[Lauren Pisani]

Many experts are discussing the issue of COVID-19 related disruptions to schooling and are attempting to estimate how it will impact student learning around the world. These models have suggested that even a few months of school closure could result in substantial learning loss, and that the most disadvantaged students are at risk of falling even further behind.

I’m wondering what this means for ECE-aged children – how much skill-building and learning loss is at stake? Which children are going to have the hardest time transitioning back to formal schooling when all this is over? What other risk factors are influencing young children’s learning and development most while they’re out of school or childcare and their families’ have work disruptions?

The IDELA Team at Save the Children is considering how we can use IDELA data to answer these pressing questions. Who else is discussing this with their team? Is anyone interested in digging into this with us??

Topic

[Andrés Moya]

Thank you Lauren. We are think about similar issues and would be interested in collaborating.

In the past two years, we have been running a psychosocial support program for families with children 0-5 residing in communities torn by violence.

We are first concerned about how the pandemic is affecting ECD and whether it will widen existing socioeconomic gaps. There are many channels here including loss of school meals, financial stress, and increased stress within the households and domestic violence, which directly affect children and the capacity of caregivers to respond.

Thus, we are discussing how to investigate these challenges and potentially devastating effects, and also how to respond quickly once the pandemic subsides in order to restore childhood development.

We are also concerned that the pandemic may attenuate our program’s impact and even cancel out the positive impacts observed on our earlier cohorts. Or perhaps, some wishful thinking here, our program enabled families to better cope and navigate in this crisis. So we also plan to assess this once we can head back to the field.

[Lauren Pisani]

Dear Andres,

It’s great to hear from you. We have a number of project teams who are thinking along similar lines in terms of the specific channels or factors influencing learning loss for young children, and potential attenuation or support from programming that families have received. I’ll follow up with you directly via email to discuss this further.

Best,
Lauren

[Ema Kasapi]

Hi Laurel, this is a pressing question also in my country and part of discussion in our program. Ministry of Education is focused to close the academic year through on line learning and children 6-17 will not return to school. Instead there are discussions that but yet confirmed the children 3-6 will return in June. As we are using IDELA instrument as a monitoring tool in our ECCD program I need you advice in regard of conducting the assessment on-line. This idea is proposed by MEAL as they consider period of conducting follow up baseline very important for data analyzing. So the though is to conduct assessment online. But I’m a little resistant on that since I think that this is a face to face interaction with child without the presence of parent. Anyhow I need to have your perspective on that.
meanwhile we have conducted a need assessment to better understand situation of Save the Children’s in Albania Programs target groups, and beneficiaries at community level, through the rapid assessment of the situation as a result of COVID-19.
Children 3-6 were represented by their parents so I think it will be very useful to use IDELA findings as a way to understand the impact of pandemic lockdown on these target

[Lauren Pisani]

Hi Ema,

It’s great to hear from you! I’m happy to talk about options for online data collection with IDELA, and also how the data you have collected in the past could inform the understanding of COVID-19 effects in your target areas. We’ll follow up via email to discuss in more detail.

Best,
Lauren

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