This report proposes seven action areas to help guide the global community and local actors as they work to Save Our Future:
Action Area 1: Prioritize reopening schools, deliver vital services to children, and treat the workforce as frontline workers. School closures were necessary to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic, but there are great costs to children from being away from school. Governments will need to reopen schools as soon as it is safe to do so, make concerted efforts to get children back into school, and ensure that vital services including nutrition, physical and mental health services, WASH, and child protection services are put in place urgently to support children as well as the workforce in and outside of school.
Action Area 2: Make education inclusive, engaging, and adaptive. We propose adaptive education systems characterized by inclusive and engaging teaching which builds the skills children need to flourish. Many children are not learning because the teaching they receive is not engaging and is not aligned to their level. We propose urgent action to measure learning as children return to school and “meet them where they are” by providing engaging, differentiated instruction matched to their learning levels. This will be vital in the short term, but if aligning education systems with learning becomes the new normal, this could also have tremendous longer-term impacts.
Action Area 3: Strengthen the education workforce. The scale of the education crisis means that we need to harness the entire education workforce to support teaching and learning and ensure quality education for all children. By creating teacher-led learning teams with children at the center, children will benefit from ed-ucation professionals, parents, the community, and health and welfare sectors, all working together to maximize children’s learning, inclusion, and welfare. There is also an urgent need to provide leaders, teachers, and other members of the workforce with the data, support, and development they need to shift to more inclusive, engaging, and adaptive teaching approaches and to prioritize support to those who need it the most.
Action Area 4: Focus education technology (EdTech) where it is proven to be effective and most equitable. There is increasing interest and support for using EdTech to transform education, but also a real risk of exacerbating marginalization by increasing access for the most privileged and diverting resources from the fundamentals of an education system. Appropriate use of EdTech should be integrated in efforts to strengthen education systems, particularly by expanding data systems, enhancing teacher and workforce development, and promoting inclusion and equity of access to education and learning outcomes.
Action Area 5: Protect education budgets and target public spending at those left furthest behind. Governments across the world are facing enormous financial pressures and these are particularly magnified for low- and middle-income countries. Reductions in public spending on education will be further exacerbated by declines in household spending, often an important component of education spending in low-income countries. We urge governments to grow public revenues where possible, protect education spending as a critical component in the COVID-19 recovery efforts, and target public resources to prioritize lower levels of education and support the most marginalized across the system. Developing strategies to fully finance education will require improving financial data and public financial management systems and more widely adopting equity financing formulas.
Action Area 6: Mobilize international resources to fully finance education. It is vital that governments in low- and middle-income countries do all they can to protect public spending for education, but even in the best case, there will still be a signifi-cant financing gap. We call on a diverse coalition of global actors—including donors, multilateral development banks, and philanthropists—to maximize aid for education, improve allocation, and harness innovative financing mechanisms to close the financing gap and support countries in fully financing education.
Action Area 7: Use resources better by improving evidence generation, coordination, alignment, and effectiveness. Mobilizing more funding for education is critical, but it is also more important than ever that every single dollar invested in education achieves its maximum impact. The international education architecture can play a vital role by improving its own coordination to deliver the best possible support to low- and middle-income countries and by promoting and supporting the most cost-effective ap-proaches based on enhanced evidence generation and use.