Oecd covid survey eag indd

---

The S t a t e o f G l o b a l 
E d u c a t i o n
18 M o n t hs i n t o t h e P a n d e m i c
September 2021

---

Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks are due, particularly in the context of the 
COVID-19 pandemic, to the many people who contributed to 
and helped shape the preparation of this spotlight on 
The State 
of Global Education: 18 Months into the Pandemic.
The data underlying this report were produced through the 
Survey on Joint National Responses to COVID 19 School 
Closures
, a collaborative effort conducted by the United 
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; 
the United Nations Children’s Fund; the World Bank; and the 
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 
(OECD). The data were complemented by an additional 
Special Survey on COVID-19 administered by the OECD for 
its member and partner countries to report on the situation in 
2021 up to 20 May. 
Designed for government officials responsible for education, 
the survey collected information on national or regional 
education responses to school closures related to the 
COVID-19 pandemic. This spotlight is the 
fourth in a series 
that tracks developments throughout the pandemic, and 
analyses a range of topics, from lost learning opportunities and 
contingency strategies through the organisation of learning 
and the working conditions of teachers to issues around 
governance and finance.
Our special thanks go to members of the OECD Indicators 
of Education Systems (INES) Working Party, who provided 
guidance on the design of the questions, co-ordinated the 
national responses to the survey, and provided guidance and 
comments throughout the process. 
This spotlight was prepared under the responsibility of Andreas 
Schleicher, Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD 
Secretary-General and Director for Education and Skills.
Co-ordinated by Eric Charbonnier and Marie-Hélène Doumet, 
this work is the product of a collaborative effort across staff 
of the OECD INES programme of the OECD Directorate for 
Education and Skills: Étienne Albiser, Heewoon Bae, Andrea 
Borlizzi, Antonio Carvalho, Manon Costinot, Bruce Golding, 
Yanjun Guo, Corinne Heckmann, Massimo Loi, Gara Rojas 
González, Daniel Sánchez Serra, Markus Schwabe, Giovanni 
Maria Semeraro, Choyi Whang and Hajar Sabrina Yassine. 
Administrative support was provided by Valérie Forges. 
Cassandra Davis, Sophie Limoges and Della Shin provided 
valuable support in the editorial and production process.

---

© OECD 2021 
3
The State of Global Education: 18 Months into the Pandemic
Editorial
As schools and universities in OECD countries are 
progressively resuming operations following the most 
serious disruption of their services for many decades, 
it is time to look forward to what could and should 
be the new normal. In an unprecedented crisis like 
the COVID-19 pandemic, it is difficult to derive 
lessons from the past. However, it can be instructive 
to look outwards to how other education systems are 
responding to similar challenges. To support this, the 
OECD has collected comparative education statistics 
to track developments throughout the pandemic, 
looking at aspects ranging from lost learning 
opportunities and contingency strategies to make up 
for these through the organisation of learning and 
the working conditions of teachers to issues around 
governance and finance. 
This spotlight expands the picture from learning 
in educational institutions to the labour market 
opportunities of youths and their transition from 
education to work. Young workers typically bear the 
brunt of economic and employment crises, as they 
often have not acquired the skills and professional 
experience needed in the labour market and are more 
likely to have short-term and precarious contracts. In 
times of layoffs, they are also often the first to go, as 
they have not acquired sufficient seniority. This being 
said, and compared with earlier crises, government 
interventions such as job retention schemes were 
largely able to cushion the effect on employment, 
with unemployment even among poorly qualified 
25-34-year-olds across OECD countries just
2 percentage points higher in 2020 than in 2019. 
Furthermore, the impact of the pandemic on the labour 
market seems more evenly distributed across levels 
of education than during the last global financial 
crisis. This relates to the nature of this health crisis: 
while highly educated adults were often able to work 
remotely, those with lower educational attainment 
dominated many occupations that performed essential 
functions during the pandemic. Still, a closer look 
shows a less-even picture: Across the OECD,
the year-on-year change in hours worked during the 
second quarter of 2020 fell only by 8.5% among the 
highly skilled, while it dropped by 24% among those 
without an upper secondary education. And while 
the number of hours worked recovered for highly 
educated adults that returned to work later in the year, 
they persisted for those with a lower level of education. 
The data also show gender differences for the poorly 
qualified: younger women without upper secondary 
attainment were more affected by unemployment 
than men. On average across OECD countries, the 
unemployment rate among women without upper 
secondary attainment was 12% in 2020, compared 
to 10% among men. In contrast, for those with higher 
educational attainment levels, unemployment levels 
were not only lower overall, but also similar between 
men and women. However, between 2019 and 
2020, the rise in unemployment due to the pandemic 
was generally similar for women and men, across all 
levels of educational attainment. This is due partly 
to government and company policies to introduce 
flexible working measures, but also to the occupations 
allowed and encouraged to continue working during 
lockdowns, many of which tend to be over-represented 
by one gender or the other, such as nurses for women 
or construction workers for men.
While policy attention is naturally focused on young 
people at work or in their transition to work, since their 
immediate future is most directly affected by the crisis, 
the loss of learning opportunities for students in school 
or university deserves no less attention, as it could have 
serious implications for their future. As the OECD’s 
Special Survey on COVID-19 shows, the extent of 
lost learning opportunities has been very significant in 
many countries. On average across the 30 countries 
with comparable data for all levels of education, 
pre-primary schools were closed for 55 days, primary 
schools for 78 days, lower secondary schools for 
92 days and upper secondary schools for 101 days 
between 1 January 2020 and 20 May 2021. The 
number of days of school closure represents roughly 
28% of total instruction days over a typical academic 
year at pre-primary and more than 56% at upper 
secondary level on average across OECD countries. 
While the Special Survey on COVID-19 highlights 
numerous contingency measures that countries put 
in place to keep learning going when schools were 
closed, national studies show significant learning 
losses, particularly for students from disadvantaged 
backgrounds and among students in secondary 
schools.
Recognising the serious impact of school closures 
on the learning and well-being of students, many 
countries adjusted their strategies concerning school 
closures as the pandemic evolved. As the Special 
Survey on COVID-19 shows, after a quasi-systematic 
closure of schools in most countries in mid-March 
2020, approaches diverged significantly between 
September 2020 and the first part of 2021.

