Readying children for on-campus school

ParentsWorld interviewed some of the country’s most knowledgeable educationists and healthcare professionals to advise how best parents can prepare and support children to resume in-person schooling at a time when education institutions and society are obliged to live with the Coronavirus until herd immunity is attained, writes Aurelin Ruth, Mini P. & Cynthia John Last month (August), after 62 weeks of lockdown of all education institutions across the country — the longest education moratorium worldwide — ten state governments issued tentative orders to restart middle and secondary school on-campus classes subject to strict adherence to anti-Covid safety protocols. Meanwhile, this knee-jerk lockdown of preschools-class XII institutions, to check spread of the novel Coronavirus, has imposed heavy loss of learning on the country’s 300 million preschool and primary school children in particular. While a few thousand well-resourced private schools have responded to the pandemic challenge by switching to online learning-from-home classes for their students from elite and upper middle class homes, with a mere 8 percent of Indian households able to afford Internet connectivity and digital devices, learning has stopped for the majority of India’s 260 million children and youth in primary-secondary education, especially in rural India. An Emergency Report on School Education based on a nationwide School Children’s Online and Offline Learning (SCHOOL) survey led by eminent economist Jean Dreze, says only 24 percent of urban children and 8 percent of rural children countrywide were able to attend online school regularly over the past 16 months. Another authoritative field research study titled Loss of Learning During the Pandemic, published by the Bengaluru-based Azim Premji University (APU), states: “Overall loss of learning is going to lead to a cumulative loss over the years, impacting not only the academic performance of children in their school years but also their adult lives”. The APU study says that “92 percent of children on average have lost at least one specific language ability… and 82 percent of children in classes II-VI have lost at least one specific mathematical ability learned in the previous year.” Moreover, with 200 million children enrolled in 1.6 million government-run anganwadis and 1.2 million government primary schools deprived of early childhood nutrition and the mid-day meal provided to them, pervasive child malnutrition poses danger of brain damage and stunting to millions of children. The India Child Well-being Report 2020, published last November by World Vision India, a Chennai-based NGO, says the pandemic has placed 115 million children at risk of severe malnutrition. A major factor in prompting the belated awakening of state governments to whom the buck of restarting on-campus classes has been passed in recent weeks after the BJP/NDA government at the Centre ordered a national lockdown of all education institutions countrywide for over 16 weeks from March 25, 2020, was a detailed cover story titled ‘Why Schools Should Reopen Right Now’ in EducationWorld (July), an affiliated print and online magazine of ParentsWorld. In the unprecedented 10-page long-form feature, EW editors highlighted the huge loss of learning suffered by the…