Theme „Innovations for Educational Resilience“

Covid-19 has had a significant impact on education and training. If we want to build resilient education systems, issues of learning loss due to school closures and lack of access to technology for teaching and learning need to be addressed. A gender-sensitive system focusing on the social, emotional, and economic contexts of learners is required. Additional support for vulnerable groups, such as persons with disabilities and girls who have faced additional challenges, is needed to bring them back to school.

The pandemic has underscored yet again the importance of technology and open, distance, and online learning for providing access to quality education. During lockdowns, teachers, educational institutions, and governments used many innovative approaches to reach learners. A comprehensive body of knowledge and experiences on what worked and what did not has been gathered.

Some of the questions that have emerged are the following:

• How can governments and institutions scale up teaching and learning to make up for the learning loss and strengthen education?
• How can institutions build systems and processes for lifelong learning that are financially sustainable to educate and skill a large number of people? What can civil society do to prepare citizens to meet the challenges of the 21st Century?
• What else needs to be done to create a sustainable educational infrastructure that is resilient in the face of pandemics, unrest and natural disasters?

PCF10 will be a platform for reflections and discussions on reimagining education systems to foster lifelong learning and empower people to make life choices and improve their livelihoods. Such systems will be based on innovative uses of technology for teaching and learning, and ethical practices for equity and inclusion. Stakeholders across the globe, and particularly in the Commonwealth, are welcomed to join PCF10 to discuss, debate, and showcase how innovations can develop resilience in our education systems.

PCF10 will focus on many contemporary issues, such as skilling youth, mainstreaming gender, providing equal opportunities for persons with disabilities, and supporting learning for sustainable development. In addition, PCF10 will be a platform for ministers of education, government officials, academics, teachers, administrators, and representatives of civil societies to develop a roadmap to rebuild our education systems and make them resilient to future shocks.

Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning

COL’s Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning (PCF) is held triennially. It is co-hosted with different partners in different regions of the Commonwealth. The programme is designed to explore applications of open and distance learning in widening educational access, bridging the digital divide, and advancing the social and economic development of communities and nations at large. The Forum’s focus is on topics relating to developing countries and participation of practitioners from these countries.