Primary schoolchildren in Sweden, where schools remained open throughout the pandemic, did not suffer any educational setbacks, research has found. The study, published in the International Journal of Educational Research, found that “word decoding and reading comprehension scores were not lower during the pandemic compared to before the pandemic”. Here is the abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to worldwide school closures, with a risk of learning loss. Sweden kept primary schools open, but it is unknown whether student and teacher absence and pandemic-related stress factors affected teaching and student progress negatively. In this study, reading assessment data from 97,073 Swedish primary school students (grades 1-3) were analysed to investigate potential learning loss. Results showed that word decoding and reading comprehension scores were not lower during the pandemic compared to before the pandemic, that students from low socio-economic backgrounds were not especially affected, and that the proportion of students with weak decoding skills did not increase during the pandemic. Study limitations are discussed. We conclude that open schools benefitted Swedish primary school students.
This contrasts with England, where the extended closure of primary schools in just the first lockdown led to children falling months behind in educational progress.
Other research in Sweden and Japan has shown that keeping schools open did little or nothing to increase the COVID-19 infection rate, so this deeply harmful policy also brought no benefits.
When will our politicians, both in Government and in opposition, acknowledge this evidence of huge harms and lack of tangible benefit and affirm that they will never close schools again?
Worth reading in full.
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Aside from the first lockdown, the closure of schools was unforgivable. I’d like to think these people will be brought to account but somehow I doubt it. After the first three weeks, when it was obvious that people weren’t dropping dead in the street, schools should have been reopened. Even more so, in Jan 21, when the physical and educational damage of the first lockdown was blatantly obvious, they should never have been closed. If you are a bright child with proactive parents, you will be ok, but for the vast majority, the damage caused by these lockdowns is irreversible.
although on a positive note I do now have a highly sceptical 11 year old!
No, there was clearly an agenda when it came to children. It seems that the architects of this crisis wanted to usher in the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ in which all human communication is conducted digitally, over the channels they own. What better way to induct children into this new reality than insisting they are schooled by video call.
As a teacher I taught many such lessons (I use the word generously) It was really me in a room talking to myself and looking at static profile pictures of the kids apparently present but not wishing to be seen, heard or contribute. I never asked them to turn their cameras on; Why would I want to look at some kid’s bedroom?! I doubt that any real learning happened anywhere during that period, and I hope the f**kwits who dreamed up the notion were able to see clearly how comically useless their big idea was.
Humans are humans, and they’ll communicate however they want. Don’t come along now with your Skype and Zoom *****it thinking you can remake society in 5 minutes because you’ve watched a PowerPoint at Davos about transhumanism! What an embarrassing bunch of old ********!
Oh no.. Yuval Noah Harari has given me a thumbs down 🙁
Respect! 😀
No, there was clearly an agenda when it came to children. It seems that the architects of this crisis wanted to usher in the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ in which all human communication is conducted digitally, over the channels they own.
I think stories like this are a distraction. Schools were closed because teacher’s union insisted that this was necessary to safeguard the lives of their members. In itself, that’s already a scandal as there was absolutely nothing special about Sars-CoV2 except the very special name it got and as every teacher whoever signed up for the job was perfectly aware that this meant teaching classes of children. Statistics had also repeatedly shown that teachers were not specially at risk because of COVID when schools were open. One should also keep in mind that the force-testing (I’m still calling that torture) of healthy school children whose outcomes were abused as motor of the bullshit pandemic throughout all of 2021 and the force-masking (at very least, that’s child abuse due to it being a degrading treatement) also happened because of this: Teacher’s unions claiming the very jobs their member took up voluntarily where inherently so dangerous that they should really be abolished to benefit teachers. That schools are suposed to benefit pupils was considered less important in this context.
This becomes even more of a scandal when considering possible Chinese involvement here: Traitor’s unions demanding that the kids of the nation must be tortured to benefit the ruling elite of China.
You’re right – the teaching unions behaved appallingly. I don’t believe however that they had the power or influence to shut down schools single-handedly. The very same thing happened across the world; disrupting education seemed like a global strategy.
It didn’t really happen across the world, only across certain parts of it we kept being informed about. Pandemic news would always jump from country to country in order to find something the report which fed into the narrative. The prominent examples of this would be Brazil and India which were both very much written about for a fairly short amount of time and then, dropped from the radar as soon as it became clear that continuing to report that Something absolutely dreadful is going to happen in Brazil really soon now unless the government … would cause too many people to notice that something absolutely dreadful didn’t happen, despite the government didn’t …
If the real reasoning behind closing schools comes out I suspect it will be that the leaders of the teaching unions had been bought. Or threatened.
I love that my uncharacteristic swearing has been asterisked out. Quite right; no need for language like that!
The main drivers behind the closures were the teaching unions. Their ignorant beliefs about the dangers they faced were believed by the even more ignorant politicians. And none of them will be held accountable. 🤬