The COVID-19 pandemic has sown havoc on the schooling calendar for 2020 but as the months wore on it became clear that schools would have to restart soon.

Despite some learners returning to school in June and July, President Cyril Ramaphosa and other stakeholders announced that schools would close for all grades on 26th July.

While learners have been returning to school slowly, it was not clear what the remainder of 2020 would look like for school learners.

Thankfully we now have that information following a notice published by Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga.

The revised 2020 calendar can be found here (PDF), but we’ve also embedded the calendar below. For a higher resolution image simply tap or click the image.

As we can see from the calendar above there is only one more school holiday for 2020 and that takes place from 26th October to 30th October.

School days now extend well into December were pre-pandemic classes would’ve wrapped up closer to the end of November.

This announcement of new schooling days comes after the World Economic Forum published advice that developing countries shouldn’t reopen schools too early.

While studies show that children aren’t as susceptible to COVID-19, the WEF points out that family dynamics in developing countries could see children interacting with elderly family members more often.

“While our study does not address all the issues related to schools reopening during the pandemic, we argue that evidence on household spread of the virus needs to be considered by governments when deciding to reopen schools,” said the organisation.

Of course developing countries don’t have the luxury of shifting all children to online learning so schooling has to restart at some point.

[Image – CC 0 Element5 Digital Unsplash]