The school year 2020-2021 in Hungary during the pandemic

This report describes the experiences of Hungarian public education in the 2020/21 academic year, during the COVID-19 epidemic. We focus primarily on describing the teaching practices, the teaching methods used that arose during the school closures period. In secondary schools, this meant two-thirds of the school year, while in primary schools it meant a much shorter period. The report is based on a qulitative study of teachers, school principals, students, parents and a representative of a trade union of teachers and a central organization dealing with education policy (n=22). The main finding of the study is that remote education has highlighted a number of problems that the Hungarian education system has been struggling with for a long time. At the same time, some schools and teachers experienced the situation as a challenge resulting in a number of good teacher practices. In schools, on the other hand, where the proportion of disadvantaged students was high, the problems worsened despite teacher effort. The study also deals with the question of what lessons this period provided for Hungarian public education.