Contingent reflections on coronavirus and priorities for educational planning and development

By Keith M Lewin, University of Sussex

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically shifted education and development priorities. The tragic death toll and high rates of morbidity across many countries are an unprecedented setback and a calamity for those affected physically and mentally. The economic and social effects of lockdowns, loss of production and business confidence, and global recession will cast a long shadow over education systems. 

Despite the 435 million items that Google already indexes under “COVID-19 education”, many things remain unknown. No one has a clear idea of how the current pandemic will unravel over anything but the short term. The challenge is to strengthen the mechanisms to separate evidence from opinion and to balance popularism with speaking truth to power—especially when political systems can find it difficult to distinguish fact from convenient fiction.

Proposition 1: The basic arithmetic of organising and financing and mass education systems will remain structurally the same as it was before COVID-19.

Mass provision of education will continue to be provided through schools that are publicly funded, especially for the poor and marginalised. The public good aspects of extending learning opportunities to all will remain undiminished, though it will need to be closely coupled to reducing the inequalities that COVID-19 will exacerbate. These inequalities include asymmetry in the loss of opportunities to attend school, extreme variations in the capacity of households to homeschool children, and uneven disruptions to teacher deployment and absenteeism, especially where risks to teachers are real and unrecognised. It will remain true that Low and Low Middle Income countries (LICs and LMICs) will need to spend 6% of GDP and to collect more than 25% of GDP in revenue to achieve and sustain and universal enrolment in schools of minimal quality (but see Proposition 10 below).

Proposition 2: The amount of grant aid from donors will plateau and may fall, as the appetite for aid to education comes under increasing pressure from new domestic priorities and economic recession.

The domestic political economy of development assistance in donor countries will diminish willingness to give grant aid, accelerating existing trends (Lewin 2019). Investments in health care systems and global health will take precedence over access to education and learning. Tied aid will become more common as rich countries seek to rebuild their own employment and corporate revenues. Aid sponsorship of higher education students to attend universities in the OECD in person will suffer from restrictions on travel. In the short term, domestic tax revenue will fall in OECD countries as the effects of economic lockdowns and global recession work their way through. This will reduce commitments to aid for education in real terms as government budgets and GDP shrink. Fiscal reforms that can increase domestic revenue, especially where revenue is low, e.g. in LICs and LMICs, will become even more pressing. Though grants related to immediate needs created by the pandemic can be useful (GPE 2020), they cannot meet needs for recurrent financing. Nor is it clear if it would be better to direct such grants to address short term lack of access to conventional schools, or towards more intensive care beds and ensuring that test, track and trace is effective in controlling the spread of new infection.

Proposition 3: LICs and LMICs will suffer more than OECD countries from reductions in domestic revenue, making educational financing more difficult.

Domestic economic activity is being compromised by necessary lockdowns, morbidity has a direct effect on productivity, falls in demand for exports are reducing taxable transactions, and income and tourist revenues are collapsing. Consequently, the collection of personal income tax will fall as employment shrinks, especially where PAYE systems are weak. VAT receipts will drop as consumption falls. Corporate taxes will follow the downward economic cycle. Remittances will drop dramatically, with a huge impact on LICs and LMICs that export labour. In most LICs and LMICs savings will not be sufficient to buffer recession. The temptation is to borrow to finance recurrent public expenditures, as has happened in the OECD. But the risks for sub-prime borrowers in LICs and LMICs, with already high debt-to-GDP ratios and poor credit ratings, are much greater. Loans and development bonds can have dangerously high interest rates of 8% or more annually before transaction costs. This can result in more interest being paid than the value of the original loans. This benefits the lender more than the borrower. As Ibsen observed in A Doll’s House, “There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt” (Ibsen 1992).

The experience of debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative since 1996 is illustrative of the risks of over borrowing. As recently as the end of March 2020 the International Monetary Fund warned that “to reverse the recent increase in LIC public debt burdens and reduce their debt vulnerabilities, countries need to pursue cautious borrowing policies and strengthen their public debt management” (IMF 2020). Debt write off linked to mitigation of COVID-19 impact is widely mooted. This makes good sense but only if egregious lenders are not protected from the consequences of their previous actions by the translation of private to public debt that is then written off. This creates moral hazard and an incentive for future sub-prime lending.

Proposition 4: Education systems will reopen and will rebuild themselves in ways that largely replicates their existing form, with more attention to resilience in the face of systemic risk.

Assuming COVID-19 is mitigated and morbidity falls to levels similar to the aftermath of previous pandemics, the most likely outcome in five years’ time is that the existing structures of mass education systems will adapt and persist. Organisational forms, physical structures, working practices, and roles in social reproduction and economic development are deeply embedded and widely thought to be functional. Despite the many critiques of the characteristics of education systems and regular attempts at radical reform, schools, colleges, and universities persist in forms that converge more than they diverge. Evolution is more likely than revolution in system development (Lewin 2015a). The most advanced economies have yet to replace schools with other forms of educational process and their elite institutions celebrate conventional forms of education and training. Most LICs and LMICs seek to replicate the dominant forms of schooling in high-income countries and imitate forms originating in OECD countries.

Notwithstanding this overall observation, there will be changes. Social distancing will become common, teachers may need Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in some circumstances, distance learning technologies will emerge where they can operate consistently at affordable costs, and assessment may make more use of virtual than real testing environments with less practical work. The opportunities to innovate should be grasped, but so also should lessons be learned about how to invest in making education systems more failsafe. More “just in case” measures may need to replace their “just in time” counterparts. Planning will need to place more emphasis on resilience, developing robust and distributed systems of learning that are less centralised and dominated by narrowly defined cost efficiency and high-stakes testing.

