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In this Insight Note, we report results of a phone survey that the RISE Tanzania Research team conducted with 2,240 parents (or alternate primary care-givers) of primary school children following the school closures in Tanzania. After the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in Tanzania on 16 March 2020, the government ordered all primary schools closed the following day. Schools remained closed until 29 June 2020. Policymakers and other education stakeholders were concerned that the closures would lead to significant learning loss if children did not receive educational support or engagement at home. To help stem learning loss, the government promoted radio, TV, and internet-based learning content to parents of school-age children. The primary aims of the survey were to understand how children and families responded to the school closures, the education related activities they engaged in, and their strategies to send children back to school. The survey also measures households’ engagement with remote learning content over the period of school closures. We supplement the findings of the parent survey with insights from interviews with Ward Education Officers about their activities during the school closures. The survey sample is comprised of primary care-givers (in most cases, parents) of students enrolled in Grades 3 and 4 during the 2020 school year. The survey builds on an existing panel of students assessed in 2019 and 2020 in a nationally representative sample of schools.4 The parent surveys were conducted using Computer Assisted Telephonic Interviewing (CATI) over a two-week period in early September 2020, roughly two months after the re-opening of primary schools. We report the following key findings from this survey: *Almost all (more than 99 percent) of children in our sample were back in school two months after schools re-opened. The vast majority of parents believed it was either safe or extremely safe for their children to return to school. *Only 6 percent of households reported that their children listened to radio lessons during the school closures; and a similar fraction (5.5 percent) tuned into TV lessons over the same period. Less than 1 percent of those surveyed accessed educational programmes on the internet. Households with access to radio or TV reported higher usage. *Approximately 1 in 3 (36 percent) children worked on the family farm during the closures, with most children working either 2 or 3 days a week. Male children were 6.2 percentage points likelier to work on the family farm than female children. *Households have limited access to education materials for their child. While more than 9 out of 10 households have an exercise book, far fewer had access to textbooks (35 percent) or own reading books (31 percent). *One in four parents (24 percent) read a book to their child in the last week.

DOI: 10.35489/BSG-RISE-RI_2021/027