School attendance during the pandemic
Almost two years after a widespread closure of schools, the first official data allows preliminary measurements of the pandemic’s real costs on schooling. School attendance of students between the ages of 6 and 23 has fallen 1.7 percentage points, which is the equivalent to having placed three million additional students in a condition of exclusion. These figures are lower than originally forecast; however, there are compelling reasons to expect that the impact will continue to grow in the coming months.
The Inter-American Development Bank carried out a study on the effects of the pandemic on school attendance and the effective engagement of students (quality of interactions and effective number of hours of study per week, beyond formal enrollment). Unlike the estimates released in the early months of the pandemic, which were made from statistical projections and assumptions about the duration of the closures, this new study is based on household surveys and official statistics.
With a cutoff at the end of 2020, national statistics show a decrease of 1.7 percentage points on average in the school attendance rate of students between 6 and 23 years of age. This is equivalent to the departure of around 3 million students from the education system, in addition to the nearly 30 million children and young people of school age excluded from the education system before the pandemic.