<mark>4 only learned 31%-40% as much in math as they would have during a normal year (Kim et al. 2021;</mark> <u><mark>W</mark> orld Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF 2021).</u>

# **Background: What’s New?**

In 2020, the World Bank released COVID-19 learning loss simulations modeling impacts on Learning Poverty (Azevedo 2020), Learning Adjusted Years of Schooling (LAYS),<sup>6</sup> and percent below minimum proficiency in PISA, as well as impacts on future earnings (Azevedo, Hasan et al. 2021). Since then, four major developments have led to revisions of the learning loss estimates and simulations:

- The pandemic has continued. In many countries, school closures have affected two or more school years, and the surge of COVID-19 cases brought about by the Omicron variants indicate we are not out of the woods yet (WHO 2021).

- There is actual data on school closures. At the time of the previous simulations, there was no global data on school closures, and so those simulations relied on uniform assumptions about school closure lengths for all countries under different scenarios. We now have observed country-level data on actual school closures for February 2020 – February 2022 from the <u>UNESCO school closures tracker, which we use for to build the baseline scenario and the different simulation scenarios.</u><sup>7</sup> Therefore, baseline school closure data now differ across countries and regions.

- More up-to-date learning assessment data are available. Internationally comparable data from PASEC 2019, TIMSS 2019, LLECE 2019,<sup>8</sup> and a new regional learning assessment program that took place in East Asia, SEA-PLM 2019, have been released, as have the results from AMPL-b 2021 assessment (in Zambia),<sup>9</sup> and policy linking results of national assessment in Lesotho. This new data has led to a country-level update of the pre-COVID-19 baseline Learning Poverty estimates.

- The Learning Poverty baseline has been updated. For regional and global Learning Poverty estimates, we use the new reporting window of ±4 assessment years around 2019 (the previous window was ±4 years around 2015). Some countries outside of the reporting window were included for temporal comparability with the previous global estimate. The exceptions include Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Lesotho, Pakistan, Tunisia, Uganda, and the Republic of Yemen. We use population estimates for 2019 to calculated populated-weighted averages for global and regional estimates.

This paper presents updated results for the impact of school closures and mitigation effectiveness on the Learning Poverty headcount ratio, LAYS, and percent below minimum proficiency in PISA under three scenarios: optimistic, intermediate, and pessimistic. Since the release of <u>Azevedo, Hasan et al. 2021, we have</u> lowered our expectations regarding mitigation effectiveness based on experiences with remote learning over the past two years of school closures. The previous “intermediate” scenario parameters are now used for the “optimistic” scenario, the previous “pessimistic” scenario replaces the existing “intermediate” scenario, and the previous “very pessimistic” scenario parameters are used for the existing “pessimistic” scenario. In all

> 6 Learning Poverty is defined as the inability to read and understand a simple text by age 10. More information about the Learning Poverty measure can be found here. The World Bank’s Learning Adjusted Years of Schooling (LAYS) concept combines quantity (access) and quality (learning outcomes) of schooling into a single easy-to-understand metric of progress. More information about the LAYS measure can be found here. While both LAYS and Learning Poverty combine schooling and learning, LAYS encompasses all levels of education through secondary school, capturing the educational life of students from 4 to 18 years of age, and represents the learning levels achieved by a schooling system of an entire country (excluding tertiary). Learning Poverty focuses on primary-aged children by combining learning deprivation (share of children at the end of primary below minimum proficiency) and schooling deprivation (share of primary-aged children who are out-of-school) into one multi-dimensional indicator.

> 7 Note that while the previous simulations used school closures as a percentage of one full school year, schools have been closed for almost two full school years to date; we adjust expected learning gains as a product of annual learning gains and observed pandemic school years.

> 8 Learning Poverty reports LLECE results on the SERCE scale.

> 9 Note that the AMPL-b 2021 assessment was conducted during the pandemic.

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