Inclusion and education

REMOTE LEARNING HAS TO OVERCOME 
OBSTACLES TO REACH DISADVANTAGED 
GROUPS
Many students have been unable to participate 
uninterruptedly in the learning process under remote 
conditions. Countries in the region have used a variety 
of methods to estimate participation in remote learning. 
At the beginning of the remote learning period, Armenia 
introduced an electronic platform on which parents 
registered children based on social security numbers; it has 
served as an electronic journal. In Azerbaijan, estimates of 
connected students are based on students’ and teachers’ 
registration records in the Virtual School system. In 
Montenegro, all teachers were responsible for keeping in 
touch with their students via the learning platform and 
keeping a record of their participation.
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C E N T R A L A N D E A S T E R N E U R O P E , C A U C A S U S A N D C E N T R A L A S I A

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However, data are not consistently collected and 
cannot determine the extent of non-participation in 
a comparable way. During the first wave in the Czech 
Republic, it was estimated from telephone interviews 
with schools that 11% of students in basic schools with 
primary level and 16% in basic schools with primary 
and lower secondary levels were not involved in online 
communication (Pavlas et al., 2020). In Estonia, the 
Ministry of Education and Research, which contacted 
schools weekly to identify the number of students not 
reached, estimated that 1,500 primary and secondary 
school students, or less than 1%, were not connected. 
However, there were no data on inactivity among those 
connected. In Ukraine, around 1% of students stopped 
participating and a further 14% did not participate fully 
(Ukraine Office of Education Ombudsman, 2020).
There was no systematic documentation of participation 
in remote learning by population group, even though 
students who have special education needs or a 
disability, belong to an ethnic or linguistic minority or are 
poor are at considerably greater risk of not participating. 
In Bulgaria, one in five students with disabilities did 
not receive additional support needed for education 
continuity. About 20% of Roma students in Ukraine and 
30% in Croatia did not participate in remote learning.
In Estonia, Russian-speaking parents whose children were 
enrolled in Estonian language immersion programmes 
had trouble helping their children with schoolwork 
due to the language barrier (Estonia Ministry of Social 
Affairs, 2020).
In Croatia, students who do not speak Croatian 
at home, including national minority and refugee 
students, were unable to participate in education due 
to language barriers. GOOD Inicijativa, an association 
of non-government organizations (NGOs) advocating 
for education of good quality to promote human rights 
and democratic citizenship, lodged a complaint for 
violations of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 
as non-Croatian-speaking children were not provided