The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted education for 1.6 billion children worldwide over the past year. To help measure the ongoing global response, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine and Johns Hopkins University are collaborating with the World Bank and UNICEF to create a COVID-19 Global Education Recovery Tracker.

The tracker is intended to make data available to help decision-makers in more than 200 countries make informed decisions around their COVID-19 responses. The tool is built to have the flexibility to incorporate emerging issues while offering a time trend of actions in the past months.

The effort captures and showcases information across four key areas:

· Status of schooling

· Kinds of learning (remote, in-person or hybrid)

· Availability of remedial educational support

· Status of vaccine availability for teachers

Data collected by the tracker through early March 2021 shows that 51 countries have fully returned to in-person education. In more than 90 countries, students are being instructed in multiple ways, with some schools open, others closed and many offering hybrid learning options. The team will continue analyzing these trends on a global and regional level.

In addition to recording the operational status of schools, the tracker will monitor how students are being supported. This includes changes to the school year schedule as well as tutoring, especially for the primary school grades. These interventions will be a critical component of the education recovery process after a year that has affected the learning and well-being of 95% of school children across the globe.

In countries where the COVID-19 vaccine is available, the tool is tracking whether teachers are currently being vaccinated as a priority group. Of the 130 countries where vaccine information is available, more than two-thirds are not currently vaccinating teachers as a priority group, according to the tracker.

The tracker is supported by the Johns Hopkins University eSchool+ Initiative, which is a collaboration between the Consortium for School-Based Health Solutions, the Berman Institute of Bioethics, and the Johns Hopkins schools of education, medicine, and public health. The eSchool+ Initiative focuses on child well-being from an equity lens, developing tools and resources for K-12 schools to help policymakers and educators support students during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Megan Collins, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, associate faculty at the Berman Institute of Bioethics, and co-director of the eSchool+ Initiative, is available for interviews.