Filipino students are losing thousands of pesos in projected annual future earnings due to prolonged school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, advocacy group Philippine Business for Education (PBEd) said Wednesday on the first anniversary of face-to-face class suspensions in the country.
“Our schools have been closed for a year now, and the longer they remain shut, the bigger the economic losses will be for our students – future workers who are not learning properly right now because of inaccessibility and poor quality of education,” PBEd Executive Director Love Basillote said. “Graduates who did not learn properly in school are less likely to land higher paying jobs because they lack the skills that would make them competitive in the labor market.”
In its report on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning, the World Bank noted that the pandemic, which has prompted school closures, could result in a loss of 0.6 years of schooling adjusted for quality. According to its Human Capital Index 2020 report, Filipino children who start school at age 4 can expect to complete 12.9 years of school by the time they reach 18. In reality, however, when factoring in what students actually learn, the learning-adjusted years of school is only at 7.5 years for Filipino students.
The multilateral financial institution added that shorter learning-adjusted years of school mean bigger economic losses for the individual in the long term. Based on the World Bank simulation, the Philippines is in “pessimistic” territory with school closures lasting for seven months or more. Exactly a year ago today, the government declared school suspensions in Metro Manila from March 10-14, followed by community quarantine guidelines which are still in effect today.
Being in the pessimistic scenario represents at least $531 in lost annual earnings every year, or around PHP25,800, which is roughly equivalent to one month’s income of an average Filipino family. Accounting for total projected years of work until retirement age, total losses amount to more than P1 million for each Filipino student.
“We are calling on the national and local governments to work together in ensuring that we have a clear and immediate plan to safely reopen our schools so that our students can continue learning,” Basillote said. “We have to do everything in our power to provide flexible learning options, skills training interventions and employability support to our students so that they can live up to their potential.”
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