What have we learned since 2020?

Last week, the theme of UNESCO International Day of Education 2023 was to invest in people, prioritise education. It was also the third #EducationDay since Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic.

In a three part series, our Head of Education Content & Solutions Dominique Slade explores the lessons, challenges and opportunities in education transformation for 2023 and beyond.

The lessons

As many of us are rediscovering the pleasure of spending time with family and friends, or sharing exciting live sports or entertainment events with others, we are also gradually coming to terms with the fact that we’ll have to learn to live with COVID-19 as we have other viruses.?

At the same time, it has become clear that climate change is one of the most urgent priorities facing the world today; the refugee crisis is a global issue that should concern us all; and the war in Ukraine threatens the world order and brings the prospect of a global recession.

In this context, it is becoming clear that the world will not go back to what it was before the global pandemic, there will be no ‘going back to normal’.

In the first blog in the series, Dominique proposes four lessons we've learned over the past few years:

1. The pandemic has increased inequalities in education
2. The scale of global learning poverty is unprecedented
3. The role of schools goes beyond education
4. There is a new sense of urgency and ambition for education

The challenges

With growing issues facing the world post-Covid-19, one of the key challenges for governments and donor agencies will be to allocate budgets for competing priorities, from immediate emergency relief to longer-term investment in the future, including education.?

In the second post of the series, Dominique investigates this and related three challenges we must grapple with when investing in education transformation:

1. Addressing learning inequalities to improve education for all
2. Understanding the potential and limits of technology
3. Rethinking the essential role of schools in the age of new technologies

The opportunities

Dominique's final blog post in this series identifies three opportunities to invest in people, and prioritise education post-Covid.

1. Prioritising quality early years education to reduce learning inequalities
2. Redefining the content of education to equip young people for the world they will inhabit, including: rethinking the curriculum in the age of machine learning and artificial intelligence, reconsidering foundational skills in the age of the internet and social media, and embedding sustainability and climate education within the curriculum??
3. Reviewing the delivery of education to improve learning outcomes for all, including: reforming teacher education to empower the teachers of the future, understanding the respective pedagogical value of multi-modal educational resources, and reimagining assessment in the age of new technologies

Find out more: cambridge.org/partnership/research