The Educational Consequences of Health Crises: A Project Funded by the European Research Council

Bastian Betthaeuser, a researcher at the Sciences Po Centre for Research on Social Inequalities (CRIS), has just received support from the European Research Council (ERC) for his research exploring the impact of major health crises on education.

Ce financement de la catégorie Starting Grants est décerné à des chercheurs en début de carrière ayant déjà produit des travaux d’excellence et disposant du potentiel pour se distinguer dans le milieu de la recherche. Cette année, c’est le seul Starting Grant remporté par un chercheur d’une institution de recherche française dans la thématique “The Social World and Its Interactions”.

The Starting Grants are awarded to researchers at the beginning of their careers who have already produced excellent work and have the potential to make a name for themselves in the research community. This year, it is the only Starting Grant won by a researcher from a French research institution in the “The Social World and Its Interactions” category.

The project :  Understanding the Consequences of Health Crises for Education: Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Health crises, natural disasters, and violent conflicts increasingly threaten children’s educational development. Such disruptive events are becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change and the growing instability of the global security architecture. But we lack a systematic understanding of how major disruptive events affect children’s educational development, largely because such events tend to also disrupt the collection of high-quality data on children’s education.

Because of the global scale of the COVID-19 pandemic and extensive data collection efforts as it unfolded, the COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of the consequences of major health crises for children’s educational development. The LEARN project will leverage this opportunity to provide a systematic account of how the pandemic has affected the educational development of children in different world regions.

To this end, LEARN will generate and apply high-quality, cross-national data and advanced quantitative and meta-analytical techniques. This research programme aims to substantially improve our understanding of how large health crises affect children’s educational development and provide a basis for policy makers to future-proof education systems to meet the growing threats posed by major disruptive events.

Bastian Betthaeuser, a research career dedicated to social inequalities

The researcher studied at the University of California, Berkeley (in economic policy) and then obtained a doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2018 (in social policy) with a thesis on the social mobility of children from working-class backgrounds. He joined Sciences Po's Centre for Research on Inequalities in 2021.

At the heart of his research: social inequalities and the way they accumulate over the course of a lifetime and are then passed on from generation to generation. The following year, he won funding from the French National Research Agency to carry out a systematic review and meta-analysis of data measuring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on school learning.

This work, based on 42 studies from 15 countries, provides a clearer picture of school learning deficits, which are unevenly distributed according to the socio-economic background of families, the subjects taught and the country. He set out the results in an article entitled “A systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence on learning during the COVID-19 pandemic | Nature Human Behaviour”, published in Nature Human Behaviour, a journal of international repute, which has received worldwide press coverage.