The pandemic affected coverage more at the preschool and high school level: Mejoredu

Laura Poy Solano

Newspaper La Jornada
Monday February 13, 2023, p. 8

The impact of the pandemic on education not only affected school enrollment, but also coverage, that is, the total number of students who attend an educational level for every hundred of age to attend it.

The National Commission for the Continuous Improvement of Education (Mejoredu) highlights that in the three cycles with covid (2020 to 2022) the gross coverage rate, although it was not significantly affected in primary and secondary, in preschool it went from 71.7 to 63.7 percent.

In high school it decreased from 62.2 to 60.7 percent, which means that there were fewer young people incorporated into this educational level than those who, due to their age, should have been enrolled at the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year.

The National Indicators of the Continuous Improvement of Education in Mexico 2022 report indicates that the fall in the coverage of upper secondary education suggests that many of the young people who left the classrooms due to the pandemic have not returned and those who finished high school at the start of the emergency have delayed their entry into this educational level.

It stands out that both preschool and upper secondary education are the levels with the lowest rates of school coverage, that is, they are still far from achieving universal reach, in addition to the fact that they were the most affected by the pandemic.

Regarding the number of schools, it reveals that preschools have decreased since the 2018-2019 cycle, when 90,446 schools were reported. However, this trend deepened in the pandemic, since by 2021-2022 there were 87,038 schools, that is, 3,408 fewer educational spaces, which mainly affected private centers.

In the case of high school, a reduction of 161 schools was found in the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school cycles, and it stands out that although the fall seems not considerable, it breaks with the trend observed in recent years, which may distance the National Education System from achieving universal coverage.

The commission stresses that the education system still has problems retaining students in upper secondary education, and this is aggravated by the extraordinary conditions during the health contingency, which mainly affected private educational servicessince its establishments were reduced by 1,219 between the 2019-2020 to 2021-2022 cycles.