As the skies fell quiet over Beirut this week, displaced Lebanese piled into cars and headed south for home, but any return to normality remains elusive given their economy was in freefall even before war broke out last year and no solutions seem at hand.

A ceasefire between Israel and the Iran-backed armed group Hizbollah came into effect at dawn on Wednesday after conflict escalated in September with Israel launching heavy bombing raids across the country and sending troops into southern Lebanon.

Although the fighting has stopped, at least for now, hard days lie ahead for a worn-out people who were reeling from multiple crises since the economic implosion of 2019.

The crisis has hit education especially hard.

At least 500 public schools, roughly one in two in what is a badly under-funded sector, were converted into shelters in recent months to house many of the 1.2 million people fleeing the fighting, Save the Children said last month.

And 2024 marks the sixth straight year that Lebanon's 1.5 million children faced significant disruptions to schooling, worsening their long-term physical and mental outlook, it said.

Ameer Shweekh, 13, is one of those children.

Forced to flee his home in the southern city of Tyre two months ago, he got a place at the Omar El Zeeny public school in a working-class neighbourhood in Beirut when the school year started this month.

Sitting in one of the school's cold, old, if clean, classrooms the day before the ceasefire took effect, he said he was unhappy with the quality of his learning.

Shweekh used to attend a private school in southern Lebanon.

"The level of the foreign language class here is very low. Over there it was a higher level. We were learning a language. Here we are learning what a sentence is."

Shweekh said he logs onto online classes from his former school when he finishes his new studies each afternoon.

But he knows he is falling behind, especially in coding — there are no computers at his new school.

"I do not practise it, so I forgot it all. If we stay like this, I don't think I can do it, the school doesn't teach it."

Lebanon was once was once an educational beacon in the region, with its international schools and universities drawing students from across the Arab world.

Now it ranks last among Arab countries in international assessments.

A devastating port explosion in Aug 2020, the Covid pandemic and allegations of state corruption have set the economy on a downward trajectory for years.

Funding for learning has largely dried up, as has help from non-governmental bodies and United Nations agencies.

The education community has only received 19 per cent of the donor funding it needs this year, said Janhvi Kanoria, a director at Education Above All, a Qatar-based global education foundation.

"We have a lost generation in Lebanon. How do you recover from these multiple crises?"

The conflict between Israel and Hizbollah deepened Lebanon's economic malaise with dire consequences for public services.

Last month, the World Bank estimated that the fighting caused US$8.5 billion in damage and losses.

The bank forecast that Lebanon's real gross domestic product would contract by at least 5.7 per cent in 2024, compared with the 0.9 per cent growth in GDP it would have expected without the war.

The years-long financial crisis, which saw 80 per cent of the population sink below the poverty line, also starved the Education Ministry of funds even as student numbers were growing.

As families struggled, many parents moved children from expensive private schools to the overstretched public system, which was also teaching tens of thousands of Syrian children, who had fled war in their own country in 2011.

A World Bank report found that in the 2020-2021 school year, 55,000 students left private schools to join public ones.

Around 60 per cent of students attend private schools and these institutions have benefited from more government support, at the expense of public schools.

A 2023 report found state funding to the private educational sector was around US$900 million annually with high-income groups benefiting from 64 per cent of this aid, while poorer groups received 16 per cent of school allowances.