Safe Schooling and Distance Education Project

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The Project supports the immediate education response to the COVID-19 outbreak, while laying the groundwork for critical investments to preserve education human capital equitably over the mid-term and to face future shocks. It supports the Government of Turkey's efforts to mitigate rising pressures on education service delivery through distance learning for school-age children. COVID-19 caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has spread rapidly in more than 189 countries across the world since December 2019 . As of May 15, 2020, approximately 4.5 million cases have been detected across the world, with over 300,000 deaths. The first case was reported in Turkey on March 11, reaching 145,000 cases by mid-May 2020, out of which there have been more than 4,000 deaths. This operation is prepared under procedures for project for urgent need for assistance (para 12 of OP. 10).To face the the present emergency and resilient recovery, the Project will improve the IT capacity of the education sector in Turkey through three components: (i) Emergency Connectivity and IT Infrastructure; (ii) Safety and Quality Content and Pedagogy; and (iii) Capacity Building for E-Learning Resilience. These components seek to minimize the period children and youth are without schooling, reducing learning loss. All schools and universities closed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 23, 2020, MoNE initiated distance-based schooling. The learning losses due to COVID-19 will have a long-term impact on the economy. The current school closures will result in a loss of 0.6 learning adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) for all cohorts of students currently enrolled. Without remedial policy actions on timely many students from low-income families will drop out of school and never have opportunity to come back, early school leaving, and dropout will increase and loss in learning outcomes will be inevitable. Unless remedial efforts are in place to address these losses, country’s human capital will decline by 0.03. This means that in the long run when these cohorts with reduced educational attainment, lower learning achievement enter into the labor market in 15 years will have lower income, lower socioeconomic status which leads to lower GDP.The timely support by this Project and other MoNE interventions also will contribute to prevent further fall back into functional illiteracy. In PISA 2018, the average OECD country has close to 20 percent of their students performing below the minimum proficiency level in reading – considered as the threshold for functional literacy - while in Turkey 26 percent performed below this level. Due to education disruption, students already performing low are expected to suffer higher learning losses. It is also estimated that the share of students performing below the level of functional literacy in PISA will likely increase to 37 percent without mitigation. Without major and timely effort to counter the effects of school closing shock will lead to long-run costs on human capital and welfare. Therefore, it is imperative for the country to move quickly to support continued learning, damage could be mitigated and even turn recovery into new opportunity. The online education system, EBA, has been implemented in Turkey over ten years and the Government plans to sustain a blended instruction approach that students could use online for lesson preparation. However, due to the emergency nature of the response, the system has faced issues in catering to the sudden increase in the student-load as all classes moved to distance education. The effectiveness of current distance learning needs to be improved and expanded to reach all segments of the population, in order to prevent gaps across student populations from further widening. In Turkey, in the current situation, there already exists a wide learning gap between socio-economic groups. Students belonging to the poorest socio-economic quintile performed 87 PISA points (roughly equivalent to two years of schooling) behind students in the richest socio-economic quintile. The gaps will likely increase by 9 percentage points due to the school closures by the global pandemic. Therefore, an effort is needed to make the distance learning engagement more impactful.The Project will emphasize equity, recognizing school closing and re-engagement affects vulnerable students the most. Students from remote areas, low socio-economic background, disabled, refugee or other non-native Turkish speakers, and from homes with parents less able or competent to support the home education efforts, face a higher risk of falling further back in their educational performance. Students from poorer social background, with large families in crowded households will find it particularly difficult to access and follow the distance education schedule. This is cl early reflected in the MoNE’s Equity Analysis (2020), which shows significant disparities in connectivity, access to devices and access to the EBA online system across poverty levels. Although, internet access by households ranges from 68% to 88% depending of the source, access to internet is still low among poor households with school age children (39%), and even lower for households with 3 or more children. When results were explored by quintiles of regional poverty, inequalities in access to online EBA emerge. On average, only 9% of the students in the poorest regions connected to the online EBA system, while 29% of the students from in the richest regions connected to the system in the same period of time. In addition, girls may also be more disadvantaged than boys in accessing home-based education, as they be expected to undertake more household chores, particularly in large and/or conservative families.