good evening my name is massimo madzalai i am a journalist with rai and i am chief editor-in-chief of the right trantino news and tonight i will moderate our debate on school learning interrupted is the title of our meeting we will talk about the measures that have been taken for schools and problems that have a reason during the pandemic in terms of the closures of schools and the lack of relations among students and between students and teachers and so we will address all these issues we have approximately 50 minutes at our disposal with four speakers who will offer us their insight so without further ado i would like to introduce the speakers to you first and foremost andrea gabasto an economist and director of the giovanni agnelli foundation he is very knowledgeable about the schools in general and also trentino schools because he was a member of the scientific committee of ipraze then we have laura zoller who is the school leader of the bonarotti trento institute and it is a technical institute and so she will offer as a frontline so to say view and then elia bombardelli a teacher of mathematics and physics who devised new ways to capture the attention of students and then katarina werner an economist at the center for the economics of education in munich she studies the influence of education on economic development as well so the floor goes first to andrea gavasto i ask you a simple question and i'm sure that the answer is complex what about the influence of remote education on the achievement of students in italy well apparently it is a simple question but it is very complex indeed i would like to use a number of slides if possible first and foremost you see here the situation in the world it has been complex all over the world and in dark blue you have the countries that are closed longer and we also have italy in that group in addition to that on in the right on the right you see the situation in in in italy and by the way in italy we had primary schools open starting in september while secondary schools did not reopen but all in all based on the unesco estimates 37 teaching weeks have been lost in italy starting in march 2020 so italy actually is the country in in europe perhaps along with germany that has lost the highest number of us weeks of teaching and we will see uh mid-july when we have the italian embassy test outcomes we will see then what was the impact of this a terrible year on school and we have a number of indications here we can distinguish between different things but we had the first phase of total closure and then in march in march and then the schools reopened september 2020 so then we had openings and closures again until with differences in the various regions of victory the schools italian situation and the snapshot of other countries is important in order to understand what happened in terms of laws of the basic skills and minimum levels of learning that they should achieve then we also have emotional losses and loss in terms of socialization and that also deserves our attention there was a study that was very interesting i will not go to into details but you will find this light on the website of the foundation here we have a study from the united states which uh considered first what happens during the summer breaks or during periods of closures there is a loss in terms of knowledge during these breaks and based on that it was a scene that for instance students can lose as much as 55 percent when compared to the students of the previous year so the pandemic actually had a huge cost half of the skills in mathematics a bit less in english and then we had a dutch study and investigation that was very interesting in the netherlands they made an assessment before and after the lockdown periods and by the way the netherlands have a very advanced schooling system the study was very detailed and it revealed that as a matter of fact dutch students lost approximately 20 of their skills when compared to what they were supposed to achieve during a normal school year and 20 is a lot out of five years is one year so this is of course a concern and it is it is especially concerning for a student with a social disadvantaged background where the loss was even higher then we have a uk study on children on school pupils and here we have the distribution which tests which tells that basically tests for children in the second school yeah primary school were tragic the red line was the previous years and the blue line was this year of closure so international evidence tells us that loss in terms of skills is approximately 20 percent two months for two months of schools lost again i will not enter into details but this is uh the world bank estimates that tell us what this happens means sorry in terms of economic impact and data is again uh i would say because of course rate normally the yield rate for education is very high and all economists do know that so that entails that this generation student will earn 2 000 euro less in terms of future income future jobs if we bring that back to the situation of the next 45 years if you multiply that by 6.5 million students means a minus 20 percent gdp oftentimes we focus on the economic loss of the pandemic but possibly we forget that the highest cost for our country is the fact that students will know less or risk to no less due to the pandemic this will have consequences for them and also for the economic development of the overall country indeed remote education and teaching partially offset this we will know to what extent that happened soon we will start reasoning about that mid-july we also have data based on a very recent bank of italy investigation telling us that remote education in italy achieved different outcomes so that there are groups especially disadvantaged groups of students that suffered a lot and the way of having schooling through remote teaching and learning devices despite the huge effort made by teachers in this case did not produce excellent results it was not conducive to a a good outcome so remote education means that you should have shorter classes 20 minutes and then a break and you should organize things differently of course the front uh traditional in person teaching is something that cannot be simply translated into something that you do remotely we will know in a couple of months from now what uh the closures meant but i would say that at least there has been a loss of two months and that means significant losses also in economic terms we will have to remedy to that in the next