O.6 The COVID-19 Pandemic and Early Childhood Education

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BOX O.6

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Early Childhood Education

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic has dramatically affected children’s lives and access to learning. Young children have been and will continue to be particularly vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery. This vulnerability stems from several issues, including the developmental period of their life and relatively narrow window in which to intervene before primary school entry, the need for caregivers to engage with and support young children’s learning at home, limited access to education technology or physical learning materials in many homes, and decisions by some countries to prioritize virtual learning for older children rather than younger children.

To avoid the loss of these learning opportunities, countries had to act quickly during the crisis to reach children, and adjustments to programs will be necessary during the recovery phase to reflect the lost learning opportunities that will affect many children for years to come. System-level issues will also need to be addressed because many countries are expected to now experience even more overenrollment in early childhood education (ECE) or early primary grades as a result of the lost time when some children could not enroll.

Although countries are striving to provide distance learning programs for six-to-eight-year-olds, programs for four-to-five-year-olds are less common. There are bright spots though. In Colombia, the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar launched the Mis Manos te Enseñan (My Hands Teach You) program to provide pregnant women and young children with information, activity kits, phone calls, and other support to promote children’s development. In North Macedonia, the government created a TV classroom and the Eduino digital platform aimed at enhancing the learning of ECE and primary school children. The World Bank also supported the government in securing the rights to Sesame Street, a television program that provides critical early education to children, which airs on three national television stations and reaches an estimated 250,000 children daily. In addition, the government has partnered with the World Bank on the Read@Home initiative, a new effort to get reading, learning, and play materials into homes, targeting families that are unlikely to be reached with many of the remote learning approaches being rolled out by ministries of education in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In North Macedonia, Read@Home will reach all children ages three to twelve from the country’s poorest 10 percent of households. Each child receives a package of four picture books in his or her native tongue with accompanying questions and activities for each book,

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Box O.6 (continued)

along with suggestions to help parents read with their children and ideas to play together.

In the medium term, the economic downturn caused by the impacts of COVID-19 may reduce both the demand for schooling and the supply of quality schooling because of reduced household income and public fiscal constraints. In many countries, ECE typically receives fewer budget resources than older grades. Government budgets for ECE may be reduced and, within individual families, the choice may be made to prioritize limited education funding for older children instead of younger children.

The costs of the pandemic will be felt long into the future of young children’s lives. A recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank (Lopez-Boo, Behrman, and Vasquez 2020) simulated the cost of ECE program closures in 140 countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To estimate the cost of ECE closures, the team simulated future earnings forgone when the children become adults as percentages of GDP due to declines in ECE participation net of ECE program costs. The study finds that closure of ECE programs for 12 months will cost 5.9 percent of GDP of lower-middle-income countries and 2.4 percent of GDP of low-income countries (the relatively smaller cost to low-income countries reflects the low enrollment of children in ECE before the pandemic).

As countries consider how to respond to the challenge of delivering quality early learning opportunities in the COVID-19 context, the following policy and programming recommendations may be helpful: • Ensure ECE is included within ministry of education programming for distance learning, including the development of quality content and support for dissemination. • Engage with and support parents with ideas, information, and materials to encourage their children’s learning, including learning through play and early stimulation via phone, television, radio, direct outreach, and material delivery such as storybooks in languages that families understand. Level the playing field in access to resources, particularly in rural areas, for poorer households, and where caregivers are not literate. • Ensure ECE is part of reenrollment campaigns. • Plan for potential overenrollment in preprimary or early grades of primary where disrupted school years or repetition may result in surges in young children’s enrollment and potential overcrowding in preprimary and early primary grades.

Sources: Kelly 2021; Kim et al 2020; Lopez-Boo, Behrman, and Vasquez 2020; Naceva, Galevski, and Kelly 2020; World Bank 2020a.

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Pence and Marfo 2008; Wadende, Oburu, and Morara 2016) to ensure ECE can be underpinned by a clear understanding of local norms, values, and expectations.

