Learning at home: home schooling resources and children’s learning during the COVID-19 lockdown in France and Italy

School closures, forced by the COVID-19 crisis in many countries, impacted on children’s lives and their learning process. There will likely be substantial and persistent disparities between families in terms of education outcomes. Distant learning solutions adopted by schools have been heterogeneous over countries, within countries and between school levels. As a consequence, most of the burden of children’s learning fell on their parents, with likely uneven results depending on the socio-economic characteristics of the family. Using a real time survey data collected in April 2020 and early May in France and Italy on children’s use of time, distance learning resources and emotional status, we analyse how the lockdown has affected children’s use of time, their emotional wellbeing and their home learning process. We also estimate child fixed effects models to identify the main contributors of children’s status during the lockdown. The analysis focuses on the role played by online classes or other interactive methods on children’s home learning and emotional status. We find that the lockdown had a stronger impact on Italian families, both in terms of educational progress evaluation and of children’s emotional status, but attending online classes strongly reduced the negative impact in Italy, highlighting the major role played by teachers and children’s interaction with them in the Italian educational system. The less rigidly structured French classes, changing often teachers and classmates, may have contributed to build children’s independence from teachers and peer interactions, increasing their educational resilience during the COVID-19 lockdown.