Professional Documents
Culture Documents
DURING COVID-19
by Bianca Gallagher, Global Education Project Officer
Every child has a right to learn to read – and every child requires literacy skills to open
up life choices and opportunities. Research has shown that children have a greater
chance of success in school and later life if they develop foundational skills such as
literacy and numeracy. A lack of these skills is strongly linked to social exclusion and
reinforcement of inequalities and disadvantage.
The global COVID-19 pandemic and the consequences of lockdowns are magnifying
the existing literacy challenges and exponentially increasing the inequity between
children who are supported to read and those who aren’t.
Despite the efforts of governments and organisations to address the ongoing crisis,
some 500 million children – often the poorest and most marginalised – have no
access to distance learning. Even if children can access distance learning materials,
many do not have literate parents who can help them.
For over 10 years, our Literacy Boost approach has helped teachers, students, parents
and community members to develop the literacy skills of children in the primary
grades, both inside and outside of the classroom. The programme works with the
existing national curriculum and focuses on developing skills that children need for
independent reading with the core components of teacher training, community
action, enhancing the literacy environment and student assessments.
Since the approach first started in 2009 in Malawi, we have collected a large body of
evidence about efficacy of the approach. Importantly, components of the approach
can still be applied in times of coronavirus, with a little adaptation.
A young girl learns at home with a memory card game, Guatemala
In Indonesia, where most of the country’s 500,000 schools are still closed, we have
introduced a ‘Visiting Teachers’programme which involves school teachers visiting
small groups of children at their homes in Central Sulawesi and West Java provinces.
This allows children with limited or no internet access to continue studying during the
pandemic.
We have also broadcast YouTube and community radio talk shows to encourage
positive parenting and home learning – and in the East Nusa Tenggara province,
school librarians and literacy community volunteers are distributing and swapping
books from home to home to keep children reading. Parents and children are taking
part in competitions to strengthen their literacy levels.
In Guatemala, we are distributing alphabet and nutrition memory games which have
been adapted to local languages. We’ve adapted our traditional reading camps to be
transmitted weekly via local radio stations with sessions including singing time, story
time and letter knowledge. The sessions also encourage parents to be involved in
their children’s education and to stay involved as schools start to reopen.
In the Solomon Islands, we have adapted our ‘Emergent Literacy and Maths at
Home’ package for delivery over the radio to support the development of early
literacy skills for children in rural areas. The package is specifically designed to
support the children of parents who are engaged in daily subsistence agriculture and
fishing and often have low adult literacy rates.
Students learning with tablets at Rajarhat upazila, Bangladesh
All over the world, we have been rapidly adapting our existing work to ensure that
children can continue their literacy journeys of discovery. A child’s right to a good
quality, safe and inclusive education does not end if schools are closed. We must
ensure that all children continue to learn while schools are closed, through inclusive
distance learning.
And as we start to see some schools reopening in some places around the world, we
must make sure that every child is supported to return to school when it’s safe to do
so – and that education systems are stronger, so that every child gets a good
education and the chance to build a better future.