Hello, I'm Rosakins, each week on the BBC World Service, I look in depth at one of the

biggest stories in the news, and today I'm going to consider COVID-19 and schools.

This is a sound we all know. I love the sheer exuberance and energy of the playground

as a boy, and as a dad, while it represents our children being somewhere happy and nurturing,

and a lot of us, adults and children, are not hearing the sound of the playground right

now. Thousands of schools are shut, millions of kids are at home, and, unless any of us underestimate

that, this is how the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres describes the point we've reached.

We are at a defining moment for the world's children and young people. The decisions of governments

and partners they can now will have lasting impact on hundreds of millions of young people

that decades have come. The decision facing governments is, do you reopen schools when the virus

is not contained? US President Joe Biden has no doubt. It should be a national priority to get

our kids back in the school and keep them in school. And no one will tell you better than children

themselves why this matters. I think there are a lot of things that make it really difficult to learn

at home. People seem to think that it's just a similar idea of school you go on an online class

when you're supposed to be in class, and then that's fine, but it's much more tiring than that.

This week, I'm going to look at the science around COVID in schools and at the possible roots

to reopening, but you can't assess any of this without first looking at the impact right now

of children being stuck at home. Now more than 250 million children around the world are not

going to school because of COVID. Pandemic school closures have resulted in a loss of, on average,

two thirds of a school year worldwide. Those news reports give us a feel for the scale of the

disruption. So too, do the statistics. Listen to Henry at a four from the children's charity

UNICEF back in September. Almost nine months since the coronavirus outbreak started, 872 million

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