The quantity and quality of learning resources available at home influence the quality of children’s early learning. For example, consistent with the evidence in chapters 1, 2, and 4, a study covering 35 low-, middle-, and high-income countries found that having at least one children’s book at home almost doubled the likelihood of the child being on track for literacy and numeracy, controlling for variables such as maternal education and wealth index quintile, children’s age, and area of residence (Manu et al. 2019). However, many children are growing up in homes without these learning resources. It is important to note that interventions involving the distribution of learning materials to the home have the most impact when parents and caregivers are provided with ongoing support to use these materials to promote their children’s development (Knauer et al. 2020; Saavedra Chanduvi, Aedo Inostroza, and Arias Diaz 2020). This has become even more critical during the COVID-19 pandemic as parents have been asked to take on additional roles to support young children’s learning continuity at home (box O.6).

Beyond the home, learning spaces and resources should expand to include the wider community. Public learning spaces supplement the school and home learning environments by increasing the resources available to all children. For instance, an intervention in rural Mongolia showed that access to mobile book and toy libraries greatly expanded the learning resources that children had access to and had a positive effect on children’s development (World Bank 2017). Similarly, thoughtfully designed playgrounds with a focus on nature and neighborhood green spaces also have positive effects on child outcomes (Carr and Luken 2014; Flouri, Midouhas, and Joshi 2014). Taking a step further, recent efforts have married the science of learning with urban planning and placemaking, turning to less commonly considered public spaces, such as bus stops and grocery stores, as chances to embed learning opportunities for children (Bustamante et al. 2019; Hadani and Vey 2020).

Efforts to improve early learning should be complemented with efforts to improve other crucial aspects of child development such as health, nutrition, child protection, and social protection. When supporting parents’ and other caregivers’ efforts to promote children’s development in the early years, it is important to treat child development holistically (Richter et al. 2017). Indeed, children’s healthy development is a key determinant of their learning, both in early childhood and beyond.

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For example, nutrition and health interventions, such as micronutrient supplementation, have positive effects on children’s learning outcomes (Galasso and Wagstaff 2019; Richter et al. 2017). Child protection interventions can reduce the incidence of child maltreatment (Mikton and Butchart 2009), and cash transfer programs can alleviate household constraints, and thus also have a positive effect on child outcomes (Nandi et al. 2017). In Indonesia, for example, various government entities and nongovernmental organizations work together to run parent education programs that cover many areas of the country. The Ministry of Health disseminates information on immunization, health, and safety practices; and district health offices offer classes taught by paraprofessionals and other specialized professionals to parent groups (Tomlinson and Andina 2015). The Ministry of Education and Culture provides grants to preschool programs that submit successful proposals to create parent education programs, and programs that receive the grant must require that parents bring their children and interact with them during class (World Bank 2018a).

Many children in LMICs are exposed to multiple risk factors that cannot be addressed by a single intervention, and, as such, multifactor or multisectoral interventions are needed. Adding a parental support intervention to a cash-transfer program can have potentially additive effects on child development outcomes because together they boost both household income and parent education on child development (Fernald et al. 2017). For example, in the Head Start program in the United States, the combination of multiple program components, including parental involvement, health checkups, nutritious meals, and early learning services, contributed to improving children’s socioemotional, cognitive, and physical development. Moreover, participating children were 93 percent less likely to be removed from their home environment and placed into foster care (Aikens et al. 2013; Klein, Fries, and Emmons 2017; Lee et al. 2013; US Department of Health and Human Services 2010). Another benefit of adopting a multisectoral approach is the expansion of the number of existing platforms, such as community-based programs and social safety nets, that can be leveraged to reach the most vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations in an effective and sustainable way. For example, Peru’s Primero la Infancia (Childhood First) strategy includes integrated packages of services for pregnant women and children zero to five years across health, education, and social services sectors—such as prenatal visits, home visiting for parental support and nutrition, cash transfers, and preschool—some of which are universal and others that are targeted on the basis of need (Peru, Ministry of Social Development and Inclusion 2016).