As schools decide to reopen or go virtual, Europe’s short-term closures suggest long-term costs

The experience in Europe is especially relevant, since schools here were shut for far shorter periods than in the United States in 2020 and 2021. That was supposed to help students like Kalvin Legrand, who attends a high school in Quaregnon, a working class town an hour outside of Brussels. But Legrand is faltering, and evidence is starting to emerge that European students experienced significant academic setbacks, even though they attended school in-person through most of the pandemic.

Test scores dropped. Attendance waned. And teachers worried their students were unprepared for the next school year.

“There will be long term effects for the children,” Delphine Chabert, a Belgian lawmaker who sits on the French-speaking parliament’s education committee, said of the academic losses during the pandemic.

Researchers say that governments and school administrators should weigh those effects as they consider what to do now.

Many schools in Europe started their December breaks early, as officials watched coronavirus case numbers rise, especially among young people. As they look ahead to the new year, they are worried not only about in-school transmission of a highly infectious variant, but about having enough healthy teachers to teach.

The Netherlands, currently under a strict lockdown, has warned that schools may not open in-person as planned on Jan. 10. The British education secretary, anticipating massive staff shortages in January, put out a call for former teachers to come back to the classroom, while the health secretary refused to rule out closing schools.

Countries in Europe have tended to take a last-resort approach to school closures throughout the pandemic. Whereas U.S. states lifted lockdown restrictions months before letting students back into classrooms, most European countries did the reverse — resuming in-person schooling for many students as early as spring 2020, while relying on restrictions in other aspects of public life to keep the virus in check.

While significant learning loss and social-emotional setbacks could be expected in the United States, where some students were home for more than a year, what is emerging from Europe is in some ways more surprising. Early studies suggest that even relatively short classroom closures were detrimental.

It’s still too early to assess the full extent of learning loss over the past two years. In Europe, as in the United States, many countries canceled their standardized tests during the pandemic.

One country where testing continued, though, was the Netherlands. When the pandemic first hit, Dutch students participated in virtual learning for eight weeks before their school buildings reopened. Per Engzell, a researcher at Oxford University’s Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, says those weeks were a waste in terms of academic learning.

“What we learned from our study is that children learned basically nothing at home,” Engzell said. “And it’s clear that this learning loss has not been completely recovered, even now, one-and-a-half years later.”

He found in his April 2021 study that elementary students performed on average 20 percent worse on tests than the equivalent cohorts had for the three years before the pandemic. Losses were 60 percent worse for students from low-income families. The Netherlands has spent billions on tutoring, counseling and summer programming for children, but that extra support has not yet caught them up.

Researchers in Denmark report more of a mixed picture. Danish elementary school students had only a month of virtual learning before the country became the first in Europe to reopen classrooms in April 2020. Over the course of different lockdowns, they have been out about eight weeks. Jesper Fels Birkelund, a sociologist at the University of Copenhagen, found that those elementary students didn’t experience any setbacks in reading, with many making significant gains.

But older students in Denmark had 22 weeks of virtual learning, and middle school students did experience some losses in reading, according to Birkelund’s Nov. 2021 study, which compared scores on a computerized test administered to Danish students every spring.

Birkelund said the research doesn’t support the assumption that older students can be relied on to use computers independently and keep up with their studies from home, even in a country with excellent Internet infrastructure and access.

If countries partially close schools next month, he said, leaders should look at available data to determine which students should return to school and not just make a decision based on the child’s grade level.

“We shouldn’t only focus on the young students,” Birkelund said. “This idea that we should send the younger students back should not be the focus anymore. We should think about what students really need to be back in school and not only think about this in age groups.”

There’s no standardized test data in Belgium’s French-speaking schools, but researcher Natacha Duroisin has been surveying hundreds of teachers to determine the academic impact of the pandemic. Sixty percent of middle and high school teachers reported that only half their students logged on for class on a typical day of virtual learning during the spring 2020 lockdown. Teachers reported that a significant portion of their students were unprepared for their coursework.

In Belgium, it took two and a half months for elementary school campuses to fully reopen after they shut down in March 2020. Older students did hybrid learning — rotating between in-person and virtual every other week or, alternatively, for half of each day — for the entire 2020-2021 academic year.

Duroisin, an associate professor at University of Mons, studied the different hybrid models and determined that teachers reported better academic results when students were in classrooms every day, even if just for the morning or afternoon.

“The other option, of attending school for a week and being at home the other week, was catastrophic,” she said.

The hybrid model in Belgium was intended to keep teenagers engaged in school, even if they weren’t in classrooms full-time, said Chabert, the Belgian lawmaker. Initial reports don’t indicate any uptick in drop outs, but it’s unclear what the results will be for the current academic year — when struggling teenagers are stuck taking remedial courses in addition to their standard academic loads.

“Hybrid was the least bad solution,” Chabert said. “The priority was to keep the link between pupils and schools, and it was the only the solution we had. It was the least worst.”

Legrand, the Belgian high-schooler, was among those at risk of dropping out. He was struggling before the pandemic — had already been held back two grades. And he said he had a tough time with both virtual and hybrid learning.

“It was hard to follow the classes,” he said. “I did not have any motivation, and it did not go back when we are back at the school.”

He said his complicated schedule last academic year — mornings at home doing virtual learning and afternoons in the classroom — was difficult to manage, and he and his classmates had a hard time getting to their classes on time.

He ultimately failed three courses, but he stuck with school, and is now taking an extra math class each Wednesday to graduate in the spring.

Denis Betriaux, Legrand’s teacher, said more than half of his 18 students are in remedial classes for math this academic year, making up for courses they failed during hybrid learning.

“They are not very optimistic and I don’t have the impression they have a lot of hope things will get better,” Betriaux said. “It is very sad for them.”

Legrand, 20, said that before the pandemic, he dreamed of becoming a physical education teacher, but now higher education feels unrealistic.

“I wonder maybe I should do a more accessible job, like joining the army,” he said.

He also desperately hopes there’s no return to remote or hybrid learning.

“I lost a year,” he said. “If the teachers aren’t in the classroom with me, it will be another failure for me.”

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