How some countries keep schools open
MBABANE – Eswatini could learn a thing or two from its neighbouring countries on how to ensure schools remain open amid the different waves of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This follows schools only being open for a total of four months last year.
The Ministry of Education and Training, in 2020, put measures in place to ensure that pupils continued learning despite the closure of schools due to an unprecedented pandemic and surging infections.
These preventative measures included ensuring that the transmission rate of COVID-19 is reduced such as stationing hand-washing basins across the schools, checking of temperatures by the teachers, e-learning through media lessons and the monitoring of the wearing of face masks by pupils.
However, despite these measures in all schools, the closure and reopening of schools happened approximately five times last year alone.
The other cause for the closure of schools by the ministry was the schools protests and the civil unrest which occurred in the country last year.
With pupils having only learnt for about four months in the year 2021, due to the constant closure and reopening of schools, it is imperative that the ministry finds a way to ensure that this year the calendar is not disturbed.
Difficulties
African countries such as South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda and Botswana all initially encountered difficulties when the virus emerged, but reviewed their contingency plans to ensure that schools remained open despite surging cases.
Most of the strategies these countries applied were also implemented by the country’s Education Ministry, but some were not, such as conducting lessons outdoors, assigning a healthcare worker to each school and providing psychosocial support for teachers to ensure there’s no disruption to the year’s school calendar.
The emergence of COVID-19 led to close to half the world’s pupils being affected by the partial or full school closures. According to UNESCO, over 100 million children will fall below the minimum proficiency level in reading as a result of this.
There are African countries which have made great strides in safely reopening schools to improve access to equitable and quality education, arrest the escalation of risks to children’s mental and physical health and the long-term impact of loss of learning associated with school closures.
Collaboration
Kenya, Nigeria, Malawi and Rwanda have initiated sub-national level collaboration among schools, sustained private sector investment in education, provided infrastructure support to schools and provided teachers with psychosocial support before, during and after schools reopening.
Another solution to the stopping of schools’ closure implemented by these countries is occasionally holding classes outdoors, which according to the Council of Foreign Relations, reduced the risk of transmission.
It was further stated that in Kenya, when the weather did not permit outdoor learning, schools ensured that windows and doors were opened at all times in order to filter indoor air to prevent transmission.
In South Africa, some schools have routine COVID-19 tests, where free rapid tests are
offered by a healthcare worker stationed at the school to the pupils as well as the teachers. This helps in quickly identifying who the positive individuals are in the school to enable them to go home and isolate without further transmission within the school. These tests are done three times in five days weekly.
These measures ought to be part of a bigger contingency plan by the Education Ministry for better future COVID-19 like occurrences of education disruptions.
When the Principal Secretary (PS) in the Ministry of Education and Training, Bhekithemba Gama, was asked whether the ministry had strategies or measures in place which would guarantee that the sudden closure of schools will not be realised this time around, he said the ministry’s fallback position was media lessons, such as radio and television lessons which covered a lot of areas.
“We also have the open and distance learning currently being used by Emlalatini Development Centre. They have a decentralised learning management system which we can ride on because they also teach the same curriculum,” he said.
the percentage of children who were unable to read a simple sentence by age 10 could rise from 53 per cent before the pandemic to 63 per cent as a result of school closures.
The report further highlighted that the learning losses among children due to school closures could stem from a combination of things such as forgetting what was previously known, and missing what would have been learned if schools had not been closed.
Accumulate
“These learning lessons can accumulate in the long run. Students who re-enter school far behind the curriculum expectations might be too far behind to learn anything from daily instruction and fall even further behind,” the report read in part.
A study from the University of Oxford by Noam Angrist found that there was growing evidence base of interventions that have worked at scale in low and middle-income countries to improve basic numeracy and literacy skills.
According to Angrist, the first strategy is to target instruction to a child’s learning level. It is further stated that this could be achieved at little cost by testing the child’s knowledge during the learning process – known as formative assessment – and a menu of activities tailored to each child’s level.
“This has more potential than teaching prescriptive one-size-fits all syllabi,” read the report.
The second strategy included in the report is the introduction of structured pedagogy programmes, which the report describes as the combining of structured lesson plans, teacher coaching and instructional support.
“Many teachers in the status quo are often left to fend for themselves and write their own daily lesson plans. By providing some structure and ongoing support, big learning gains are possible,” Angrist further stated.