A version of this blog was originally published on the NORRAG website.

Across the world, disruptions to education – such as natural disasters, conflict, climate change impacts and the pandemic – have steadily increased. In addition, the rise of generative artificial intelligence raises questions about the role of teachers and the purpose of academic learning – and poses an existential threat to education.

Improved ‘resilience’ is offered as the solution to these challenges, and since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in resilience has grown: Google Trends shows that before 2020, searches for ‘education resilience’ were limited, but the term spiked in March 2020, and have almost doubled in the years since.

Across education literature, and within national policies and COVID-19 recovery plans, efforts to cultivate more resilient education systems have been proposed to ensure better response and recovery to crises, and increased preparation for new shocks and disruptions. However, without a focused, shared understanding of education system resilience (ESR), there is a risk that it will become just another education buzzword.

A system resilience framework

A framework for understanding and examining education system resilience was developed as part of a scoping study commissioned by GPE KIX and implemented by the Education Development Trust.

The study included academic and grey literature review, policy analysis, and key informant interviews with education planning officials in 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), all GPE partner countries.

As illustrated in the figure below, a resilient education system is characterized by policies and plans to embed overall system strengthening, to anticipate risk, to plan for and to respond and recover in times of crisis, and to prevent and mitigate future disruptions.

Emerging framework for conceptualizing ESR

Each activity is summarized here, with a brief example of what it could involve:

• Strengthen: a resilient system is in a continued cycle of strengthening to ensure it is reliable and flexible, regardless of emergency status. Activities for system strengthening could include attention to financing, supervision and support to schools, quality teaching, curriculum and assessments, data, planning, monitoring, and accountability, and governance and management.
• Anticipate: activities for risk analysis consider potential crises that will impact education, including ‘known’ disruptions that may look like past or current crises (such as disasters, violent conflicts, pandemics) and ‘unknown’ disruptions, like emerging climate change impacts or GenAI.
• Plan: planning includes all efforts to document strategic objectives, to codify rights and responsibilities, and to propose a course of action. Education sector plans, along with specific plans for disaster risk reduction, crisis-sensitive education planning, comprehensive school safety, and climate-specific plans, are common approaches to plan for day-to-day operations and consider crisis and emergency circumstances.
• Respond and Recover: response and recovery plans go into effect when a crisis or disaster hits, and effective plans include strategies for short-, medium-, and long-term timescales.
• Prevent and Mitigate: policies and programs that attempt to prevent future crises and mitigate the impacts of ongoing disruptions demonstrate a form of resilience. Activities could include curricula and programming to reduce conflict and violence, education for sustainable development, disaster risk reduction and emergency preparedness, and efforts to improve or retrofit infrastructure.

An overarching aspect of the framework concerns attention to gender equality and social inclusion. Crisis and disaster situations disproportionately impact marginalized populations, including women, girls, people with disabilities, and those in poverty, particularly in rural areas.

However, marginalized groups are often excluded from meaningful participation in crisis planning, and the existing plans and targets often under-emphasize their particular needs. As such, marginalized populations should be included in policy development activities and their needs foregrounded.

There are several caveats for understanding and applying the framework. This framework focuses on policy and planning, rather than bottom up ESR activities that build resilience at an individual, teacher, school, or community level.

From framework to practice

Further, policies and plans are often overlapping and interdependent: for example, DRR policies anticipate risks and plan a response for each, along with providing medium-term recovery activities and ensuring that built environments, such as school infrastructure, are climate resilient to prevent future catastrophe. Thus, one DRR policy may capture activities for anticipate, plan, and recover and respond.

We now turn to research and practice communities to respond to and test the framework itself. Next steps could include the development of a checklist, which creates tests for the different framework components explained earlier and draws attention to the inclusion of GESI needs.

We look forward to more development and refinement in understanding of ESR to ensure that policies and plans indeed strengthen resilience across nations and that it does not turn into a mere buzzword.