future now i would like to give the floor to laura zoller who is a school leader so what about your experience and how do you think the pandemic influenced the situation what about the impact on the achievement of your students well it is a very complex question what you what you're asking certainly what mr gabosto said is a clear and additional evidence of the fact that we will have a very long term impact of this situation and indeed the hypothesis is made that we will have major losses due to the lockdown and school closures undoubtedly the pandemic caused generated a sort of earthquake in the school system the school system was upset by the covet pandemic and we have to come to terms with the idea that we will have major losses and collapses i would even say in this sector that we will have now and also later on and yet there is one aspect that we should underline which i believe is absolutely positive which is the following due to this experience a number of rigid structures in terms of models of schooling from the past have been shaken and have been taken down and i really hope that we all will start from from this and rebuild the system in a different way for sure there are elements that due to these collapse opened up new scenarios and i really hope that we are going to be able to grasp opportunities that i'm sure mean that schools will be really changed for the first time at least since the second world war we need to underline the fact that schools reacted differently in different areas so there was no homogeneous reaction and that due to the different technological development of the schools of the households and also over various regions and this is also something that we'll need to take into account so we will certainly have to be more inclusive and equitable and there are also some positive aspects certainly the role of technology has had an impact also the training of teachers has had a role and also the technological level of the schools has had an impact so the first impact of course was unexpected absolutely unexpected but there were schools which were ready let's say to react there has been an extraordinary work made by digital facilitators and new ways of doing learning activities have been implemented so new ways new methods aimed at making a school tracks more flexible of course there have been difficulties students have not all been able to react and with reference to that investments have been made right starting from last summer investments for students with special needs as we call them and so there have been some positive elements in this emergency situation for example networks have been reinforced for example our movement vanguard educational vanguard that is the name we already belong to that movement and we have strengthened our role there so new unexpected resources have been activated webinars have been organized to support the teachers but also school leaders because it was not easy either for us as school leaders to direct the school towards this digital transition technological transition so it's not been easy and we should not forget all the aspects which have to do with the organization of the school also the issue related to accounting and administration because there has been a transformation of the school which was uh unimaginable up to last year so in terms of results we don't have data yet we will see the imbalancy results in a few months and the results are the final exams while we are analyzing them and that will be an important evidence as compared to two years ago because last year data are not comparable with those of the previous years because we applied assessment modalities which are unusual and then last year evaluation of students if you want while this year we are defining new lines rather than about the loss in terms of knowledge i would be more concerned about the loss of relations of social relations emotional relations which really make a difference and have an impact also on learning and if we are able to relaunch this new school model well i'm sure that in a little time and i do not want to contradict what you said but i would not be so much concerned if we can relaunch our students self-confidence and direct them towards a better self-confidence i'm sure that we will have good results so you're cautiously optimistic professor bombardelli you are famous because of your innovative methodologies in distance learning you are a youtuber as they say so how come that you have this idea sorry if i making this question so why you had this idea of using these non-classical methods i started to make videos on youtube in 2012 so a long time ago and i had no idea that we would come to such a situation well when i was at university more than 10 years ago 15 years ago also at the time some universities abroad uploaded media multimedia contents and so when i went to work to as a teacher as a high school teacher i wanted to see if there were maths videos for students and i saw that there were many resources but not videos and so i wanted to make videos to offer to my students containing information that i normally also share in school in the classroom and uh sometimes i had a traditional lesson and then i used some multimedia content in order to recap the most important things and then other times i showed the video to my students and so they had so to say an idea the most important things then we did problem solving group teamworks et cetera i share what dr davos does said my experience of distance learning is that these lessons online lessons work very badly above all if there are many hours one after the other in trentino we've been lucky with the colors of the pandemics with the stringencies of the lockdowns and we were able to do lessons in the classroom physically half of the time and then during the distance learning the synchronous method has been very useful i invited students to watch videos and then i gave them some exercises that they had to make and then at the end of the lesson we discussed about what they did we discussed about doubts and problems and it worked pretty well and i did uh something similar also at the balcony university we used multimedia contents and i introduced videos not so much devoted to explanation and these uh videos which could be seen also in the afternoon for example but we use the online lessons to discuss about problems also social problems emotional problems so in general i think that we passed from a pre pandemic situation where the uh digital side was not very present in schools