Reopen, Recover and Resilience in Education: Guidelines for ASEAN Countries

These guidelines are intended to help Member States of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to reopen schools and keep them open for safe in-person education. This is an urgent priority to maintain the learning process for children and adolescents, ensure their right to an education and recover learning losses. The guidelines also aim to strengthen the resilience of education systems and the cross-sectoral work that should bind them. The guidelines have three objectives: (i) offer medium- to long-term strategies to cope with future shocks and disruptions by strengthening the resilience of the education systems in ASEAN; (ii) respond to the urgent needs of ASEAN Member States for immediate strategies to ensure safe school reopening and operations, learning recovery and continuity from pre-primary to secondary education; and (iii) propose performance indicators to monitor and evaluate the progress of these strategies and their results.

The guidelines follow a theory of change that describes the route for moving from the current expression of the problem, whereby children and adolescents are not attending schools (including pre-primary) and do not have access to effective learning opportunities, to the desired impact – a better situation: All children and adolescents in ASEAN return to school, recover their learning losses and continue with their learning path; thus, they develop the skills and knowledge to thrive in life and contribute to their community and national development. The theory of change identifies critical strategies to advance outcomes and outputs and proposes activities and inputs. These are based on global and regional evidence to guide their effectiveness and equity. The guidelines also propose key performance indicators and rubrics for self-assessment to monitor and evaluate the implementation status and progress of the suggested strategies.