by Vivien Gyuris and Andrea Gruber

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced a new norm into the world with limited perspective for our lives to become ‘normal’ again. What we have been experiencing over the past year reflects the reality we all have to continue facing in the future. Education systems, therefore, need to prepare for periods of on-site, remote and hybrid learning, with a strengthened vision in mind that every child deserves quality education, including those with vulnerable backgrounds. Investing in human capital should remain a high priority for any country to secure its potential for economic stability and the overall wellbeing of its people.

The pandemic has disrupted the education of 90% of the children in the world, with the poorest and the most disadvantaged hit hardest. According to the World Bank Learning Poverty (LP) team and UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics (UIS), out of the 53% of children already in learning poverty prior to the pandemic, 44% are in-school children who did not meet minimum proficiency, and 9% are out-of-school children. As of August 2020, an additional 10% children entered learning poverty due to the impact of COVID-19 pandemic closures, out of which 10% are children in school and 0.3% are children out-of-school. Chances for these children to return to education are scarce. In the midst of the third wave of the pandemic, as learning is organized in mixed manner of on-site and remote instruction varying by levels of education as well as from country to country, it is worth to assess the impact of the situation beyond the obvious and contemplate a more flexible approach educations systems can take to countering these effects.

Those children who had the opportunity to continue remotely with the use of technology, including Internet, computers, television, radio, cell phones, and electricity, could compensate partially for their education loss. Remote learning, however, also exacerbated inequality. Analysis of remote learning and access to technology across the world estimates that at least 463 million, or almost a third of students from pre-primary to upper secondary school, have not been reached due to either lack of remote learning policies or lack of technology. Remote learning due to COVID-19, thus seems to just aggravate existing inequalities.

During the past year, the global community has invested significant resources into efforts to increase the access to remote education by of families in-need. From our experience working closely with children of all backgrounds and particularly those in disadvantaged situations, we have witnessed how school closures, social distancing and confinement destabilized the mental wellbeing of most citizens, including parents, children, teachers and other education or health professionals. The increased level of stress children experienced during the pandemic, has derived from the unprecedented levels of uncertainty that have become part of everyday life, as well as from the exceptional amount of time families have been forced to spend together. Stress levels have also risen due to a high increase in child abuse, neglect, economic uncertainty, fear, illness, or the unsupervised Internet use allowing augmented sexual exploitation and cyber-bullying. The COVID-19 pandemic, thus, created a prolonged and intense stressful situation for many children, youth, and families, regardless of their socio-economic status.

As the pandemic has become more severe globally with the infection now in its third wave, families, teachers, school management and staff have developed highly sensitized nervous systems and showed visible mental health challenges. We believe that securing access to remote education itself, just as the return to on-site education, do not address the aggravated learning crisis, especially for vulnerable social groups, including children with socio-economic disadvantages, disabilities, learning difficulties or extreme behavior patterns. Intense psychosocial support measures are needed to reduce anxiety and stress for all members of the learning chain, i.e. children, parents, and teachers. Focusing on building positive, trustful, and hopeful personal relations, even remotely, is essential for re-creating the conditions for a safe learning environment where children can absorb the transferred knowledge.

Education systems, including school management and teachers need a more open mindset in adjusting their teaching practices, methodologies, schedules, and curriculum to the specificities of the evolving circumstances, and in valuing students’ psychosocial status and mental health over academic achievement. To secure quality education, teachers globally need strengthened capacities in technical skills and knowledge, along with direct channels of communications with parents and children to react fast to new circumstances, like lockdowns. As parents are supporting children in their learning efforts, targeted capacity building would help children’s learning processes. Children, especially in disadvantaged communities are already facing learning losses of six months and up and widened ability gaps as a consequence of the pandemic. These learning losses will be hard and for the most vulnerable social groups, almost impossible to compensate for. Given the unpredictable direction of the global crisis, only with a more open and innovative mindset can we react fast and efficient to this new norm of unpredictability. As a precondition, however, we insist on advocating for adequate psychosocial support and personal attention provided to children, parents, and teachers to sustain a resilient and forward-looking attitude in time of the COVID-19 pandemic and its hoped aftermath.

So, what has happened to us – we mean to ALL of us – during the COVID-19 pandemic and the quarantine situation that has resulted from it?"

To fully understand, we have to start before the pandemic and turn to the latest findings of neuroscience; first we need to understand the basics of brain development and the effects of trauma on the developing brain and then relate these findings to the current situation. Let’s get started.