but then with the pandemics we moved on to the opposite situation with too much digital uh methodologies i hope that in the future we will have a balanced situation more digital but at the same time more physical presence and we hope we will be able to use the digital technology as a support of what we will do at school in the classroom so it's sort of a blended methodology and i would like to conclude with a positive note well the data that you showed a resource of concern of course we hope that situation is better than the worst uh outlooks as a teacher and as teachers i think that we made the most in order to do the best that we could do and i hope that every i'm sure that every teacher did his best and her best to uh focus on the most important things focusing on what was really important and then also focusing on the social side the sociability side of students thank you katarina berner you mainly focused on the consequences of the pandemics in germany what happened there in germany what have been the consequences of the lockdown stringencies applied to schools yes exactly so similar to italy i think in germany we have a situation where you don't actually have good data on the knowledge that students have but what we have been able to do in this study is that we have been able to survey parents and basically ask them about the experience that their family and their child had in the period of the school closures in lockdown and it's quite interesting and very much in line with the data that we've already seen that what happened in the period of school closures is we had a dramatic reduction in the interaction that students had with their teachers so of course these are just the numbers that parents report but in the first block done in germany we saw that only six percent of parents said that their child would have daily kind of online lectures lessons with the whole classroom and their teacher which is of course much different situation compared to the normal kind of classroom experience and we have seen that over time this has increased to 26 so we have seen that schools in germany have tried really really hard to increase the interaction between teachers and students but we are still at a level that is very much kind of reduced kind of interaction between students and teachers compared to the pre-lockdown phase and what we can kind of wanted to focus on in our study is basically the experience that students had in this time of school closures and one of the things that we noticed is if we look at students that work kind of prior to the school closures kind of falling behind on grades a little bit so that we're kind of below the median school grade in their classroom we see that those students were in particularly struggling to kind of cope with the material if they had to kind of study independently so what we see is that a lot of students and i mean of course they're very good examples where maybe teachers tried really hard to create interactive formats but for the majority of students what learning looked like in the period of school closures at least in the german context was that teachers would send exercise sheets and materials and the students would be required to basically acquire read the material maybe watch some videos and then basically translate this new knowledge into exercise and we see that these students kind of that were already kind of behind on the material a little bit before the school closures were those that were in particularly struggling to kind of cope with this new kind of learning format and we do see that parents report that students got better so we do see an increase in the share of parents that think that this their children are good at independently working towards new material but we see large differences where some students are just having a much harder time in the period of school closures than others and in general if we look at the data we actually asked parents whether they think that their children learn more or less at home compared to school if they study in an hour and we see that for the majority of kids the parents think that the students learned lessons at home that learning at school would usually be more effective than learning in the home environment and again this is in particular true for kind of students that were kind of struggling and low achieving prior to the school closures but we also have a share of students that actually were able to learn very effectively at home and that actually had large learning increases and so i think one of the challenges that we'll have when students return to the classroom is actually that we'll have this huge disparity of how much individual students were able to learn in the period of school closures and basically that will create huge challenges for them teachers once students return to make sure that everybody is still kind of get everybody back on the same page in a way the analysis that raises concerns of course what can we do is the question to solve these problems to move forward so to say well the three speakers have already highlighted what can be done and katharina berner especially focused on the fact that different groups of students need a differentiated approach because indeed the effect of the pandemic was highly different on a student basis what can we do well i would say that we should try and regain ground we know that what we're talking about has been a general phenomenon meaning that almost all students enjoyed a loss in terms of emotional skills and also skills which are more linked to subject and cognitive learning we should try and start procedures and approaches so that we can make up for that loss it was said that it was possible to do something during the summer i always need to to draw your attention onto the fact that in trentino schools are absolutely excellent so when i go to other regions and say in trentino people do like that and they react and say well of course uh that is trentino though and the rest of italy is something else so trentino is uh considered a a heaven and um now we have also understood why but anyway the situation is much worse in many other areas what i was saying is that we have to try and recoup what has been lost and that entails first and foremost the social relations um and the same goes for the lower secondary school there we should have a full-time schooling that would help us uh make up for the delay that was accumulated that i think is what needs to be done so increase the number of hours in school laura dollar