Nearly 500,000 children missed the school year in Colombia during the pandemic

The figures reported in the analysis show that the increase in children who lost the year during 2020 was 142.22%, the figure is striking because in the last decade the results were constant until that time.

Before the pandemic, the number of students who repeated the year was 203,010, but when the national emergency was decreed due to COVID 19, around 10 million students were affected. Leaving 491,722 children who missed the school year as a result.

The significant increase in school repetition may be a result of school closures, or changes in teaching modalities due to the pandemic, but, there is a lack of implementation of measures to mitigate lost learning and this brings other negative effects, they say from the laboratory.

The department that recorded the highest number of repetitions was Antioquia, with 74,134 in 2020 compared to 37,093 reported in 2019, that is, an increase of 99.86%”, while the department that experienced the highest percentage increase, in the number of repetitions, during the referenced period was Tolima, with an increase of 574.66%. In contrast, the one with the lowest increase was Arauca, with 5.23%. In addition, Vaupés was the department that recorded the lowest number of repetitions for 2020, with 381.

Angelica Abadía, a graduate in education sciences with a specialization in preschool, believes that: “children (some) in addition to losing their years, lost the opportunity to share with other children their age, interact with peers and adults. (that is), they lost social life.”

He says that “Not only students, but also some teachers were affected during the virtual mode. The fact of not sharing with other teachers, of having to put the daily life of our homes into classes; it was not planned and it was strange.

This created a rarefied atmosphere of fear, of uncertainty, of a possibility that perhaps we could lose our lives, loved ones, etc. The fragility of life has never been so exposed.”

According to the report, when a significant number of students repeat a school year, huge inefficiencies are generated not only for the education system, but also for families. Some of the productive years of life of individuals in a society are lost. It is a sign of the system's inability to adapt to the training needs of children and adolescents.

In contrast, Abadía notes that: “I think the grades also improved because the children at home had help from parents, siblings, even some guardians. Now that they return to face-to-face, we notice that they did have enough help in their homes. In some cases, there is a gap in some knowledge that was not fixed. But in the face of this pandemic where life came first, there were surely things that happened to the background and that we are now trying to recover.”

The Colombian Institute for the Evaluation of Education, Icfes, announced that this year it will also carry out a report for the International Program for Student Assessment (Pisa), through an international examination that will test skills and knowledge in reading, mathematics and sciences.

The latest measurement, carried out in 2018, showed the poor performance of Colombian students, specifically in reading, mathematics and science, who performed less than the OECD average.

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