Attachments
Statistics and Informatics Division (SID)
Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS)
United Nations Children’s Fund
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Survey on Children‟s Education in Bangladesh, 2021, was conducted to generate estimates for a host of indicators on the status of children‟s education during the pandemic COVID-19. The survey aimed to generate primary data on a few selected key indicators including drop-out rate, foundational literacy and numeracy skills at primary and secondary education levels, as well as online learning with length of study during school closure due to COVID-19. The intent is to provide estimates at the national and divisional levels, with disaggregation of the national level estimates by sex, area, relevant age-groups, mothers‟ education level, child‟s functional difficulties, sex of the head of the household, ethnicity, and wealth index quintile.
The survey covered a sample of 9,000 households (8,995 successfully interviewed) across all 64 districts in 8 divisions. The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) conducted the survey between December 2021 and January 2022, in collaboration with UNICEF Bangladesh.
The specific objectives of the Survey on Children‟s Education were to capture the extent of impact of the prolonged school closure due to the onset of COVID-19 pandemic on drop-out and learning loss of children and adolescents, over the past 18 months, and to capture data on child marriage and child discipline, that are proven correlates of the education situation, which had impact due to prolonged closure of schools, necessitated to take appropriate measures to mitigate COVID-19 risks.
The Survey on Children‟s Education followed a two-stage stratified cluster sampling approach (design), utilised Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) technique for face-to-face data collection at field level. One questionnaire with two modules, prepared on the lines of MICS6 standard questionnaire, was used in the survey.
Here is the summary of the findings of the report, which presents national level summary results of the survey.
This is immediately followed by the analytical report containing division level estimate as also the disaggregated data by different household characteristics that are related to the indicator. A summary of the survey findings are presented below.
Household composition and housing characteristics
The majority of the surveyed households are headed by a male (87.6 percent); most of the members belong to age 35-64 years (69.8 percent) and are living mostly in the rural areas (76.5 percent). The households commonly had 3-5 members, about 68.5 percent (ranging from 19.7 to 29.1 percent). There are about twothirds of the household heads have formal education, i.e., primary or above (65.9 percent).
Access to electricity of households are almost universal (98.4 percent). About a half of households (49 percent have internet access at home, it is much higher in urban (65.3 percent) than in rural areas (44.0 percent).
A large proportion of households own their dwelling (87.5 percent), it is more in rural (95.5 percent) than in urban areas ( 61.6 percent), while about 4 in 10 households possess agricultural land (rural: 44.8 percent; urban: 22.1 percent) and 6 in 10 own farm animals/livestock. Ownership of livestock is mostly presents in rural areas (70.4 percent).
Almost every household has at least one member with a celular phone (96.0 percent) but only about 39 percent households have at least one member with a bank account, which is more prevalent among urban (53.3 percent) than in rural households (33.9 percent).
Sanitation
The survey shows that 88.7 percent of the population have access to improved sanitation, which is 4 percentage higher increase in past 3 years compared to MICS Bangladesh 2019 (84.6 percent) results. Again,
71.2 percent of the population is using improved sanitation facilities which is not public or shared, which again has increased by 7 percentage in the last 3 years (MICS 2019). Flush/pour to septic tank or to piped sewer system are the most commonly used facilities in the urban areas and pit latrine with a slab is the most common in rural areas.
Learning
A majority of children are attending school at their official age (primary: 77.7 percent, lower secondary: 66.2 percent) as compared to those attending at an age below the official age or are underage (primary: 5.2 percent, lower secondary: 7.4 percent). Children attending school at an age which is higher than the official age or are overage, are substantially high (primary: 17.1 percent, lower secondary: 26.4 percent), though they are much lower than those attending at their official age.
The Gross Intake Rate (GIR) to the last grade of primary school is 88.7 percent, about 8 percent higher among girls than boys (97.5 percent vs. 89.2 percent). GIR is similar in rural and urban areas but vary considerably across divisions (111.1 in Barishal and 67.6 in Mymensingh). The GIR to the last grade of lower secondary school is 83.6 percent and is much higher for girls (88.8 percent) than boys (74.9 percent).
Further, the primary school completion rate is 78.2, which is much higher for girls (85.6) than boys (70.7). The school completion rates however fall for lower secondary school (64.1 percent) and upper secondary school (20.2 percent). The rates are much lower than those reported in 2019 (MICS), especially at the primary and upper secondary levels ((primary: 82.6 percent; lower secondary: 64.7 percent and upper secondary: 29.4 percent)
The effective transition rate to the secondary level, i.e., children in the last grade of primary school moving on to secondary school has remained very high at 94.1 percent, which is very much comparable to 2019 rates (94.5 percent). These rates do not show much variations across sex of the child, area of residence,and even across the divisions.
