By Professor Chris Chapman, Director of Policy Scotland, and Irene Bell,  Research and Impact Officer, West Regional Improvement Collaborative Knowledge Exchange

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken millions of lives and caused global crisis for education systems that will impact on the lives of millions of children and young people across the world.

The OECD’s Trends Shaping Education Spotlight 21 highlighted equity as a key issue by suggesting that support for children faced with a “concentration of disadvantage” should be at the heart of a revised adaptive and responsive system resilience. Families and other partners in the wider community should also be part of this system to build resilience capacity and in strategic decision making. Contingency planning should also be included depending on capacity and resources.

This paper draws on an extract from Chapman and Bell’s article Building back better education systems: equity and COVID-19 published in the Journal of Professional Capital and Community, to highlight and explore some of the key medium and longer-term considerations for educational decision makers who are attempting to create more equitable education systems post pandemic.

First, the paper highlights some medium and longer-term considerations. Second, the paper offers a typology to stimulate thinking about how we might begin to frame the new-normal and concludes by offering questions for reflection.

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