The past ten years have brought vast developments in neuropsychology and brain research, and the new approach of trauma informed care of children with serious emotional and behavioral problems has progressed in response to these new understandings. The Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT)[1] is a biologically-respectful approach to treating children. NMT considers that trauma leaves a mark in the brain.

The brain develops from the bottom up and the inside out; it is a sequential process starting with the brainstem responsible for basic life functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature; then the midbrain controlling sleep, hunger and satiation, and motor skills, followed by the limbic system that is responsible for managing emotions, sexual behavior, as well as attachment and belonging. The cortex which gives us the ability to engage in both concrete and abstract thought, is the last to fully develop. Normal development depends on the infant’s, and later on the child’s needs being met by caring and loving adults who also provide a plethora of positive stimuli. This level of care ensures that the brain develops to its full potential by establishing as many neural networks as possible. For example, if an infant’s parents respond to him/her within minutes as s/he starts crying because s/he is hungry, thirsty, hot, cold, tired, needs a diaper change, etc. in time the infant ‘learns’ that in these moments of stress caused by these adverse sensations, s/he is not alone and the adult is helping him/her calm down by meeting his/her needs and soothing him/her, by hugging, rocking, kissing. Similarly, when a child feels distressed because s/he is not getting a toy and throws a tantrum, the composed and caring response of the adult such as reassuring words, giving space and time for the child, or hugging will help him/her feel safe and calm down. The caring and soothing the adult provides strengthens the regulating, calming function of the child’s stress response system which,  after an appropriate number of repetitions, becomes the child’s basic functioning trait. In other words, the child’s ability to tolerate stress increases, s/he becomes resilient.

At the same time, if the infant is continuously left to cry for a long-time without a response from the adult or the reaction to the child’s tantrum is always anger and punishment all s/he ‘learns’ in time is that ‘I am by myself, I can only rely on myself, I am not worth the attention’, etc. In these cases, the adult does not help the child to regulate his/her stress response system; instead, s/he is left to his/her own devices to find regulating activities for him/herself. Later on, this becomes the root of disturbing behavior as his/her response to stress from an alert, alarmed or fear state becomes permanent; his/her nervous system is sensitized. This is not conscious learning, instead the brain develops in a way that its natural response to later similar situations will be the ‘I am on my own, I have to fend and tend to myself’. While in infants this negative experience of appropriate adult response can manifest in never crying again, or in the child throwing even bigger tantrums, subsequently, later in his/her life it can result in the child hurting him/herself or in serious aggressive behavior towards others. Moreover, these negative experiences or the lack of the positive experiences leave a mark on the developing brain (tolerant or sensitized stress response system). From that point on, the development of the higher brain areas will be altered and they will not be able to achieve their optimal state. In terms of behavior, we will experience the given child revert back to the behavior that helped him/her get through the negative situation. Taking the example of our infant, when at school s/he may react to minor stress such as the teacher asking him/her a question, by withdrawing and becoming ‘invisible’; or in an extreme case, s/he might not even hear the teacher at all. At the same time, the child in our example may react by hitting the teacher when confronted with the same situation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have all, children and adults, experienced unforeseen levels of stress. The appearance of the virus, the first quarantine resulting from it and then the 2^nd and 3^rd waves with the varying restrictions, have created a situation full of uncertainty and fear giving us all erratic doses of stress at unpredictable times. We worry about getting infected, or dying from the virus, making ends meet, losing our job, not being able to see our loved ones, cancellation of events, having to go to work, figuring out how to do the shopping, wondering if we will have enough money, what to eat, how to support our children, how to study at home, how to share the screen between study and work, how to exist locked up together in our flat, being punished for not obeying the rules, being blamed or attacked, listening to the news, people we know getting sick, etc. The sources of our stress are numerous and appear at unforeseen times. As with our examples of the infant and the child, during COVID-19 we experience different levels of stress at unpredictable times. In the beginning, when the situation was new in many aspects, we often did not have time to calm down from one dose of stress before the next one hit us. This, for many of us, has resulted in a sensitized stress response system; in other words, our basic level of functioning has become elevated from the calm state to the alert or alarmed state and being ‘nervous’ has become our base line.

