The non-state sector provides the only meaningful option for children’s learning in many parts of the world – particularly in low-income countries where government-run systems are often overwhelmed and unable to keep up with the demand for education – but it receives little attention in policy and research.

Globally, there are 70.8 million forcibly displaced persons. Among these are 25.9 million refugees, over half of whom are children. Effective teacher management is key to ensuring inclusive, equitable, quality education for these young people, and teachers constitute the most important factor affecting student learning. In crisis and displacement situations, the role of teachers is particularly significant: they are sometimes the only resource available to students. This report investigates teacher management in refugee contexts in Jordan, and is the second in a series of country reports. It contributes to a burgeoning body of evidence about teachers in refugee contexts and aims to provide policy guidance to support ministries of education.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in September 2020, the Rwanda Basic Education Board (REB) – in its efforts to improve the country’s school leaders – formed a learning partnership with the Education Commission, Education Development Trust, and WISE to undertake rapid research on school and system leadership during school closures and as they started to reopen for the first time.

Covid-19 caused considerable disruption to education around the world. Disadvantaged and marginalised learners have been particularly hard-hit. Naturally, earlier in the pandemic, the focus of much attention was on how to safely reopen schools, often with a preoccupation on hygiene and social distancing considerations. With schools in many jurisdictions reopening partially or fully, there is now a growing interest in the immensely important area of recovering the learning lost while pupils have been away from face-to-face education. These reports are a result of the first phase of a collaborative research programme undertaken with UNESCO.

Efficient use of resources depends upon many factors, but one key variable is the extent to which we design and implement activities which require funding in a way that is informed by relevant evidence.

Following Covid-19-related school closures across Rwanda, our Building Learning Foundations team commissioned an inequity impact assessment of the country’s primary-age school population to investigate how children from different backgrounds and contexts have fared during the period of closures, and to inform plans for school reopening.