Fighting educational inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic: an exploratory study

by Alex Turrini in collaboration with SKEMA Business School and University of Edinburgh Business School

The main goal of this study is to explore which factors can affect educational equity. We will focus on school’s internal conditions such as the principal’s leadership skills, teachers’ behaviors and collaborative networks that they have been able to activate to overcome inequalities. The definition of the impeding / facilitating factors in maintaining educational equity in a school will emerge from in-depth interviews. Our analysis will focus on the COVID-19 lockdown phase which occurred Feb. 21st – Jun, 8th 2020: in this period schools were forced to switch from in-class teaching to distance teaching. This shift has exacerbated the impact of individual socio-economic and cultural differences among students and it function as a fertile terrain to analyze the role of school’s professionals in ensuring students’ learning.