Learning on the margins: An assessment of learner and educator well-being outcomes in the midst of and following contagion and conflict in Palestine (January 2023)

Executive summary

The longstanding occupation, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic and other more recent escalations in both Gaza and parts of West Bank highlight the importance of understanding who is being most acutely affected by these events, and how. This research has tracked learner well-being over the past four scholastic years across a sample of schools in West Bank and Gaza, and teacher well-being in the same schools over the two most recent years (2021-22, 2022-23 scholastic years) through further analysis of data collected as part of NRC’s Better Learning Programme.

It was found that COVID-19 has had differential impacts on student well-being in Gaza and West Bank. While in West Bank, well-being of students improved significantly during periods of school closures/lockdowns, the opposite was the case in Gaza. Much of this is due to the fact that a much higher percentage of learners in West Bank, compared to Gaza were able to engage in some form of distance learning from home.
But beyond that, household conditions and circumstances were markedly different between the two contexts, with higher levels of parental engagement, support and care offered to learners in West Bank and with students much more likely to feel safe at home and able to learn and speak freely with their parents/caregivers about their emotions and feelings. In Gaza, a combination of increased food insecurity and household economic stress during COVID-19, overcrowded living conditions, violence in the home, and a lack of electricity/internet, led to an increasing sense of social isolation and hopelessness on the part of learners. Economic and social risk factors, rather than the risk or prevalence of schools or communities falling under Israeli attack, appear to play a more significant role in impacting on learner’s well-being in Gaza during this time.

As students began to return to school, students’ well-being in West Bank started to decline again, with this being most significant in schools and communities where settler and military violence and harassment, attacks in and around school, and ongoing Israeli military operations are most frequently experienced by learners. This trend, coupled with the fact that improvements in well-being were most marked in these more vulnerable schools during school closures, suggests that unfortunately, attending school in person is a risk factor for many young children throughout the West Bank.

In Gaza, returning to school fully has not led to improvements in well-being. When students initially returned to school in 2021, they experienced a renewed sense of optimism and connection to those outside the home. Unfortunately, the May 2021 escalation with Israel significantly eroded this sentiment and again trapped students in their homes and with increased insecurity over all aspects of their lives. Hence well-being outcomes amongst young people—in terms of their self-regulation skills, connectedness to caring adults in the home, their sense of safety, and hope for the future—remain concerningly low and in need of wide-scale attention and support.

Additionally, these shifts in well-being have a clear gendered component to them. In West Bank, females are consistently more positive about most aspects of their wellbeing than their male counterparts. In Gaza, while this was true in 2019, by 2022 this situation has shifted markedly, with females having lower well-being outcomes than their male counterparts, barring the dimension of connectedness with caring adults where females remain higher than males.

Importantly, these findings suggests that educational vulnerability should be assessed through a deeper investigation of the specific nature of risk factors impacting on learners (and educational personnel) and how individual, household and community level conditions interact to lead to improved/worsened educational outcomes. In Gaza, for instance, a worsening economic, social and political conditions have eroded the capacity for individuals and households to withstand the impacts of the pandemic and recent escalations on children’s well-being. Vulnerability was found to be an evolving and complex phenomena—and best understood by measuring learning outcomes of interest—rather than gauging it on access-related constraints alone.

Lastly, in terms of teachers’ well-being, there are two areas of concern at present.
One is teachers’ sense of professional worth—where sizeable numbers of teachers report feeling overwhelmed by their current workload and lacking the motivation to remain in the profession. The other, particularly in West Bank, is teachers’ sense of safety in and around schools. A sizeable number of teachers in West Bank report feeling unsafe in around their school, and lacking confidence that if they report these issues they will be sufficiently addressed.

These findings lead to the following key recommendations:

1. There remains an ongoing need to address the impacts of the pandemic on learning and well-being. Psychosocial support and social emotional learning opportunities are most acutely needed across the Gaza Strip. This is likely a matter that needs to be imbued across all areas of the curriculum and with the engagement and involvement of caregivers.

2. In West Bank attention should be given towards restoring and strengthening the sense of safety and security students (and teachers) feel towards both reaching school and being in school. Strengthening protective access measures (including local and international advocacy toward protecting facilities, students and staff from attack), while concurrently addressing some of the other issues which might undermine students’ sense of safety in school (violence, bullying) are critical needs at present. In all these efforts, a more gender responsive approach to programmatic efforts is needed.

3. Measuring and then responding to educational vulnerability needs to shift towards regularly assessing and measuring the outcomes of interest for the education sector in Palestine: learning and well-being. Schools where these outcomes are lowest compared to others should be those deemed more vulnerable and provided tailored support. Such analysis needs to be sufficiently disaggregated by location, gender, age of students, disability status, to truly understand where needs are highest.

4. Attention needs to be given to strengthening teachers’ professional worth, through both improved working conditions (increased salaries and reduction in curriculum demands), but also better ongoing support on managing stress and workload constraints.

5. Efforts should be directed towards strengthening the capacity of the education system to deliver learning and well-being programmes to learners using distance/remote learning measures, given that disruptions due to ongoing escalations in conflict, teachers’ strikes, and other unforeseen events are likely to continue in Palestine. Learning continuity and a maintenance of connections to peers and adults outside the home environment can act as an important protective factor in times of heightened adversity.