Being adults, our brain is of course fully developed, yet regulating ourselves and staying in the calm state have often been a challenge for many of us in the wake of the pandemic. The same situation has had a different effect on our children. In the absence of caring adults who were able to lend their calm to them and help them regulate themselves, their developing brain may have been affected adversely; depending on age and on what part of their brain is in its sensitive growing period, they may have experienced the stresses of the quarantine as altered brain development, the symptoms of which may already be observed in changed sleep and eating patterns, anxiousness, being irritable or aggressive, regression to earlier habits, being withdrawn from others or daydreaming a lot just to name a few. Some effects may only appear later in their lives as various dependences such as performance compulsion, anxiety, or substance use. To put it in another way, having a fully developed brain gives adults the advantage of using our thinking brain (cortical modulation) and apply self-regulation techniques (such as breathing, walking, running, rocking, swimming, rhythm, doodling, humming, swinging, jumping, dancing) or relational regulation. If we are able to remain regulated, we can then ‘lend our calm’ to others especially to children around us and help them regulate their stress response systems. Having a less developed brain they are more prone to react to stress from the lower parts of their brain and have emotional, or in extreme cases survival reactions even to the slightest stress they experience. It is evident then that our role is to be aware of this fact, work consciously on regulating ourselves and support our children in doing the same.

As many children went back to school while just as many remained in distance education and then vice versa, we still encounter the ambiguity of how to regain normality in the face of the third wave of the pandemic. The context is still ever changing as specific school communities experience the illness or the threat of it on large scale; rules and expectations vary almost school by school. One thing is sure: citizens of schools, both children and adults lead their daily life with highly sensitized nervous systems and visible mental health challenges due to the accumulated stress of  a year of the pandemic. Thus, the questions remain: Could children continue their learning process where they stopped in March 2020? Could teachers fill the learning gaps caused by the pandemic so far in the current school year? The answer is clearly no.

The example of one Hungarian school with over 80% of disadvantaged children illustrates well why we are so bold to state this. In September 2020, by government decree, the school resumed teaching as if nothing had happened. Because they put a lot of emphasis on staying connected with all their students, they all showed up for school. Nonetheless, teachers emphasized activities to reconnect and re-strengthen the communities be they at the classroom level or the entire school. At the same time, teachers were very anxious and frightened; many of them were elderly, some had chronic illnesses and they were all aware of the lack of appropriate hygiene practices in many of their students’ families. Despite of the strict measures taken at the school they were not able to fight off the infection. Due to their difficult economic situation many families sent their children to school often with high temperatures suppressed by medicine. Frequently, if symptoms of raised temperature or diarrhea were detected at the beginning of the day, the school was not able to send the student home because the family refused to pick them up before the end of the school day. There were efforts to isolate these students on the school premises, but it posed tremendous challenges from providing their supervision, through using bathrooms to serving their meals. As it could be expected, COVID-19 took its toll in the school. At the beginning of November, 13 out of the 20 school teachers came down with serious symptoms of the disease. Not only they had to stay at home quarantined, but also, they were too weak to provide online education. The school building was closed, and online education introduced, however with serious shortage of teachers. Understandably, in these circumstances the school staff was not able to maintain the level of connection to their students as they had done in the spring semester. Some of them were sick or in poor condition for as long as 5 weeks; even so they were summoned back to teaching and the school had to reopen and resume the onsite teaching for the very last week of the semester before the winter break. Coming out of a serious illness or fearing of the possibility of becoming infected, teachers were devastated. They received their students in a very fragile physical and mental state with obviously seriously heightened stress levels. To make things worse, about half of the school’s entire student population did not show up on that week with the 5^th and 8^th grades missing completely. Teachers were idling at school, trying to provide online education for those who at least connected; the distress of the situation prevented them from keeping the rituals of celebrating the holidays and the closure of the first semester. Not being able to sustain the connection with the students in the second round of the distance education visibly showed its result sending both students and teachers in a disarray for the holidays.

Returning to school in January therefore was not a positive, exciting prospect. As anticipated, teachers did not re-charge over the break and brought their anxieties to school in January. It is not exaggerating to say that they themselves were not ready to meet the challenges of the sensitized nervous systems of their students with fully equipped mental capacities. Although all of the students returned to school on the first week of the new semester, the proof of the sensitization of their nervous systems are manifested in their behavior. The school principal reports that student behaviors that had successfully been eliminated by the school’s relation-focused, trauma-informed, healing-centered approach are now back; students smoking in the building and physical fights have been observed and the number of critical incidents has gone up from zero to several in the first week. As the principal stated,

We now have to go back to the base and re-enforce our relationship and connectedness to our students. We have to get them ready for learning before we can expect them to perform academically. It all starts with us teachers, though. We have to fortify our relationship to each other and emphasize that we are a team and as such we can handle the situation. We have experienced how strong trusting relationships with the adults enabled our students to perform well in school before, so this is what we have to focus on now, this must be our priority for the time being.”

