The prolonged school closures in Bangladesh has put us at the top of yet another unpalatable list—according to UNICEF, we have had one of the world's longest full closure of educational institutions due to the pandemic. Its data also suggests that, after Brazil, Bangladesh has the most number of students who have missed almost all classroom instruction time since March 2020. We are one of the few countries in the world that have not even partially opened schools during the course of the pandemic, for over an entire year. Research suggests that 5.92 million primary and secondary students in the country are facing learning losses as a result. An Education Watch report also detailed how almost 70 percent of students are not participating in distance learning.

Against this backdrop, one had hoped that the joint press conference by the two education ministers, held on Wednesday, would give the country's students some much-needed relief by providing a concrete roadmap to the resumption of education in Bangladesh. Their announcements, however, were at best confusing, and at worst—incoherent, out of touch and devoid of any empathy for the students of Bangladesh. After 14 long months of school closures, our students deserved better than the confused plans that have been put forward.

Let us start with the conflicting statements. It was suggested at the press conference that educational institutions might open on June 13 and in fact, current school closures have been extended to June 12 only. So will schools be opening then? Unlikely, since the education minister also said the ministry will be relying on the suggestions of the National Technical Advisory Committee on Covid-19, which has recommended reopening educational institutions once the infection rate drops below five percent, which has again been on the rise for the last several days.

This also begs the question—if the ministry has been relying on the committee's recommendations, why did they not start planning to open schools when the positivity rate started nearing five percent in January this year? Government data suggests that on January 12, the positivity rate was at exactly five percent. By January 19, the seven-day rolling average positivity rate was also five percent—meaning that by then, the average positivity rate had been at five percent for a week. It wasn't until late March that the positivity rate started climbing again. So why then, were students not given the opportunity to go back to school, at least for a month or two? For children who are at high risk of being pushed into child labour and/or child marriages, especially due to the economic crisis that the poorest families are facing during the pandemic, any opportunity to make up for learning losses (and access the school meals initiative) would have been a welcome change.

This brings us to the next suggestion put forward in the press briefing regarding the plan for reopening schools. According to a report in this daily, if/when schools do re-open, students of class five will attend classes six days a week whereas students of class one to four will go to school once a week. The Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education recently published guidelines on the health and safety measures that will be followed in this scenario, which includes measures to physically distance, the division of classes into smaller groups and the use of masks by all. As commendable as these suggestions are, how feasible are they, especially since, according to the Obhibhabok Oikya Forum (a platform of guardians), there can be more than 80 children in one classroom? Will temporary classrooms be set up elsewhere? Will teachers' capacity be improved, will teaching assistants be hired? No information has been shared on how these plans are actually going to be implemented.

If you are worried that not enough concern is being shown for our primary/secondary students, the ministry's plans for SSC and HSC students almost beggars belief. After over a year of being kept out of classrooms, the plan is that SSC and HSC students will attend 60 and 84 days of class respectively, six days a week, and then be given two weeks to study for their exams (with shortened syllabuses). So we still don't know when these classes will actually resume, but when they do, SSC students will attend around 360 hours of schooling over 10 weeks, and HSC students will attend around 500 hours of the same over 14 weeks, and then they will get exactly 336 hours to absorb this information (assuming they don't take time to eat, sleep or relax over the two weeks of preparation time), after which they will sit for the most important exams of their adolescence, on which hinges their chances of getting into universities, following their ambitions and keeping their families happy/solvent.

I wonder if the officials who came up with this plan went through such intensive and continuous work hours while formulating it. Perhaps they might have come up with a better plan if they did. However, given the very real impacts the pandemic is having on the mental health of young people—coupled with the report from a youth organisation in March this year suggesting that suicide rates have gone up by a staggering 44 percent in Bangladesh in 2020 when compared to 2019—one feels a little more time should have been spent on making provisions that actually take the well-being of students into account.

What is truly disappointing is that nothing was said in the press conference that we haven't already heard before. The authorities have had a year to think about how to safely reopen educational institutions, and this is the best that they could come up with, despite experts putting forward multiple short- and long-term recommendations regarding the situation. The most obvious of these has been the idea of opening schools in different districts in phases, depending on the local coronavirus situation.

According to regional data from the IEDCR, 41 percent of all Covid-19 cases are in Dhaka (given the population density of this area, this isn't a surprise). The worst district after Dhaka is Chattogram, with around six percent of cases, followed by Cumilla and Narayanganj (both at 1.9 percent). This means that every other district in the country holds less than two percent of total cases, and if you compare it to data from December 2020, you'll find that the situation really didn't change much in terms of district-wise distribution of Covid-19. Given this scenario, it is absolutely baffling why children across the country—especially those in remote/rural areas who are most affected by the digital divide—are being held hostage simply because we are unable to get the coronavirus under control in the urban centres.

It is clear that there is a pressing need for decentralisation of education policy. The two ministries must end this one-size-fits-all approach and involve relevant stakeholders—schools, educators, local administration, NGOs, policy experts and most importantly, students and their families—to come up with a coherent learning recovery programme that goes beyond the bare minimum and actually comes up with approaches tailored to different localities and their contexts. At present, the government has no idea what the learning levels of SSC/HSC examinees even are. It is folly to come up with examination schedules without actually getting them back into classrooms first.

And beyond exams and learning recoveries, we must devise methods to get children who have already been lost to child marriage and employment during the pandemic, back into school. It is extremely concerning that, despite economic inequalities being further entrenched during the pandemic (CPD estimates over 16 million people have been further pushed into poverty), we are not seeing any real effort from the authorities to ensure this is not reflected in soaring rates of school dropouts.

When the health and safety restrictions were eased around August last year, most of our usual activities resumed. It was not just offices and markets that opened up—weddings were attended, holidays were planned, and life went back to relative normalcy for most adults. So why then, did we shut our children out of their classrooms? What does this say about the value we place on education in this country? Through our desire to protect our children during the pandemic, have we inflicted greater long-lasting damage on their intellectual development and psychological well-being? As the main government bodies in charge of the education of our younger generations, we hope the two education ministries are pondering these questions as seriously as they ought to.

Shuprova Tasneem is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star. Her Twitter handle is @shuprovatasneem.