81pc students were out of remote learning

Around 81 percent of primary and secondary school students were out of remote learning initiatives during Covid-19 school closures, according to a joint study by the government and Unicef.

Findings of the National Survey on Children's Education in Bangladesh 2021 were revealed yesterday at the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) auditorium in Agargaon.

Shah Rezwan Hayat, director general of the Directorate of Primary Education, said, "The government took immediate measures to save the education sector. However, many students still dropped out of schools and faced learning losses. We have been trying to address the issues," he said.

The study mentioned that 18.7 percent of primary and secondary schools in Bangladesh implemented remote learning during the school closure.

Besides, the study showed that a student studied for an average of 6 hours a day at home, school and private tuition before the pandemic, which was later reduced to two hours during the pandemic.

According to the report, teachers in some 20.3 percent of schools monitored their students via phones. In some 71.7 percent of schools, teachers provided assignment sheets and other materials to recover from the learning losses.

However, around 17.5 percent of schools took no such measures for the students.

The survey was conducted in a total of 9,000 houses across the country from December 21, 2021, to January 10, 2022. 

While presenting the findings, Md Masud Alam, director of BBS's Demography and Health Wing, said, "The pandemic resulted in an increased number of school dropouts at the primary education level. The percentage of dropouts stands at 15.4 in 2021, which was 6.4 percent in 2019."

Shahnaz Arefin, secretary of the Statistics and Informatics Division, was present as the chief guest. Sheldon Yett, Unicef Representative to Bangladesh; Matiar Rahman, director general of BBS; Stanley Gwavuya, chief of SPEAR, Unicef Bangladesh; Dipankar Roy, joint secretary of the Department of Statistics and Information Management, also spoke at the programme.