The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the education sector in unprecedented ways. As with many other countries around the world, the Ethiopian government closed schools following the first identified case in the capital city, Addis Ababa, on the 16th of March 2020. Across the country, these closures resulted in more than 26 million¹  learners staying at home for almost eight months (UNESCO, 2021).² In addition to this hiatus in their education, pupils were promoted automatically to the next grade with only 45 days of catch-up classes (Ministry of Education, 2020). In other words, those attending a specific school grade in March 2020 were then promoted to the next grade when school resumed in October 2020.

For a significant proportion of Ethiopian pupils, learning during school closures was extremely limited despite the government’s efforts to create educational programmes via national television and radio stations (Kim et al., 2021a; Yorke et al., 2020). School closures, combined with barriers to accessing remote educational resources, meant potential learning losses for a significant number of pupils.

Several studies have already indicated that COVID-19 resulted in learning losses, especially among the poorest and most disadvantaged groups. A study in Indonesia found that pupils lost 11 points on the PISA³ reading scale due to the four-month school closure from March to July 2020 (Yarrow, Masood & Afkar, 2020). It was also estimated that Grade 4 pupils in South Africa experienced losses equivalent to more than 60 percent of an academic year (Ardington, Wills & Kotze, 2021), while pupils in the UK lost a third of their expected learning during pandemic-related school closures (Major, Eyles & Machin, 2021).

It is anticipated that school closures in Ethiopia could similarly result in learning losses and challenges for pupils to catch up with their learning, particularly for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Our related emerging findings in Ethiopia have indicated that school closures exacerbated pre-existing inequalities in education, where progress was much lower for rural students compared to those in urban areas who were tracked from Grade 4 to Grade 6 (Kim et al., 2021b; Bayley et al., 2021).

Building on this work in Ethiopia, this Insight Note provides a new perspective on numeracy achievements of Grade 1 and Grade 4 pupils by comparing learning at the start of each academic year and the gains over the course of the year across two academic years: 2018-19 and 2020-21. During the 2018-19 academic year, the Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) Ethiopia programme collected data on students’ numeracy achievement from 168 schools. After schools reopened in October 2020, and with additional support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, data on students’ numeracy achievements were collected for two new cohorts of pupils in Grades 1 and 4 in the same schools using the same instruments. This has enabled us to compare learning patterns between two cohorts in the same grades and schools before and during the pandemic. More specifically, in this Insight Note, we aim to:

1. Compare foundational numeracy levels of pupils entering Grade 1 in the 2020-21 academic year relative to those in 2018-19.
2. Compare progress in foundational numeracy for Grade 1 pupils over the course of the 2020-21 academic year relative to that seen during the 2018-19 academic year.
3. Compare numeracy levels of pupils entering Grade 4 in the 2020-21 academic year relative to those entering the same grade in 2018-19.
4. Compare progress in numeracy for Grade 4 pupils over the course of the 2020-21 academic year relative to the progress seen during the 2018-19 academic year.
5. Estimate the magnitude of learning loss attributable to the pandemic by calculating the difference in numeracy levels and progress between the two cohorts.