at public schools have been alternating attendance days, which remains the situation for all but a few exceptions where the facilities exist.

In the latest wave of the NidsCram survey, for which the data was collected over February and March 2021, most parents (58%) agreed that children should return to school full-time. White respondents were most likely to support the full-time return (85%), while black Africans were least likely (56%).

FEEDING SCHEMES

School closures in SA were negotiated with trade unions, which expressed a high level of concern that teachers would be affected by school transmission. The survey says the evidence does not support the notion that schools are primary sites of infection. This is in line with the findings of the World Health Organization and other international bodies that say closing schools is not an effective way of controlling the pandemic.

It is estimated that of the 401,327 teachers on the public school payroll, 1,678 teachers died of Covid-19. This estimate was arrived at by comparing the average number of deaths

FEEDING SCHEMES HAVE STILL NOT RAMPED UP TO THE PRE-PANDEMIC LEVEL WHERE 65% OF CHILDREN REPORTED RECEIVING A MEAL

among teachers in a year to the number of teachers who died over the pandemic. The researchers stress that these deaths coincided strongly with the first and second waves of the pandemic and were not related to the dates of schools being opened or closed.

The research shows that high school teachers are no more likely than primary school teachers to contract Covid-19, dispelling the fear that the former face a bigger infection risk.

The survey showed school feeding schemes have still not ramped up to the pre-pandemic level where 65% of children had reported receiving a free meal daily. Even taking into account alternating school days, only 43% of respondents said their children had received a meal on the day they were at school.

Child hunger was higher over the period when the survey was conducted than it was before the pandemic.

Fourteen percent of respondents said that a child had gone hungry in the past week because there was not enough food. Before the pandemic this was 8%, reaching a high of 16% in November and December 2020.