The COVID-19: Monitoring the Impacts on Learning Outcomes (MILO) project aims to measure learning outcomes to analyse the long-term impact of COVID-19 on learning and to evaluate the effectiveness of distance learning mechanisms utilised during school closures.

The four overarching goals of the project are to:

• Evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on learning outcomes by reporting against SDG Indicator 4.1.1b
• Identify the impact of different distance learning mechanisms put in place to remediate the learning disruption generated by COVID-19
• Expand the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) bank of items for primary education
• Generate a toolkit to scale assessment results to international benchmarks, reporting against SDG 4.1.1b

The focus of this study is on students at the end of primary school. The benchmark that will be used to indicate learning outcomes in this study is aligned with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator 4.1.1(b):

Proportion of children and young learners … at the end of primary … achieving at least a minimum proficiency level in (i) reading and (ii) mathematics, by sex