Understanding Post-COVID-19 learning recovery in public and private schools in Pakistan

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic affected education through school closures and disruptive shocks to household income, health, and economic activity. Using data from a survey carried out in 2024 in 108 rural villages as a continuation of the Learning and Educational Achievement in Pakistan Schools (LEAPS) panel data project in Punjab, Pakistan, we measure these shocks and their effects on the learning outcomes of primary school students. Although the duration of school closures had a minimal direct impact, COVID-19-induced income shocks significantly reduced student learning, by 0.06 SD (standard deviation), disproportionately affecting public school students (0.08 SD) compared to a minimal effect on private school students. Consequently, the pandemic widened the pre-existing private-public learning inequality in more impacted areas. The study also finds that mitigation action by schools during closures in general did not explain the variation in learning outcomes. The impact of the COVID-19-induced shock was fairly modest in magnitude compared to the already-existing learning variation owing to other school and student characteristics that normally predict educational outcomes, such as gender, school type, and maternal education. We also document long-term trends using the village panel aspect of the LEAPS project. Despite the significant disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, student performance in all subgroups by gender and school type showed improvement in the period 2011-2024 at least as much as in the previous period of 2004-2011. The findings collectively suggest there has been a steady improvement in education levels in rural Pakistani villages and that COVID-19 may have had only a small effect, or the negative impact disappeared by 2 years after school reopening.