The study is designed as a comparative analysis of the policy responses to crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary and Romania. Our aim is to capture comparatively the ways in which policy developments and debates in the two national contexts unfolded  and explore the ways in which education was or failed to be seen as a locus of an unfolding crisis. In our analysis, we are primarily interested in how the Covid-19 pandemic was framed by different policy actors. Was it framed as a crisis of education needing to be resolved by paying attention to educational access and provision in a long-term perspective? Or seen as a public health crisis that impacted education as a side-effect of necessary measures? Or viewed as an economic crisis in which the purpose of education is to ensure the continuation of workforce activity? Exploring the locus of the crisis comparatively allows us to investigate the different ways in which the right to health and the right to education were or failed to be realized during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

In Romania, the first suspension of face-to-face activities in all educational facilities (mid-March 2020) was followed by a non-binding recommendation replaced thereafter with the obligation to continue teaching and learning activities online. While suspension of face-to-face educational activity was framed as a preventive public health measure to slow-down the spread of Covid-19, online education with technology provided by parents and legal guardians was seen as the solution for realizing the right to education. By June 16th, nurseries, kindergartens and after-schools were allowed to reopen, an economically motivated measure that mostly favored private educational providers. In a next step, at the beginning of September the system was decentralized, educational institutions needing to suspend or partially suspend educational activities depending on Covid-19 incidence in their regions. At the beginning of November, this system was replaced with one of full national suspension of face-to-face educational activities, except for nurseries and after-schools, favoring yet again private educational actors. Through-out the spring, NGOs and experts voiced concerns about growing educational inequities, whereas starting in the summer, preventing health hazards associated with reopening schools became the topic of concern.     

In Hungary, the government announced the interruption of face-to-face education in mid-March, and three days later, schools were directed to continue teaching in a so-called “digital work scheme outside classrooms”. The government delegated the responsibility of ensuring the right to education to school principals and gave them the autonomy to find the best means of education for their student population. NGOs, voicing an argument centring on the right to education, have repeatedly raised concerns about the access of disadvantaged and Roma students to education as well as about the long-term effects of missing out from education. Schools and kindergartens finally reopened in early June just a few weeks before the summer vacation. By September, arguing that the economy must go on, the government was committed to restart face-to-face education. While kindergartens and elementary schools (teaching 6-14 years old students) have remained open until the time of writing, secondary schools shifted to a ”digital work scheme” in early November as coronavirus cases surged gravely in the country. Since September, the public debate centred on the ways in which the health of students and especially the aging teacher population shall be protected and what would be the sufficient sanitary measures to keep schools “immune”. In this period, with concerns about the economy in the backdrop, the public debate concentrated on the right to health, and arguments about the right to education had weakened.

We employ an adapted version of Critical Frame Analysis (Dombos et al, 2012). In choosing Critical Frame Analysis (CFA) for our research purposes, we have been interested in its’ development as a tool specifically tailored for the comparative analysis of social policy (Leek, 2018), and designed to disclose and study the different representations that socio-political actors offer about policy problems and solutions in policy documents (Verloo and Lombardo, 2007; van der Haar and Verloo, 2016). In order to capture both policy developments as they unfold and their significance in each national context we have decided to focus on policy documents that governed compulsory education in the studied period (including relevant transnational, European and national policy documents), public statements accompanying these policy measures by key figures involved in the policy making process, as well as open letters, petitions and other public attempts at agenda-setting in which NGOs, as well as other non-state actors were involved. Following Hay (1999), we conceptualise “ ‘crisis’ as a moment of decisive intervention” and pay special attention to the narrativity and thus to the discursive production of policy narratives of crisis. Following Jessop & Oosterlynck (2008, pg. 1160) we start from the assumption that the ways in which crisis measures are selected, maintained and consolidated are discursively mediated. Moreover, the scale of these processes and policy responses are dependent on the interpretation of the locus of the crisis. If for example, the Covid-19 pandemic is interpreted as having produced a public health crisis in education, less serious educational intervention is expected than if the crisis is seen as being a crisis of education - an educational crisis caused by the inability to realize the right to education for all. In exploring how the crisis is framed in policy debates we are not only looking for measures and statements explicitly addressing a ‘crisis’ but more broadly focus on the locus and justification (educational, economic, health related, etc.) of the measures proposed, as well as their temporal horizon (short, medium or long-term). We have chosen to focus on the timeframe between March 2020 (as the onset of public health measures that limited the possibility of conducting face-to-face educational activities) and December 2020 (as the point from which discussions started to shift as it became clear that a vaccine will become available).

This is an ongoing study, so at the present moment we have not formulated our conclusions yet. In our analysis, we will be paying special attention to the ways in which the policy debate unfolded between non-state and state actors, which actors (government, families, school principals, etc.) were assigned roles of responsibility related to ensuring the right to education and the right to health by whom and when in the unfolding debate. We will also be paying attention to how the temporalities and loci of crisis are framed in the policy debate in relation to both the right to health and the right to education.

Dombos T, Krizsan A, Verloo M, Zentai V (2012) Critical Frame Analysis: A Comparative Methodology for the QUING Project. Working Paper Series, Center for Policy Studies. Central European University. Hungary: Budapest. http://pdc.ceu.hu/archive/00006845/01/cps-working-paper-critical-frame-analysis-quing-2012.pdf [downloaded April 2020] Hay C (1999) Crisis and the structural transformation of the state: Interrogating the process of change. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 1(3): 317–344. Jessop B and Oosterlynck S (2008) Cultural political economy: On making the cultural turn without falling into soft economic sociology. Geoforum 39(3): 1155–1169. Leek C (2018) Making Sense of Men’s Changing Role in Gender Equality Policy: A Case Study in the Use of Critical Frame Analysis. Sage Research Methods Cases. London: Sage Publications Ltd. Van der Haar M and Verloo M (2016) Starting a conversation about critical frame analysis: reflections on dealing with methodology in feminist research. Politics and Gender. 12 (3): 417-432. Verloo M and Lombardo E (2007) Contested Gender Equality and Policy Variety in Europe: Introducing a Critical Frame Analysis Approach. In: Verloo M (Ed) Multiple Meanings of Gender Equality: A Critical Frame Analysis of Gender Policies in Europe. 21-46. New York: Central European University Press.