Education International
difficult events to be resilient under disaster. This will, as we argue below, require (re)thinking about the education context.
2. Unpacking education policy choice about the education content and delivery modes The report has identified several education policy choices made in response to the pandemic. Generally, it is argued that education choices reflected an emergency response modality characterised by hasty decision-making processes and actions which have not been carefully considered for their feasibility or, more importantly, their equity effects. A prime example has been the vacillation between choices of closing and reopening of schools which has often betrayed a narrow focus on education as learning content and a concern with high stakes examinations. There are two particular outcomes of this emergency mode of education choice-making as response to the pandemic. The first is that teacher professional development has been an afterthought. It was assumed that in moving learning online, teachers were in possession of the necessary skill, knowledge, and disposition to do so. This was indeed not the case and the response has been marked by a dearth of carefully considered professional development support programmes for teachers. More importantly, whilst understandably much of the focus was on learners and education systems, there was little attention paid to the well-being of teachers. There has been a remarkable absence of structured professional and holistic support and care to cater for the physical, emotional and mental well-being of teachers. Even more, there was little focus on equipping teachers with the competence to support learners who were, and still are, experiencing the pandemic as a traumatic moment. The absence of structured professional development support for teachers to provide psychosocial support to learners suffering from trauma reveals a remarkable blind spot in education policy response to the pandemic. Secondly, the education choices reviewed in this report suggest a narrow focus on education as content and with an overriding concern for high-stakes assessment. Sayed and Singh (2020, p. 7) note that: A remarkable feature of the debate about the impact of Covid-19 and education responses is the strong focus on educational content. Rearranging school timetabling, extending the school year and increasing teaching hours for each learning area 186
