Returning to Learning during Crises Toolkit

This toolkit is for USAID Mission staff and their partner national and local education officials, implementing partners, and administrators and educators of education institutions. 

RETURN TO LEARNING INTERACTIVE ROADMAP

Click below to explore how to use the toolkit and hear how staff in the field are applying it to their work.

Download the full toolkit

Download the Advocacy Brief

Download the Return to Learning Brief 

WHY USE THE TOOLKIT?

Crisis situations such as conflict, natural disasters, or health epidemics regularly force education institutions around the world to close. Even when these closures are temporary, their effects on learners can be permanent. School closures disproportionately affect marginalized learners, exacerbating educational inequity for girls, learners with disabilities, those in rural areas, learners experiencing poverty, displaced learners, and others. That is why returning to learning is a top priority for learners, parents, educators, and education authorities alike.

WHAT IS IN THE TOOLKIT?

While school closures happen quickly during a crisis, reopening schools is a complicated, time-intensive, and likely political endeavor. This Toolkit helps education planners take a holistic view in planning for the return to learning by providing decision-making tools, guidance, and evidence. 

HOW WILL THE TOOLKIT HELP BUILD RESILIENT EDUCATION SYSTEMS?

Education planners should leverage the crisis as an opportunity to address historic educational disparities faced by the most marginalized and transform education systems to be more resilient in the face of future shocks and stressors. Helping learners re-engage in education and catch-up on missed learning is essential in ensuring all children access their right to high-quality education.

• Promote equity and inclusion.
• Ensure the safety and wellbeing of learners, educators, and school personnel.
• Actively communicate, consult, and collaborate with educators, communities, and other stakeholders.
• Plan to monitor, evaluate, and learn.
• Revisit policy and funding to benefit all learners.
• Plan for resilience.

Tool 0.1: Equity and Inclusion Self-Assessment

Tool 0.2: Action Planning for Resilience
To create an action plan by prioritizing next steps, considering how actions contribute to building resilience capacities, and establishing what resources/preconditions are needed, who is responsible to carry them out, and by when.

• Conduct rapid assessments (either through existing data or primary data collection) to identify marginalized groups. 
• Collaborate with communities to (re)engage all learners.
• Ensure education information and monitoring systems are functioning and capable of tracking (re)enrollment of all learners, especially marginalized populations, in real time.
• Promote alternative pathways back to education.
• Address policy barriers that exclude some learners from returning to education.

Tool 1.1: Identifying Barriers and Strategies to (Re)engage the Most Marginalized Learners
To understand how the pandemic has affected learners, especially the most marginalized, and to identify strategies to re-engage them.

Tool 1.2: Monitoring (Re)Enrollment, Especially of the Most Marginalized Learners
To rapidly estimate which learners are struggling to return to education, disaggregated by group, in order to intervene and re-engage them.
Learner Enrollment Monitoring Table Electronic-fillable Version

• Involve learners, educators, parents, and communities in decision-making.
• Develop an education reopening plan, including safe operations guidance.
• Develop an outbreak response plan at the school level.
• Communicate clearly and consistently.
• Monitor the situation regularly. 

• Understand the range of options for helping learners catch up.
• Revise the academic calendar and schedule.
• Adapt (or condense) the curriculum and teaching and learning materials.
• Identify learners’ social-emotional, protection, and academic needs.
• Consider where distance learning should continue.
• Mobilize financial and human resources for planning for catch-up programming.

Tool 3.1: Revising the Academic Calendar
To make decisions about how to adapt the academic calendar so learners can catch up and get back on track.

Tool 3.2: Revising the Daily/Weekly Academic Schedule
To make decisions about how to adapt the academic calendar so learners can catch up and get back on track.
Instructional Hours Calculations Spreadsheet

Tool 3.3: Planning for Accelerating Learning and Catching Up

Tool 3.4: Identifying and Addressing Learners’ Non-Academic Needs

• Identify how exams have been affected by the crisis.
• Identify which exams are a priority.
• Develop a learner promotion strategy.
• Communicate with learners, families, and educators.
• Ensure that monitoring systems to track access to exams and pass rates are in place.
• Mobilize resources needed to implement adapted exams.

Tool 4.1: Decision-Making for High-Stakes Examinations
To make decisions about whether to maintain, postpone, adapt, or cancel high-stakes exams that are used for learner grading, certification, and promotion.

Tool 4.2: Decision-Making for Learner Promotion
To make decisions about how to promote learners from one grade to the next after school closures.
Multi Factor Decision Matrix for Learner Promotion Electronic-fillable Version

• Revisit workforce needs.
• Address educator capacity development needs.
• Develop or revise policy to meet education workforce needs.
• Assess the need for repairs and creation of new learning spaces, additional furniture and materials, disinfection of learning spaces, and signage and floor markings.
• Mobilize financial resources to fill gaps.

Tool 5.1: Identifying and Addressing Educator Needs

Tool 5.2: Adapting the Learning Space