From access to integration: A framework for building resilience and the long-term success of learners in formal education systems

• In Event: Learning for Peace: Accelerated Education as a Pathway to Stability and Opportunity for Out-of-School Youth

Proposal

Across many crisis-affected contexts, learners move between community-based or accelerated programmes and formal schools through pathways that are fragile, fragmented, and often inequitable. In this presentation we will share practical insights from our 2025 Transitions synthesis, which draws on 387 sources of evidence from 68 countries. We will introduce the STEP Framework: a set of high-leverage evidence-based actions along the transition journey that ministries and education actors can adopt within constrained budgets. Beyond improving access and persistence, these actions can also contribute to peacebuilding by building trust between communities and the education system, reducing grievances linked to exclusion from schooling, and strengthening everyday practices of inclusion in classrooms and communities.
We show how, in conflict-affected settings, aligning curricula and assessment criteria across AEPs and formal schools reduces perceptions of bias between displaced, returnee, and host learners, closes language-of-instruction divides, and limits arbitrary gatekeeping that can fuel grievance. Clear eligibility and placement rules, paired with documentation support and recognition of prior learning enhance enrolment in formal systems. Deliberate linkages between programmes and nearby schools (joint case management, shared transition plans, and community representation) create shared accountability and negotiated handovers that ease tensions. Targeted post-enrolment packages (trauma-aware mentoring, psychosocial support, language and curriculum bridging, transport or meal stipends, and referral pathways to child protection services) improve first-year completion while signaling that every learner is valued and safe. Finally, conflict-sensitive school conditions, flexible timetables that account for curfews and insecurity, safe spaces, restorative discipline and peer mediation, stigma-aware support for returnees (including formerly recruited children), and teacher guidance on de-escalation, strengthen connectedness and reduce risks of dropout, retaliation, early marriage, or recruitment into armed groups. Taken together, these choices rebuild trust between communities and the education system and foster not only academic but social-emotional and broader life skills amongst learners - helping classrooms and communities become everyday infrastructures for peace.
Grounded in a broad, multi-country evidence base and practitioner validation, the session will offer a decision-maker brief and a simple planning tool so governments and partners can identify where learners are most at risk of being left behind and choose feasible responses. In short: better-designed transitions can advance learning outcomes and, at the same time, help rebuild social cohesion, classroom by classroom, school by school.

Authors

• Giulia Di Filippantonio

• Randa Grob, Insights for Education Foundation