the education content and delivery modes

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

focuses education policy attention on the loss of learning content, measured by the amount of time children are expected to spend on learning. Underpinning this understanding of education in times of crises is the notion of learning as curriculum coverage. In other words, school closure as a response to the pandemic is understood as the loss of learning content due to insufficient time for covering the content specified in the curriculum. A narrow focus on the curriculum and content of learning (cognitive learning) is the current concern globally, with much talk about the ‘learning crisis’ and ‘learning poverty’ (see Saavedra, 2020).… This obsession with curriculum coverage suggests a narrow understanding of the purpose of schooling. While the concern with learning content is understandable, a narrow focus on the loss of learning and a learning gap approach limits the vision and purposes of education given that learning is much more than the learning of content.

A narrow focus on learning and content resulted in a glaring failure to pay attention to what Sayed and Singh (2020) refer to as ‘affective learning’ and others refer to as ‘social-emotional learning’. Whilst these are different in intent and practice, they both signal a need for an education system to pay attention to developing relationships and enabling learners to develop social and civic skills for navigating life in a democratic, post-pandemic context. It speaks to the need to assist learners to manage and navigate complex crises and uncertainties and speaks to UNESCO’s ideal of a holistic notion of education in which education is not only about learning to do but learning to be, become, believe and live with others in an increasingly fragmented, conflicted and uncertain world. This review makes evident that greater attention should be paid, as the consensus document does, to supporting government, teachers and their representatives, and other stakeholders in these ways: i. Empowering teachers through appropriate professional development: A key gap in responding to crises such as COVID-19 is ensuring that there are well-targeted, widelyavailable, appropriate and relevant professional development programmes to support teachers in responding to the education choices made. The absence of such programmes hinders the realisation of quality teaching and learning. ii. Protecting a holistic approach to education curriculum: Content-focused curriculum, on which much online learning relies, tends to instrumentalise education and learning,