Proposition 5: The global pandemic has illustrated the importance of global public goods like health and education.

Almost all countries have had public health campaigns to manage COVID-19. These require skilled staff in public health systems that generate and validate health messages, as well as a literate and numerate population capable of understanding and acting on such messages. The crisis has highlighted how public institutions are at the heart of a response to the crisis that requires collective action, not to mention responsible sharing of the burden of disruption, the risks of infection, and ultimately treatment. Without public goods that are publicly financed, hospitals cannot reach beyond those who can pay for medical services, and all children cannot access educational services that are rationed by price. Key workers need to continue to send their children to school if they are to continue to work. More efficient and effective use of trained teachers, secure in their environments, will be an overdue benefit.

Proposition 6: Non-state providers have to develop business plans that factor in a new economics of private school operation.

Private schools depending on fee-paying students will have to manage a significant loss in income as disposable household income is squeezed. Austerity will have a disproportionate effect on middle- and lower-income families, where effective demand for fee-paying private schooling can be expected to fall as incomes are reduced. It may also be reflected in gendered preferences to enrol and other social exclusions of relatively powerless groups. New arrangements for social distancing in classrooms, PPE for teachers and pupils, boarding, transport, and sanitation and hygiene are likely to inflate costs. Private providers may seek subsidies from states to maintain viable businesses during and beyond lockdown, but most LICs and LMICs will not be able to finance salary supplements and loan repayment holidays. It will be a political question as to whether the opportunity costs of diverting public resources for this purpose are judged to be socially beneficial.

Proposition 7: Children currently not attending school as a result of school closures by governments should not be confused with conventionally defined Out of School Children (OOSC).

Their causalities are unrelated, and the numbers affected are vastly different. A precipitate rush into distance education, artificial intelligence driven internet schooling, or one of many versions of homeschooling is both unrealistic and unwise, at least until the temporary and permanent effects of COVID-19 can be distinguished from each other. It will be a mistake to adopt new priorities in a hurry with only opinion as a foundation for action. Existing priorities remain important. Conventionally defined OOSC excluded by the cost of education, location, civic status, or disability continue to be at risk. Learners not learning before the crisis still have the same need to learn.

Proposition 8: Teachers have to be seen as key workers, and schools as key institutions.

Teachers have not been considered “key workers” in most countries, except to meet the need to keep some schools open for the children of other key personnel so that they can go to work. In the short term, the consensus in most countries is that closing schools made good sense. Before it was known that children were at low risk of severe illness, the precautionary principle dictated that public authorities should err on the side of caution. Schools are key social institutions that create meeting spaces for teachers and parents who would clearly be at greater risk than if they were self-isolating. As infection rates fall, schools will continue to play a central role in the ability of societies to reproduce themselves, transmit knowledge and skill across the generations, and encourage behaviour based on evidence rather than superstition and commercial interest. Teachers as key workers have to take the lead on developing safe practices that reflect the evidence and that recognise the need for consensus about acceptable levels of risk. Schools, as key public institutions, can demonstrate how COVID-19 can be managed in institutions, building on their experience with more familiar infection and morbidity risks.

Proposition 9: Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) for education needs to be revisited in the light of the dislocations of COVID-19.

The world is now seriously off track to achieve SDG4 (UN 2015). The force majeure of the pandemic is causing dislocations. There are many consequences for the achievement of this Goal. These include: i) children de-schooled by temporary closures may not return, especially if they are already at risk of drop out; ii) ambitions to extend universal schooling to grade 12 look premature, given the direct and indirect costs and likely falls in levels of employment and household incomes; iii) demand for technical and vocational education will fall as labour markets contract; iv) equitable opportunities to learn are threatened by instabilities in school income, staffing, and safety; v) universal literacy may have less utility as modern sector development slows; and vi) global citizenship is challenged by closing borders and restrictions on movement of workers and students. Simply changing the SDG time frame to allow a longer period to achieve the same goal and targets is unlikely to be the best strategy, but it is the most probable. After five years of striving to achieve SDG4, a comprehensive review is needed. This must revisit whether the Goal and its ten targets are still fit for purpose, whether some targets should be deprioritised in the light of recent events and others introduced, and how the Goal and targets should be adapted now to the radically different country circumstances created by COVID-19.

Proposition 10: The SDG4 indicators also need to be changed, even if SDG4 and its Targets are retained.

Useful targets need to be achievable and target setters must co-commit with target getters to common indicators that are relevant to different systems. This now includes indicators that have some bearing on COVID-19 status. What is important to achieve is dependent on where a country and education system is located on the pandemic curve. Thus, measuring changes in enrolment rates during a system closure seems pointless. Learning levels need assessing in a different way before and after disrupted schooling. Gender equity may look different as a result of changes in social care. Other indicators of progress need careful reconceptualization. For example, one of the SDG4 ambitions is that LICs and LMICs will allocate around 6% of GDP to education (from a current average of around 4%) and that the proportion of the public budget that governments spend will increase to 20% (from an average of about 15%). These changes will almost certainly happen in many countries in 2021. But it will not mean more money spent on education. This is because GDP in many LICs and LMICs will fall and at the same time educational spending will prove sticky on the downturn. Education system costs are mostly in teachers’ salaries and these will continue to be paid. The exception will be in systems which have casualised the teaching profession with short-term contract teachers, and where public and private providers employ teachers on a temporary basis with few contractual obligations. In these cases, resilience will be low. The SDG4 indicator that is the percentage of GDP spent on education is thus misleading. It can increase in value when less money is spent on education if GDP itself shrinks. It needs replacing.