ROMA – One year after the start of the Covid pandemic, children and adolescents around the world have lost an average of 74 days of education each, more than a third of the global average school year of 190 days. This is what emerges from the data released today by Save the Children, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Covid 19 pandemic. Globally, it is estimated that 112 billion days of education have been lost overall and that they were the poorest children in the world to be affected disproportionately. The figure is calculated between February 16, 2020 and February 2, 2021.
Tesauro: “With the virus we discovered educational poverty”
Maria Novella De Luca
21 May 2020-
Italian students found themselves attending their institutes for much less than half of the theoretically foreseen days. This is what emerges from the Save The Children Report in which 8 provincial capitals were taken into consideration. From September 2020 to the end of February 2021, the children of preschools in Bari, for example, were able to attend 48 days out of the 107 planned in person, against their peers in Milan who were in the classroom all 112 days. Middle school students in Naples went to school 42 days out of 97 while those in Rome were in attendance for all 108 days.
As for high schools, the boys and girls of Reggio Calabria were able to participate in classroom lessons in person for 35.5 days against 97 on the calendar, their peers in Florence went to school 75.1 days out of 106 The pandemic that last year forced students to abruptly interrupt their presence at school three months before the end of the school year, has also severely marked their ability to attend classrooms in 2020/21.
Save the children: “In Italy over a million girls without study, work and training courses”
by Cristina Nadotti
November 17, 2020-
The data show strong differences between cities, linked to the trend in the risk of contagion as well as to the different administrative choices. The numbers recorded refer to school days lived in presence, highlighting those areas where students have benefited from longer periods of distance learning, with the difficulties that this entailed in terms of accessibility and the loss of direct relationship opportunities between peers. and with the teachers.
“We know well how much territorial inequalities have conditioned in Italy, even before the pandemic, the educational poverty of children, girls and boys – said Raffaela Milano, Director of Italy-Europe Programs of Save the Children – due to serious gaps in the offer of services for early childhood, full-time, canteens, extracurricular educational services. Now also the number of days in which schools, from infancy to high school, have guaranteed the opening during the second wave Covid shows a photograph of the Italy is highly unequal, and reveals that some of the regions particularly affected by early school leaving even before the pandemic are those in which the shortest time in school for children and young people has been ensured. The risk is therefore that of further expansion of educational inequalities “.
“These data cannot leave us indifferent. Also in light of the new developments of the pandemic – continued Raffaela Milano – it is necessary to put school in the first place, making every possible effort to ensure the prevention and protection of health for students and staff. school and keep schools open safely, resorting to distance learning only in cases of proven impossibility of continuing classroom lessons. At the same time, it is necessary to prepare programs and resources that immediately and in the medium and long term – including summer period – allow children and young people from the most deprived contexts who have suffered longer periods of being away from school and the greatest difficulties in distance learning to overcome this learning and sociality gap. School cannot be left by alone in the face of this challenge, and the involvement of all civic and associative resources of the territories, with the development of community educational pacts. When all categories of the country understandably denounce the loss of economic turnover in their sector, attention must be paid to a loss that is less visible in the immediate future, but extremely serious for the future of entire generations “.
A picture confirmed by the experiences and emotions experienced in the past year by the girls and boys who benefited from Save the Children’s ‘Fuoriclasse’ project to combat early school leaving, collected in a video released today by the organization.
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