Simone Grätzer

Even before the pandemic, progress of Goal 4 “Quality Education” was too slow to be achieved by 2030. COVID-19 has significantly reduced the progress, as many schools had to be closed. Children from poor backgrounds have a disadvantage.

The situation before the pandemic

Good education would be a solution to lift the affected children out of poverty (United Nations, 2019). Therefore, it is important to provide children and adults with good education. Without sufficient education, it is very difficult to compete in global marketplace. In the field of education, there are very large regional differences, which lead to great inequality. Especially in poor countries, education is often not good enough for children to reach the minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics during their school years. Often there are not enough financial resources to provide good infrastructure and well-trained teachers (cf. United Nations, 2019).

Even before the pandemic, progress on Goal 4 was too slow to be achieved by 2030 (United Nations, 2021a). Goal 4 says: “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”(United Nations, 2021a). According to Renold (2022), this goal is very complex and also a generational project, if all eleven points of this goal are to be achieved.

She believes that lifelong learning is very important and that there should be no “dead-ends” in education. This means, that there should be a constant opportunity to continue learning and to learn new things (Renold, 2022).

Still, millions of children are not able to go to school and even among those who attend school, not all of them learn. Data from 2015 show that more than 55% of children worldwide at primary and lower secondary school age do not reach the minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics. Of these, 2/3 have attended school but still have not acquired these skills. The last third needs access to education as soon as possible, as they have not been able to go to school. The problem is that even some of those who had the opportunity to acquire education either dropped out of school or did not acquire the basic skills after school (cf. United Nations, 2019).

A very efficient way to improve education is to start to process before the official commencement of primary school. Children should acquire some knowledge beforehand, which can then be built up during the official school period. For this reason, it is pleasing that in the years 2010- 2017, participation in education one year before the official start of primary school increased by 6%. However, there are very large differences between the regions. The participation rate is particularly low in less developed countries (cf. United Nations, 2019).

The literacy rate of young people is higher than the literacy rate of adults. This shows that access to education has already improved. Therefore, positive progress has been made. However, the literacy rate does not say anything about the level achieved, i.e. about the attainment of the minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics. The following graph shows the percentage of children and adolescents who did not reach the minimum proficiency divided into the disciplines reading and mathematics. Here, the regional differences in educational opportunities become revealed (cf. United Nations, 2019).

Children and adolescents not achieving minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics in percentage, 2015 (United Nations, 2019).

Problems in education during the pandemic and what should be done

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools had to be closed in many countries around the world. In some cases, these closures have lasted more than a year and during that time lessons had to be held online. This leads to a generational catastrophe, as these sometimes very long school closures will have long-term consequences regarding education. Particularly children from poor households have suffered. They are often not equipped to attend remote school. For them, there is a risk of having to interrupt school for a long time or permanently (cf. United Nations, 2021a).

Another challenge is not only the equipment, but also that information and communication skills have become very important to participate in remote school. In the data from 2017- 2019, less than 40% of people reported that they had used basic information and communication skills in the last three months. It is important to note that there were large differences in the age groups (cf. United Nations, 2021b).

There is a different problem with young children. Often, they could not attend early education where they could be supervised. Without this possibility, they are dependent on their parents. Thus, there is no equality of opportunity (cf. United Nations, 2021a).

A better basic school infrastructure is needed to be able to provide good on-site teaching again. Data from 2016 to 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, show that more than one- fifth of primary schools worldwide do not have access to basic drinking water or gender- segregated toilets. Furthermore, more than a third do not have adequate hand-washing facilities (cf. United Nations, 2021b). This would be necessary to avoid infection and to be able to continue teaching on site. In addition, a quarter of the schools have no electricity (United Nations, 2021b).

The economic impact of the pandemic has had a negative impact on education budgets and capital expenditure. This would be important to improve or adapt school infrastructure to continue teaching under the difficult conditions of the pandemic. To be able to do this online, it would be important to provide internet access and computers for home use. For on-site teaching, important infrastructural aspects are needed, such as sufficiently large classrooms and air filtration in the school buildings. This is a major problem especially in schools in less developed countries. There, it is also much more difficult to achieve the goals because the financial resources are not available (cf. United Nations, 2021b).

According to Renold (2022), non-formal learning became very important during the pandemic. This includes, for example, learning how to use new computer programs. To prevent infections a lot had to be done remotely during the pandemic. Because of that, many people had to improve their knowledge on this. This also includes the change to online teaching in schools. This required learning how to use all these tools to continue teaching in this new form. This has led to a lot of learning in this field (cf. Renold, 2022).

Conclusion

In conclusion, more should be invested in improving the quality of education for training and further education. This could be achieved through improved infrastructure, improved teacher education and training, and extended early education before the start of primary school. The greatest potential for improvement exists in less developed countries (cf. United Nations, 2019). However, the problem is that precisely in those countries, the financial resources are often not available. The pandemic has exacerbated this problem (United Nations, 2021b). Furthermore, many children could no longer attend classes due to the pandemic, which is a big problem (United Nations, 2021a).

References

Renold, U. (2022). The UN Sustainable Development Goals in Context Lecture Series: Education, Gender and Inequality.

United Nations. (2019). SDG Indicators. Retrieved 30 March 2022, from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019/goal-04/

United Nations. (2021a). Goal 4 | Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Retrieved 26 March 2022, from https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4

United Nations. (2021b). SDG Indicators. Retrieved 27 March 2022, from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2021/goal-04/