Weekly tutoring sessions. Reluctance to see friends in person. These are just some ways in which the educational impacts of COVID-19 still linger for Katherine Korakakis and her children, 14-year-old Bella and 17-year-old Nathan.
“We’re spending probably close to $400 a week for the children to supplement and there’s no other option because they’re still not caught up,” says Korakakis from her Montreal home. The teens are getting help in math, French and science.
“Both of them are still behind, both of them are still struggling…. And my children are not the only ones that have to deal with this,” says Korakakis, who also advocates for other parents as the president of the English Parents’ Committee Association of Quebec, an Anglophone parents’ organization.
Learning loss and getting back on track post COVID-19 closures has been difficult for this family.
The disruptions of COVID-19 to schooling in Canada were extensive. Ontario in particular had the longest school closures in all of North America, with Quebec not far behind. The reasoning at the time was that closing schools would curb the spread of the virus, not just among children but their families, as well, and help overwhelmed hospital emergency departments.
But there were other things that disrupted both childhoods and learning: toggling between virtual and in-person instruction, inability of students to focus or ask questions in online classes, delays in assessments and support for learning challenges and anxiety about contracting COVID-19 by seeing friends. Experts and parents say the ripple effects of these disruptions are felt by students to this day.
Korakakis says that they’ve also spent money on therapy to tackle Nathan’s anxiety, which she traces back to the pandemic.
“There were curfews in Quebec. You couldn’t even walk your dog at a certain point. It was hard times — in his mind, it was like, ‘Oh my goodness, something really bad’s happening,'” says Korakakis, noting that Nathan only recently started socializing with friends in person, outside of school, and wore his mask long after most others stopped.
“So we had to work really hard with therapy to get him to to understand that he doesn’t need to wear a mask all the time.”
Impact on children with special educational needs
In Toronto, Adriana Ferreira also says the effects of the pandemic are not in the rearview mirror for her family, which includes two children living with disabilities.
She says that Samuel, 9, and Sophia, 8, both of whom are on the autism spectrum, are doing “really well, all things considered.” Thanks to the funding from Ontario Autism Program, both are doing therapies and catching up on skills. But one of two siblings could have been doing even better, had the pandemic not affected her schooling, says Ferreira.
Learning loss and recovery from it has been slower and more challenging for kids with autism says this mother of two.
During the pandemic, Samuel attended a special school for children with disabilities, which stayed open even when others closed. However, Sophia, who now attends a high-intensive support program class within a public school, was at one point in virtual kindergarten — a less-than-ideal environment for a non-verbal child with autism. At another point, she was the sole student in her special education class.
“So it has impacted her social skills. We are working on that now in therapy, but it definitely has impacted her in that aspect,” said Ferreira in an interview from her Toronto home.
Sophia was only recently diagnosed with ADHD, as well — something Ferreira says teachers only noticed once she was in a group of children. Without a pandemic, there could’ve been an earlier diagnosis.
“So we missed that window where she could have been, you know, doing specific therapy or even on medication, it could have helped her with her academic skills.”
Losses in academic achievement and well-being
Louis Volante, a distinguished professor at Brock University’s education faculty, is researching the short- and long-term impacts of the pandemic on student learning outcomes.
According to a major international assessment, students were behind by “about 70 per cent of a school year in mathematics and 30 per cent of a school year in reading,” said Volante in a video interview from a conference in Barbados, where he was presenting that analysis, which looks at the pandemic’s educational impact on 35 countries, including Canada.
Those numbers were gathered in a worldwide study by the OECD in 2022, the first post-lockdown school year. PISA, or the Programme for International Student Assessment, evaluates educational systems by measuring 15-year-old students’ scholastic performance. It’s done every three years, and in 2022, it tested 23,000 Canadian students from 10 provinces.
From learning loss to heightened anxiety among students, this researcher says the effects have left a lasting impression on many young people.
As he awaits the 2025 PISA results, Volante says the repercussions of these lags still linger. But he adds that the governments should also be focusing on other deficits that, if unaddressed, can help with learning losses. For example, he says, students who are bullied in school tend to be further behind academically than their peers.
“We also have to think in terms of things like physical health, mental health, social emotional learning, sense of belonging to schools,” says Volante. “What we’re finding is that the impact on learning losses is significantly higher when we also see that they’re not doing as well in some of these other non-cognitive, non-academic areas.”
Need for government investment, parents say
Another research project of Volante’s examined how well different provinces were doing in helping students catch up after the pandemic. While most offered some kind of support to address lags in subjects like math and literacy (like tutoring), he said supports for social skills and mental health were sorely lacking.
“If we can support the whole child, we’re much more likely to see them do well academically in the future, as well.”
Katherine Korakakis, the mother of two from Montreal, would like to see a more comprehensive and robust national catch-up strategy. Learn, Quebec’s online tutoring plan for Anglophones, she says, can’t cover all the families who need it — its strict eligibility criteria meant her own family had to hire tutors.
But even with her kids slowly catching up, thinking back to that March 2020 when schools closed and the world came to a standstill fills her with regret.
“I feel, as a parent, that I was cheated off of five years that I won’t get back, like that,” she says, snapping her fingers.
“And it’s such a small time you have them. So my children missed all kinds of transitions. And it’s just really unfortunate.”