The ratio of girls to boys, known as Gender Parity Index (GPI), attending primary, lower and upper secondary school, obtained from net attendance ratios, are 1.11, , 1.35 and 1.14, respectively, which suggests that more girls than boys attend school and particularly at the lower secondary school. Though GPIs by area are very similar to the overall GPI. It varies significantly across divisions (GPI in primary school is 1.49 in Mymensingh, while it is 0.99 in Rangpur).
Children‟s foundational reading skills seem to be lacking as among children aged 7-14 years, only 62.3 percent can correctly read 90% of words in a given story, while 52.8 and 52.9 percent of children correctly answered comprehension questions of three literals and two inferential, respectively, with an overall foundational reading skills are exhibited in 49.8 percent of children; urban children (56.8 percent) have better reading skills than rural children (47.7 percent). Foundational numeracy skills among children aged 7-14 years are also at low levels with only 25.8 percent children who could complete all 4 tasks under the numeracy skills. Among them, 59.1 percent successfully completed number reading, 59.6 percent completed number discrimination, 53.5 percent completed addition and 37.5 percent recognized the pattern in numbers. Urban children are a little better than rural children in each of the numeracy tasks.
Primary school drop-out rates are much lower at 3.1 percent (boys: 4.0 percent, girls: 2.3 percent) and are about 4 percentage lower than that at upper secondary school (7.1 percent; boys: 6.4 percent, girls: 7.8 percent) while the drop-out rate at lower secondary level lies in between these two levels. The drop-out rates, regardless of education level, is 4.9 percent with insignificant differences across the background characteristics. On the other hand, the repetition rate is as high as 27.9 percent in upper secondary education, while it is much lower in primary education (3.7 percent) and lower secondary education (2.4 percent). The overall school repetition rate stands at 11.4 percent, irrespective of the level of education.
Online learning during the school closure due to COVID-19
The survey presents school age children‟s learning status before the closure of school due to COVID-19, during the peak hour of COVID-19, when a country wide lockdown was enforce and educational institutions remained closed as well as immediately after reopening of educational institutions in late 2021. It shows that that only about 1 in 5 (18.7 percent) school going children (regardless of education level) attended online learning during the school closure, with little sex differentials though the levels varied across area of residence (urban: 28.7 percent; rural: 15.9 percent). The primary level participation rate (13.1 percent) was lower compared to lower and upper secondary levels (20.3 and 23.7 percent, respectively). Overall, 36.9 percent of children had some supportive devices in the household to ensure online learning, which again was more in urban (50.6 percent) than in rural areas (32.9 percent), though sex differentials in availability of supportive devices was not very prominent. Nevertheless, among f the school age children who had the scope of using such devices for online learning, about l 57.7 percent used them always, while 22.1 percent used them occasionally and 10.3 percent very little and about 1 in 10 (9.9 percent) never used devices for online learning. Usage of devices was more during the lockdown in urban (67.2 percent) than rural (53.4 percent) children. On an average the children. Studied online for about 3 hours (177.1 minutes) per day.
Regardless of education level, children‟s everyday study time for learning was 127 minutes per day at home, 190 minutes per day at school and 46 minutes per day at coaching centres, with a total of 363 minutes per day of study time before the school closure. This came down to about 124 minutes per day during the school closure, with 83 minutes at home, 13 minutes at school for online learning and about 278 minutes per day at coaching centres .
Among school going children, a large proportion of 95.5 percent children studied at home before the school closure for pandemic. This dropped sharply to 80.8 percent during the school closure and have not come to the pre-closure levels yet, as it has recovered to 90.8 percent after reopening of schools. Their average study time per day during the three periods are 117.5, 85.8 and 111.3 minutes, respectively. Also, during the three periods under discussion children studying at coaching centres was 48.7, 27.5 and 39.2 percent, respectively. The mean study time at coaching centres were 73.4 minutes, 68.2 minutes and 69.5 minutes per day, respectively, showing that the mean study time at home and at the coaching centres reduced during the school closure days together with the proportion of children that studied at home and at the coaching centres.
As mentioned before, about 4 in 5 school going children did not participate in online learning during the school closure. The main reason for non-participation in online learning (including through radio/television) during school closure were absence of scope of online learning from school (42.1 percent), absence of internet facility at home (41.8 percent) and non-availability of supportive device for online learning at home (39.9 percent) and not having radio/television at home (30.9 percent).
The "prolonged closure of school‟ was the most significant reason (43.6 percent) for children‟s non-attending any educational institution in the school year 2021, among those who attended school in 2020, i.e., those who dropped out in 2021. Besides, „decrease in family income‟ (23.6 percent) and ‟child‟s unwillingness to attend‟ (22.8 percent), were some other notable reasons for drop-out.