---

4
© OECD 2021
The State of Global Education: 18 Months into the Pandemic
In some countries, schools remained closed as viral 
transmission increased, while others kept them open 
even in a difficult pandemic context. Learning in 
upper secondary schools was disrupted (full or partial 
closures) by more than 200 days in Colombia,
Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Mexico, 
Poland and Turkey between January 2020 and May 
2021, compared to less than 50 days in Norway,
New Zealand and Spain. The Special Survey on 
COVID-19 also shows that the arrangements for 
keeping schools or classes open varied considerably. 
Germany, for example, implemented strict rules in 
2021 such that all schools had to adopt hybrid 
learning protocols if incidence rates were higher than 
100 in a region. Moreover, after 3 days with an 
incidence exceeding 165 per 100 000 inhabitants, 
schools had to switch to distance learning for all 
students. By contrast, Belgium, France, Spain and 
Switzerland did not fully close their upper secondary 
schools (or only for a few days) between January 
and May 2021 despite high cumulative numbers of 
COVID-19 cases.
It is also important to address the impact of the 
pandemic on adult learning. The shutdowns of 
economic activities decreased workers’ participation 
in non-formal learning by an average of 18%, and 
in informal learning by 25%. Before the pandemic, 
workers across OECD countries spent on average
4.9 hours per week on informal learning and 0.7 hours 
on non-formal learning. According to estimates, during 
the pandemic, this dropped to 3.7 hours for informal 
learning and 0.6 hours per week for non-formal 
learning. This represents a notable amount of lost 
learning, which may not be easily recovered.
In sum, the disruptions of learning risk to cast long 
shadows over the economic and social well-being of 
people of all ages. This makes it so important to learn 
the right lessons from this crisis. 
For a start, it has become abundantly clear how 
important it is during a pandemic to ensure reliability 
and predictability of educational services for learners 
and parents. Even during school closures, all students 
should have daily and dedicated contact with 
educators. Long phases of distant learning need to be 
avoided, and daily schedules for hybrid learning work 
better than weekly or monthly schedules. 
Wherever possible, schools should remain open, with 
appropriate health measures that minimise risks for 
students, school staff and the rest of the population.
It is important to combine transparent criteria for 
schools and education services – e.g. the use of 
bubbles and stable pods, masks, ventilation, testing, 
quarantine, vaccination, classroom or school closures 
– with flexibility to implement these at the frontline. 
Hybrid and remote learning should be second- and
third-best options, and only be used when keeping 
schools open proves impossible to preserve collective 
health, or students’ and staff’s safety. Providing 
transparent criteria and guidelines based on infection 
levels and other relevant considerations for different 
modes of schooling is essential, as is the necessary 
flexibility to implement them effectively at the frontline. 
Beyond continued academic development, a holistic 
approach to education focusing on students’ socio 
emotional learning and agency needs to be a central