The situation is due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which in the Salvadoran case kept children, adolescents and school-age adolescents away from face-to-face classes in blended mode from March 2020 to 2021.
In general, the company explained in its report that this situation affects all countries in the Latin American region, where the consequences are not yet fully known and may take several years to become apparent.
The document, “The Urgency of Education Recovery in Latin America and the Caribbean,” attributes the problem to the fact that Latin America experienced 62 weeks of school closures between 2020, 2021 and 2022, the longest period compared to the rest of the world second to South and West Asia.
“All levels of education recorded a decline in their attendance rates in 2020, to varying degrees. The biggest decline is in the pre-school sector, where the decline is seven points,” he said.
In the primary, lower and upper secondary levels, this decline is around two percentage points. For the period from 0 to 2 years, the decline is around one percentage point, according to the study.
According to UNESCO, for primary and secondary education, dropping out of school due to the pandemic in 2020-2022 means abandoning the first level of reading at school and a total withdrawal from the education system of those who previously attended it.
In extrapolating this decline in school attendance in Latin American countries, the organization pointed out that this means that 2.4 million boys, girls and adolescents have dropped out or postponed school.
UNESCO relies on the results of standardized tests such as PISA 2022, whose results showed that in El Salvador, 68 percent of students perform poorly academically in the three subjects they assess: mathematics, science and reading.
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