While many countries have deployed distance learning strategies during Covid-19-induced school closures, inequitable access to resources and infrastructure means that over 460 million children may not have been reached by such programs.

A lack of access to quality education will have massive implications on children’s learning levels, especially given the fact that over half of children in low- and middle-income countries couldn’t read a basic paragraph with understanding by age 10 even before the pandemic started.

Failing to support the development of foundational literacy and numeracy skills for millions of children who were likely already behind in school pre-pandemic could result in irreversible consequences on an entire generation of learners.

The FLN Academy

As part of its Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) Initiative to support governments with scaling up evidence-based approaches to improve FLN, UNICEF in collaboration with Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pratham, and Delivery Associates, hosted a multi-module online course, the FLN Academy, from June 24 to August 5, 2021.

Open to practitioners from all UNICEF regional and country offices, government and civil society partners, the FLN Academy aimed to provide timely and actionable guidance to participants. It was structured as a professional development and knowledge sharing journey to help enhance participants’ understanding of the evidence on FLN and strategies and approaches to improve implementation.

Over 700 participants from 75 countries attended the Academy. These numbers suggest a high demand for these learning opportunities.

The Academy's content and resources

In addition to sharing the basics of each theme and engaging participants through interactive features, the partners showcased different practical case studies and tools to guide and support action.

The content across all 6 modules resonated with participants who indicated that while the challenge to improve learning is considerable, there is a clear opportunity to take action:

What's next for the FLN Academy?

Based on the positive response and the demand for additional knowledge sharing opportunities, UNICEF and partners are keen to continue supporting learning opportunities for practitioners. This will continue to focus on increasing while simultaneously strengthening practices; it is not enough to know the “what”, we must increase capacity to deliver (know the “how”).

As education systems reopen and strategize on how to support children to learn, we envision a broad partnership through which practitioners can readily access support as they implement programming on teaching practices, parental engagement, assessment, education technology among other areas.

A future academy which engages a wide range of partners actively working to improve FLN will serve to ensure tools and resources are more widely shared and used beyond the individual organizations.

As the education community responds to the ongoing learning crisis, made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, the world needs to leverage our collective knowledge, skills and experiences to make rapid and real progress on learning outcomes in the immediate term. The FLN Initiative partners hope you will join us, share your insights, and engage with this growing community.

Additional resources

• Recordings of the FLN Academy modules: English; French; Spanish.
• Foundations for student success: Focusing on foundational literacy and numeracy
• How can formative assessment foster learning as schools reopen?
• Modeling the Long-Run Learning Impact of the COVID-19 Learning Shock: Actions to (More Than) Mitigate Loss
• Learning “Loss” and Learning “Gain” in Primary School Years: What Do We Know from India That Can Help Us Think Forward in the COVID-19 Crisis?
• Remediation Kit
• TaRL Africa website

The FLN Initiative and blog were made possible with support from GPE.