Quality, protection and coordination

1Psychosocial support and social and emotional learning

Pupils arrive with fears, bereavement, sleep or concentration problems. Most regain their balance thanks to a safe, predictable and caring environment. In the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) intervention pyramid for mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS), schools act mainly at the first two levels: basic services and security, and community and family supports.

• Psychosocial support: routines, a warm welcome, play, sports and arts activities, positive discipline, links with families.
• Social and emotional learning (SEL): short, regular sessions to learn to recognise emotions, manage stress, cooperate and resolve conflicts, integrated into reading or mathematics lessons.
• Referral: the teacher is not a therapist. A child in severe distress, a victim of violence or at risk is referred discreetly to child protection or mental health services according to the agreed procedure.

The INEE Guidance Note on Psychosocial Support and Social and Emotional Learning (2018) describes these practices in detail.

2Safe schools: attacks and risks

Education is under attack in many conflicts: shelling of schools, abduction of pupils, threats against female teachers, military use of buildings. Attacks on schools are among the six grave violations against children tracked by the United Nations Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism (MRM). The Safe Schools Declaration, opened for endorsement by States in Oslo in 2015 and championed by the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA), commits more than a hundred States, in particular to use the Guidelines for Protecting Schools and Universities from Military Use.

In the field: school safety plans, early warning systems with the community, adapted timetables and routes, evacuation drills, documentation and reporting of incidents to the cluster and the MRM, and dialogue with armed actors by mandated organisations. For disasters, the Comprehensive School Safety Framework rests on three pillars: safe learning facilities, school disaster risk management, and risk reduction and resilience education.

3Monitoring learning

Counting enrolled pupils does not tell you whether they are learning. A solid monitoring system combines:

• A baseline assessment of foundational literacy and numeracy skills (rapid tools based on EGRA and EGMA, or ministry tests), to group pupils by level.
• Regular formative assessment in the classroom, which allows the teacher to adjust teaching.
• An end-of-cycle assessment, compared with the baseline, and measurement of well-being and social and emotional skills with validated tools.
• Process indicators: pupil and teacher attendance, pupil-teacher ratio, availability of textbooks, support visits carried out.

Teaching at the right level approaches (grouping by level rather than by age) produce good results in catching up on basic skills. Results are analysed by sex, age and disability, shared with parent committees and used for decision-making.

4The Education cluster and Education Cannot Wait

The Education cluster is co-led at global level by UNICEF and Save the Children; at national level, it works with the Ministry of Education, which often co-chairs it. Its functions: JENA and joint analysis, 5W mapping, harmonised standards (incentives, kits, TLS), the sector response plan within the HRP, gap monitoring and advocacy. In refugee situations, education coordination falls under UNHCR together with the government, according to the Refugee Coordination Model.

Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, created in 2016 at the World Humanitarian Summit and hosted by UNICEF, funds First Emergency Responses (FER) and Multi-Year Resilience Programmes (MYRP), designed with the government, the cluster or the local education group and development actors. For an NGO, being active in the cluster is often the condition for accessing this funding.