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Education and training at the heart of the crisis and the recovery

2020-09-16T18:02:08.201Z


The OECD and the World Bank point to the impact of the crisis on education, and the need to train the most vulnerable workers.


Around the world, education has suffered particularly from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Schools have been closed and many children cut off from teachers for lack of materials for distance learning or a suitable place to work at home.

Cash-strapped families sometimes sent their children to the fields or married their teenage girls.

To read also: Will the debt of the recovery plan be “absorbed” in 2025, as Jean Castex asserts?

An entire generation of schoolchildren will be affected, worries the World Bank, which on Wednesday released an update of its Human Capital Index (HCI).

This measures the contribution of health and education to the productivity of a country's next generation and takes into account three main criteria: infant mortality, the quality of education and health.

It had grown by 5% in ten years.

But the crisis should reverse these gains.

A major question today is: how to improve knowledge?

», Underlines Roberta Gatti, main author of the report.

Even if the epidemic lasts only one year, its consequences will be lasting and all children in school today will lose, she worries.

Poorly targeted training

Training is a central point of the recovery, adds Laurence Boone, chief economist of the OECD, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which published its Economic Outlook on Wednesday.

Overall, the less adults are qualified and the less they benefit from training, deplores the economist.

Moreover, in many countries the unemployed have much less access to it than employees.

France is particularly inefficient in this area: 60% of the best educated adults participate in training.

While this only concerns 20% of workers with low literacy skills.

In a group of ten of the most advanced countries, France comes at the back of the pack, just ahead of Italy and Russia, and largely ahead of the United States and Great Britain, which come in first.

Read also: How PowerZ wants to make learning fun

Public action can make a difference.

In particular, officials must help citizens find new jobs and target measures on those who need help the most

”.

They must show "

creativity

" to develop training, urges Laurence Boone.

The OECD document therefore proposes "

to impose an obligation to participate in training in order to benefit from subsidies in the event of partial unemployment"

, by financially encouraging companies or workers to do so.

Online tools

This training should also be organized so that it can be reconciled "

with part-time work or with irregular working hours

", which will be easier "

if individual rather than collective training sessions are provided, by means of online tools and over a relatively short period of time,

the report suggests.

Be that as it may, we must

"

strengthen education and vocational training to offer new opportunities to workers made redundant, unskilled or having suffered a reduction in their working time

", insists the report.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-09-16

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