FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ON COVID-19 WORK

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Education.org’s team is made up of passionate and experienced education technical experts and practitioners as well as research and data specialists. More information on our team members and collaborators is available here.

1. It provides a comprehensive, robust and comparable look across country experiences in school closures and reopening decisions, as it synthesises a mass of scattered information gleaned from multiple organisations (such as UNESCO, The World Bank, Our World in Data), and daily scanning of press reports, social media, and ministry announcements. 
2. It is user-centred: our tools and resources match questions school reopening task forces and education leaders are asking. For example, not only when schools closed/opened, but what are the factors influencing their decisions at the time reopening decisions are being made? 
3. It is an interactive display of rich information, searchable by country and region, making it easy to access and more user-friendly than traditional documents and presentations.
4. It is timely, providing information updated daily, to meet the dynamic needs of school reopening considerations. 
5. It offers impartial, unbiased and apolitical analysis in a much politicised and polemicised debate. We are testing explicit and implicit assumptions.
6. It highlights equity issues by allowing comparative analyses by income level, and flagging specific policies crafted to address the most marginalised students. 

This work has been used and praised for its distinctive value-added and user-friendliness by National Education and Reopening Task Force leaders, as an instrumental tool in their decision making around school reopening approaches and policies. It has also received positive feedback from education leaders at bilateral agencies and foundations. 

These resources have been accessed in more than 160 countries by more than 2000 users.

This work has been featured widely in key global media and in regional outlets across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

Our team at Education.org has been tracking the experiences of c. 200 countries, collecting data dating back to January 27th to analyse and compare school reopening patterns and characteristics (such as distancing, hygiene, safety measures, pedagogical and policy responses), and seven-day moving average of COVID-19 new daily cases. 

Our tracking looks at primary and secondary schools only. 

Tracking is based on a combination of quantitative data (UNESCO, Our World in Data, World Bank), and rigorous daily review of ministry reports, country response plans and policies, press and social media.

We use Our World in Data for COVID-19 daily infection data (per 100,00 population, 7-day rolling average), UNESCO for school status and enrolment data and the World Bank for country data.

Some countries devolve decision making and there can be significant variation within parts of a country or even between schools.

Infection wave patterns are calculated by comparing the 28-day and 7-day averages for daily new COVID-19 cases to determine where they align for a minimum period of 14 days. This typically points to a sustained change in the wave pattern and helps to eliminate shorter-term ‘blips’ which are much more common but less important in the analysis.

We conduct a rigorous review of ministry reports, country response plans and policies, press and social media. Main information sources consulted by our team per country are mentioned at the bottom of our Country tracker.

All countries where data is reported for these three elements are included in our tracking: 

• COVID-19 infection data: Our World in Data
• Country information and income levels: World Bank
• School closure/opening data and enrolment data:  UNESCO 

School status is defined as per UNESCO:

• Open: For the majority of schools, classes are being held exclusively in person.
• Partially open: Governments have mandated (a) partial reopening in certain areas, and/or (b) a phased re-opening by grade level or age and/or (c) the use of a hybrid approach combining in-person and distance learning. It also includes the countries where national governments have deferred decisions on re-opening to other administrative units, and where a variety of re-opening modalities are being used.
• Closed: Government-mandated closures affecting most or all of the student population enrolled from pre-primary through to upper secondary levels.
• Planned vacation: Most schools across the country are on scheduled academic breaks for periods of at least four weeks. 

If you have specific questions about these resources or would like to know more about how these resources could be of use in a specific context, please use our contact form.

For media inquiries, please contact us at media@education.org. 

We welcome feedback, suggestions and corrections. Please use our contact form.

We regularly update the tracker in response to feedback. Recent changes are noted here. 

We would like to thank the many readers who give us feedback on this work every day. Your feedback is what allows us to refine and improve this so that better decisions can be made. We very much appreciate you taking the time to provide feedback.