we heard that from you that you are optimistic about the future of schools and students well i would like to say that i absolutely agree i would like to open schools i would like to keep the schools open 24 hours a day not in terms of having traditional classes but giving the opportunity to students to be there do different things so i would say that the school plans that are about to be approved go in this direction and they can indeed maintain very interesting opportunities these are extra out of school activities by out of school i mean activities that are not strictly related to the various subjects or courses but which of course are done within the school so this would help restore the soft skills which are essential but also this would absolutely increase as mr bombardelli and mrs berner said that would increase the motivation of students so that students are motivated to actively engage in learning we should not simply say and pay deep service to the statement that we put students at the center we should really do that if we manage to transform schools in this direction by opening up two areas as well to the community meaning companies research centers and universities and they talk about the upper secondary schools we will achieve a lot but that can also apply to primary school of course it is a different level of learning and socialization that we talk about but i i think that that is the way that could really make the difference it took a pandemic to draw everybody's attention onto schools well at least that can be seen in a positive way this is the opportunity to restart from scratch and the planner for education that was assigned by the minister in italy together with the social partners in recent times goes in this direction and we are happy if people consider trentino as a place which can lead the way in a way and which can serve as a sort of laboratory in this respect because you see this is i believe really something that would help us do more and this pronoun this could also act as an incentive and stimulus for other areas which are lagging behind and which have more problems in this moment i would also like to recall the fact that the drop out school living rates in trentino are much lower than in the rest of italy and they are even better than the eu 2020 target of course we do have issues uh here in tortino as well but i think that since our situation is better than the general situation we should exploit that advantage and do even better mr bombardelli the schools suffered a number of injuries so to say scars will remain but as far as i understood we can also say that we will have positive things to bring into the future what about the positivity what is positive i always look for the positive aspects of course there have been criticalities of course we will have to make up for lost ground and yet i would say that the step forward made in terms of exploiting technologies is huge and that is a positive thing i would say that that has to be become a normal approach in the working sector technologies are already present and by the way uh students and pupils know how to use their smartphones so before that was something that remained outside schools now it is part of schooling and i think that that is positive and i hope that it remains so i think also of the education platforms that have been set up and that have been proven to be very useful i hope that they remain and then families households really appreciate the fact for instance that they could have uh meetings with the teachers online so that uh parents do not need to take a leave to to come to have an interview with a teacher for for five ten minutes only so that is a possibility plus meetings can also benefit from remote meeting opportunities this is something that can remain digital in the future i think and then going back to what laura toller said i also hope that we can further investigate what we tell uh because this skill skills mismatch is increasing and i'm referring to the market and what the labor market demands and what schools do and offer so let's start to introduce something that fills that gap which of course has economic consequences i believe that that is important that is essential and i hope that it happened so that we can start working on things that at present do are not part of schools but we should be financial uh education for instance is one of the things that we miss at school they read students about cyber financial tools on the internet but they do not have knowledge about cyber currency uh cryptocurrency currencies uh from schools which we could do better there um katharina werner we always have this picture of germany of a country which is efficient and open to technology based on your studies and observations is it so that students and families in germany reacted positively or negatively to the fact that they had to use this new technology uh to to attend schools so what was their reactions yes absolutely so even though germany has kind of a lot of knowledge a high level of skills overall actually in terms of the digital competencies we started this pandemic pretty ill prepared so if you look at international studies and actually the overall german population is kind of less fluent in digital technologies than a lot of other countries would be and this is true for our teaching force as well as for parents for example but it's definitely the case which is something that we also see in our data is that there has been a lot of progress and a lot of students have actually increased their digital technology that it took the skills now in the pandemic given that they had to so we also seen large increases in digital infrastructure and basically people kind of upgrading technology wherever possible in order to basically enable them to still participate in schooling the best they can during the period of school closures so i think what we've seen in germany is basically a lot of people putting a lot of effort into catching up in terms of the digital competencies but starting at a reasonably low level and maybe i just quickly wanted to say i'm really glad to hear the optimism of mr bombadelli that we can actually use this increase in the digital skills that we've now had we've basically had this kickstart where people had to develop all of these new formats and i really hope that going forward we can be very mindful and very careful about what aspects of this we will keep and actually also kind of how we evaluate what actually does work in the in the ream of digital