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The global disruption to education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is without parallel, and its effects on learning have been severe. The crisis brought education systems across the world to a halt, with school closures affecting more than 1.6 billion learners. While nearly every country in the world offered remote learning opportunities for students, the quality and reach of such initiatives varied greatly, and they were at best partial substitutes for in-person learning. Now, 21 months later, schools remain closed for millions of children and youth, and millions more are at risk of never returning to education. Growing evidence on the impacts of school closures on children’s learning depicts a harrowing reality. Learning losses have been large and inequitable: recent learning assessments show that children in many countries have missed out on most or all of the academic learning they would ordinarily have acquired in school, with younger and more marginalized children often missing out the most. Students in São Paulo (Brazil) learned only 28 percent of what they would have in face-to-face classes and the risk of dropout increased more than threefold. In rural Karnataka (India), the share of grade three students in government schools able to perform simple subtraction fell from 24 percent in 2018 to only 16 percent in 2020. The global learning crisis has grown by even more than previously feared: this generation of students now risks losing $17 trillion in lifetime earnings in present value as a result of school closures, or the equivalent of 14 percent of today’s global GDP, far more than the $10 trillion estimated in 2020. In low- and middle-income countries, the share of children living in Learning Poverty—already over 50 percent before the pandemic—will rise sharply, potentially up to 70 percent, given the long school closures and the varying quality and effectiveness of remote learning. © UNICEF/UN0527672/SUJAN

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