The measures taken by the household to prevent learning loss during school closure for COVID-19, „selflearning‟ (44.2 percent), „engaging a house tutor‟ (38.9 percent), and „teaching by parents/family members‟ (24.0 percent) were the more important ones through which children got benefited. In contrast, 35.8 percent did not get any benefit as households did not take any measure in this respect. „Giving assignment to students by teachers‟ (71.7 percent), „monitoring by teachers through phone‟ (20.3 percent) and „assigning homework by teachers‟ (20.0 percent) were the main measures taken by school that benefited the children to prevent learning loss during school closure. However, 17.5 percent of children did not get any benefit as the schools did not take any measure in this respect.
The school closure during the pandemic hampered children‟s classroom learning to a great extent was felt by large proportion of parents/caregivers of the school going children (72.2 percent) while some felt it has hampered children‟s classroom learning to some extent (26.2 percent).
About 64% of children‟s parents/caregivers felt that online learning during the pandemic was „quite less‟ while about 33 percent felt it was „less‟ or „average‟ as compared to the effectiveness of classroom study before the pandemic.
Child marriage
The survey shows that 9.1 percent of women aged 15-24 years got married before the age of 15 while 11.2 percent and 40.7 percent of women aged 20-24 years got married before 15 and 18, respectively. Mother‟s education appears to be strongly negatively correlated with child marriage, where higher proportion of children are married off at an early age when mothers have low or no education (55.6 percent of women of age 15-19 are married), while this it is 28.4 percent among those whose mothers have higher education. Also, among women of age 20-24 years about 40.7 percent had been married before age 18, while 11.2 percent had been married before age 15 years. These proportions were 51.4 percent and 15.5 percent, respectively, in 2019 (MICS), showing consistent drop in the rates of child marriage over the years in Bangladesh.
To "find a suitable groom‟ was reported as the main reason for marrying early (81.2 percent). While „social practice‟ was cited by 23.6 percent of women, „school closure due to COVID-19‟ as a reason for child marriage was reported in 5.1 percent cases.
Child functioning
About 4.2 percent of children aged 5-17 years were reported to have a functional difficulty in at least one domain of the listed domains6 based on the Washington Group on Disability Statistics. It was higher among boys (4.8 percent) than girls (3.6 percent) and in urban (5.3 percent) than in rural areas (3.9 percent). Among children who wear glasses, 2.7 percent have difficulty in seeing even after wearing glasses; of the children using hearing aid, 6.9 percent have difficulty in hearing even after using hearing aid and among children using equipment for walking, 28.8 percent have difficulty in walking even after using equipment. Though no area differences exist in these proportions, sex differences show that a higher proportion of boys difficulties than girls in all these three domains. Notably, about 37.7 percent of boys as against 20.9 percent of girls have difficulty in walking even after using equipment.
Conclusion
The Survey on Children's Education 2021 reflects the educational status of school age children immediately before and during the school closure for COVID-19 and after reopening of school. School readiness among primary school children is high (75 percent), indicating a high attendance in pre-primary education in the year before the survey year and is comparable with result in the year 2018 where it was 72.7 percent (MICS 2019).
Although net attendance ratio (adjusted) in primary school is quite high (80.5 percent), it is considerably low in lower or upper secondary school (59.6 percent and 50.5 percent, respectively). The corresponding attendance ratios three years ago were very much higher at primary level (85.9 percent) but were comparable at lower secondary (57.8 percent) and upper secondary levels (48.1 percent). Similarly, the primary school completion rate is seen to be higher (84.3 percent) than lower and upper secondary school completion rates (69.4 percent and 32.2 percent, respectively), though they were also at similar levels in 2018 (MICS 2019). The gross intake rate to the last grade of primary school (88.7 percent) and lower secondary school (83.6 percent) as well as the effective transition rate to secondary school (94.1 percent) are very high. The GPI in school suggests girls had higher attendance than the boys particularly in lower secondary school (GPI 1.35) and were close to parity at other levels of education. Children of age 7-14 show moderate levels foundational skills in reading (49.8 percent children qualify all three reading skills), but their numeracy skills are disappointing (25.8 percent complete all 4 numeracy tasks). Drop-out and repetition rates in primary level are low (3.1 and 3.7 percent, respectively) although it is moderately high in upper secondary level (7.1 and 27.9 percent, respectively).
During the school closure due to COVID-19, children were less likely to participate in online learning (18.7 percent) mainly due to lack of scope of online learning from school (42.1 percent), absence internet support at home (41.8 percent), unavailability of supportive device (39.9 percent) and lack of radio/television at home (30.9 percent). Online learning apparently failed to satisfy parents, as they opined that online study was „quite less‟ (64.0%) or „less‟ (24.8%) effective in comparison to classroom study before the school closure. They also observed that the school closure hampered children‟s education a lot (72.2%) or to some extent (26.2%).