Brock Professor of Educational Studies Louis Volante has contributed his education policy expertise to a new open access book addressing learning losses caused by school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected more than 1.5 billion students and youth.

Released last week, The pandemic, socioeconomic disadvantage and learning outcomes: Cross-national impact analyses of education policy reforms was authored by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in collaboration with experts in the field.

Editors Sylke Schnepf, JRC, Italy; Volante; Don A. Klinger, Murdoch University, Australia; and Orazio Giancola and Luca Salmieri, Sapienza University, Italy, examined the impact of COVID-19 related school closures as well as the effectiveness of cross-national policy interventions. The book includes a global perspective of COVID-19 learning losses as well as case studies from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Hungary and England.

Volante said that among the many outcomes of the research, it was clear that physical school closures significantly affected learning outcomes in Europe, leading to greater educational inequalities as disadvantaged students faced greater losses.

“Even though we know that learning deficits are the outcome of a mix of instruction loss due to COVID-19, we can cautiously deduce a series of conclusions about the educational reforms needed to recover the learning loss,” Volante said.

The editors note that the most common response to newly emerging learning difficulties has been to organise or provide students with additional small-group tutoring or in-person lessons tailored to specific groups of students.

According to Volante and his colleagues, summer schools and tutoring programs personalized to students whose learning loss has been followed by schools could help inform effective new policies.

However, Volante said “if there is a scarcity of government funds, additional schooling and tutoring interventions should focus first on students who, no matter their grade, display severe learning deficits in basic skills including reading, writing, mathematics and digital literacy.”

While the research showed variation in learning losses among the six countries included in the book, losses were more severe for mathematics than for reading skills.

The book also discusses the importance of improved communication between parents and teachers to help schools identify and respond to vulnerabilities among students.

Volante and his fellow editors concluded that policymakers within and outside Europe will need to carefully consider policy interventions in response to a range of cognitive and non-cognitive student needs as they seek to address COVID-19 learning losses.

The book is available on the website of the Publications Office of the European Union.