technology because i think there's a lot of opportunity but also there's a lot of formats that might not actually give us really good results and i think it'll be really important going forward to determine kind of what actually is beneficial in in the future as well and what we also looked at in our study and which i think is also important kind of regarding your question um what we see in germany is that we have had some kind of attempts of programs that have started to try and fill up the learning gaps that students saw so we've had kind of programs that have been taking place in vacation times or kind of like in addition to normal classroom learning and what we see is that basically this is very much driven by parents so what we kind of observe is our parents with good education backgrounds with higher incomes are the ones that have been most able to actually organize other learning opportunities for their children kind of while the schools were closed or while kind of learning did not take place in the schools and i think this is something that we should also be very mindful of going forward and i think the idea of keeping schools open as a kind of space of opportunity that mrs sulla mentioned is important because otherwise if we kind of don't have a strong kind of coordinated answer to this question on how students are going to get this extra support then we will kind of be in a situation where it's very much parents responsibility to try and basically make up for this lost learning and that could lead to large differences in how different families basically have the opportunities or are able to give opportunities uh to their children and if i'm allowed a final point i think this is something that mr gavosto already raised and i think it's important to keep in mind in the german debate sometimes i have heard people say well we can just basically everybody has been affected the same we just basically reduce the standards a little bit we make the exams a bit easier everybody will go through school and then we'll all be fine we'll pretend it never happened and i would just like to caution against that kind of approach because what we know from the literature as education economists is that it really is the skills it's actually knowing how to solve a certain type of math kind of question it's really understanding what a probability is that it's actually going to help you kind of solve problems later on in the labor market and basically just giving people certificates is not actually the problem that we face but it's the loss in skills and in actual knowledge that students have acquired so i think it's important going forward in kind of designing our policies we should keep these kind of aspects in mind we we still have uh five minutes i'd like to make a final question mrs catarina um in your opinion in terms of possible funds and incentives how should we invest in the school now what do we really need well in germany what do you really need so what measures do you need in order to improve the school so i think actually in the german context in particular a large barrier to improvement has been bureaucracy so we have kind of there's been a lot of money that has been earmarked for the education system but basically getting that money to kind of the programs that would benefit from it has been a real struggle and i think this is a pity and it should we should have more smooth processes of getting funds allocated to programs and schools and now if you ask me what kind of programs should be the ones that should be kind of funded in particular i think the the important focus that we need to have right now would be kind of training the teaching force to make sure that they are kind of have the best kind of tools at their disposal to provide the best type of lessons that we can have ideally maybe in a blended format going forward and then also programs that focus on supporting those students that might be able to get less kind of support from home i think those would be the two types of programs that would be most important going forward bombardelli technological infrastructure so mr bombardelli sorry well first of all we need technological infrastructure certainly agree with me so to help teachers train and improve their training and also there is also a question of the which is related to the career of teachers and then to generate more opportunities for students giving them the possibility for example of going abroad or establishing contacts between schools and companies so the business world how can we spend the money in the best possible way well we should get the resources invest i agree with the previous speakers training of teachers infrastructure investments in the technological and scientific side because there is a continuous innovation and then to invest in teachers careers enhancement of their job and also a new organization for schools with involvement of mid managers as we say in order to change the model of schools and then we should not forget that we also need uh facilities new facilities competitive facilities so in such an environment where it is pleasant to go to school well i'm sure that our students will not lag behind mr gawas go so invest in schools is like putting money in banks well it's more than that investing in education is the best possible investment that our country could make for future generations and in our recovery plan there is about 20 billion euros invested at least on paper with the following priorities so schools physical schools and then we should not forget that the average age of our schools is 50 years so most of our schools go back to date back to the 70s so we need to rethink our schools based on new approaches training initial training above all of teachers because there is a huge problem here we invest too little in training of teachers our teachers are very good in terms of knowledge of their subject matter but then in fact there is no training on how to teach and this is something we should invest on and then i share what has been said there should be also some reforms for example reforms about the recruitment of teachers which should be less bureaucratic and sometimes also less unfair so to speak about the future of a school of the school means to speak about the future of a nation no we have completed our roundtable dedicated to interrupted education i would like to thank all the people who joined us online i also thank the physical audience it's very beautiful to see people here thank you and have a nice evening you