In other words, both students and teachers, along with their families needed strengthened psychosocial support in adjusting to the disrupted reality of the learning environment. This is exactly what they did: instead of focusing strictly on academic achievement of the students, they emphasized the importance of reconnecting with each other, both in student-student and student-teacher relations. The teaching staff started with themselves; school leadership created opportunities for dealing with the emotional stress teachers experienced and reinforced activities that strengthen community. At the same time, they were asked to do the same in their classrooms and introduce extra activities and daily routines to strengthen the sense of community. It took almost two months for the staff to stabilize themselves and their classrooms so that they could start putting the focus back on academics. This coincides with the latest one-month of school closure as we write this article; the consequences of which are still to be seen. With our knowledge from NMT we predict that the work after the next return to school would take longer to stabilize the school community again to get them ready for learning.

The great news is that NMT tells us that it is possible to revert these tendencies; we can go back to the area of the brain in which a child has had an obstacle and help it re-develop. This can be done in a relationship with caring and affectionate adults through developmentally matched activities that stimulate the given part of the brain. These activities must be rhythmic, repetitive, and rewarding; music and rhythm, games, storytelling, daily routines and ceremonies, roller skating, sports, dance, creative arts, cooking, etc., the list is endless. The important thing is that we do these activities together with the kids. Creating the conditions for a safe learning environment[2], i.e. for an atmosphere in which students feel safe both physically and mentally, starts with positive and inspiring personal connections to the adult. It is equally true for parents and teachers. Spending quality time together without actual studying, enjoying playing and connecting, doing everyday activities such as preparing meals or tidying the classroom should be placed to the forefront of activities before we expect children to perform academically. The current mixed situation of in-school and digital education only with adequate psychosocial support and personal attention will reach the desired learning outcomes for any children.

We adults –whether we are parents, educators, or have another role in the child’s life–must be aware of how our calm or the lack of it, supports or prevents the ability to self-regulate behavior of the children in our care. This, in turn, has a significant impact on their academic achievement. Though the importance of the physical conditions of learning and academic progress cannot be discounted, we believe that as students are expected to learn in or outside the school, the emphasis must be put on continually nurturing relationships and strengthening communities, so that all citizens of a school can remain regulated and keep their calm. In an inclusive school, this is the first and foremost characteristic anyway; in an environment where children and adults feel physically and emotionally safe and have the opportunity to experience calming activities, that affect the lower areas of the brain, throughout their day in the company of adults they like and trust, they all have the potential to thrive which will result in academic progress.

We call education decision makers at all levels to reconsider their focus on the physical conditions – equipment and access – of digital education and on academic achievement, and adopt a trauma-informed and healing-centered approach in the policies formed in response to the COVID-19 educational crisis and call for actions that focus on the personal relationship between the children and adults."

These measures could include the following:

• Acknowledge the extraordinary stress of the situation for all and lower the expectations for producing academic results both for teachers and students.
• Focus on strengthening communities within the schools, both among the student body and the teaching staff.
• Promote interventions and activities that are proven effective in regulating the stress response system. Make room for them in school schedules.
• Educate teachers and parents on the mental health and emotional consequences of the pandemic and on techniques to counter affect them. Offer targeted capacity building for teachers and parents to support the children’s learning process.
• Decentralize systems to allow and enable teachers directly involved with the students to make the treatment and intervention decisions, particularly in weighing when to focus on well-being activities and when on academics.
• Provide extra psychosocial support for teachers and students as well.
• Increase the number of school staff to work with families in need and to reach out to those who dropped out of the system.
• Encourage schools to serve as community centers and to involve parents in healing activities.

This will not only benefit the students who are in the education systems, but also it will create an opportunity to reach out and bring those children back into the education systems that disappeared as the result of the disrupted education caused by the pandemic.

Your history of connectedness is a better predictor of your health than your history of adversity. (…) If you don’t make an assessment on connection, and only focus on adversity, you will not make the same progress.” - Dr. Bruce D. Perry