Schools across Europe must stay open, say WHO and Unicef

Schools across Europe must stay open and be made safer for staff and children, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Unicef have demanded, as a new term gets under way with the highly transmissible Delta variant still dominant in the region.

“The pandemic has caused the most catastrophic disruption to education in history,” said Hans Kluge, the head of the WHO’s Europe region. “It is vital that classroom-based learning continues uninterrupted.”

Kluge said that while the pandemic continued, “educating children safely in a physical school setting” was of “paramount importance for their education, mental health and social skills”, and must become “a primary objective” for governments.

Forty-four out of 53 countries in the WHO’s Europe region closed their schools nationwide at the height of the pandemic’s first wave in April 2020, and while most reopened that September, surging infection rates sparked new restrictions and more closures in dozens of countries during the autumn and winter.

Photo: A teacher in the Antonio Labriola Scientific High School in Ostia, Rome, Italy. EPA-EFE/EMANUELE VALERI

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