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Mrs R Tharani Ramasamy,��Ms Hema Letchamanan
Taylor’s University, Subang Jaya, Malaysia

Accentuation on the significance of instruction, particularly literacy skills among children since the start of schooling ought to have the ability to assist them with accomplishing a balanced lifestyle particularly in terms of becoming a responsible citizen and sustaining sound and thriving relationships with families, at work environment, and within the community. By implication, this will intensify economic and national development (Chew, 2017). According to the World Bank (2019), numerous children globally are not reading proficiently despite being in school. Besides being referred to as one of the fundamental literacy skills, reading is also considered as an elixir for learning as children advance through school and contrarily, an inability to read limits their opportunities for further learning. To underscore this crisis, the World Bank together with UNESCO Institute for Statistics put forth a term called “Learning Poverty” (LP) that denotes a child’s inability to read and comprehend a simple text by the age of ten. Children who are unable to read at grade level are more likely to drop out of school which prompts the intergenerational transmission of poverty and vulnerability (Azevedo et al., 2021). More than half of all children from both low- and middle-income nations are currently experiencing LP. In Malaysia alone, 13% of children at late primary age are not proficient in reading, adjusted for out-of-school children (The World Bank, 2019).  Even before the  COVID-19 pandemic, many children from disadvantaged homes often begin grade one behind their peers and sometimes not on par with the curriculum’s expectations. These children face a higher chance of placement in specialised curriculum programmes, grade repetition and early school dropouts. With prolonged school closure since 2020, a total of 21,316 students dropped out of school from March 2020 until July 2021 in Malaysia (Putra, 2021) and globally the learning crisis has been amplified with an additional 72 million primary school goers being pushed into LP (Herkner et al., 2014). Hence, this paper is primarily concerned with investigating the impact of COVID-19 on education for urban children living in poverty in Malaysia. It answers questions on these children’s current reading ability and the factors that push them into LP during a pandemic. This study was based on a sample of 30 urban children experiencing poverty aged ranging between six to nine and their parents from a low-cost flat in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A qualitative methodology using reading tests and semi-structured interviews were employed and the data set collected were analysed using the social justice framework outlined by Tikly and Barrett (2011). Tikly and Barretee (2011) deduce the framework from prior theoretical work on the human capabilities approach by Amartya Sen in 1999 and Martha Nussbaum in 2000 that incorporates learning basic literacy in reading, writing and numeracy and Nancy Fraser’s global social justice theories. The central principles of the framework such as democracy, relevance and inclusivity are also extracted from the above-stated theories surveying how instructive conditions advance quality learning and results that are locally esteemed and applicable. Findings from the reading tests revealed that most students were unable to read and understand a text provided based on their grade level. Some children even required one-to-one support throughout the test as they struggled to identify and sound out the alphabets, their phonemes and graphemes correctly. The analysis of interviews by the parents uncovered that these children either did not receive or received very little preschool education as it is not part of the compulsory education in Malaysia (The Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, n.d). This finding is similar to the UNICEF (2018) report titled “Children Without” that studied children with a similar background in Kuala Lumpur where only 1 in 2 children of those aged 5 and 6 was in preschool. Further, parents listed unconducive learning environments at homes such as sharing of gadgets among siblings, limited access to internet connectivity and lack of study space as the factors that have hindered their children’s development of reading skills during the school closure for a total of 61 weeks from the year 2020 to 2021 (UNESCO, 2022). This causes difficulties for the children to catch up with the new year’s curriculum expectations that were not adjusted for their learning loss from the last two years. The insight from this study adds to the discussion on the impact of COVID-19 on learning for children from disadvantaged homes and the importance of addressing LP.