Among the range of measures employed by affected countries include:

• Physical protection, including unarmed or armed school guards, the reinforcement of school infrastructure, student or teacher housing, alternative transportation or escorts, avoidance of high risk routes to school, arming of teachers, or rapid response plans

• Community involvement in protection, including community-based protection committees, school-based protection committees, school management committees, community involvement in peace building, or involvement of religious leaders

• Alternative delivery of education, including community-based schools, temporary schools, schooling for refugees, mobile training teams, summer sessions, or distance learning

• Negotiations with stakeholders to make schools conflict-free zones

• Restricting military and political use of schools

• Conflict-sensitive reform at the education systems level, including policy to address the causes of conflict such as improving equitable access to education and reforming the curriculum to respond to the learning needs of marginalized groups

• Advocacy initiatives including use of media, human rights/child rights training and awareness, coalition building, direct actions, public hearings, youth mobilization

• Monitoring and reporting attacks on education for early warning, rapid response and advocacy and accountability

One of GCPEA’s organizational goals is to promote effective, coherent, timely, and evidence-based programmatic measures, including prevention and response.  Education sector actors in affected countries have expressed a need to receive information on good practices that could be adapted to their particular country contexts.

Toward this end GCPEA has undertaken a multi-year initiative to:

• Build and strengthen a network of key field-based prevention and response actors in affected countries

• Establish a knowledge baseline of field-based protection and response programs and initiatives and identify gaps

• Identify research needs to evaluate effective practice

• Foster communication among practitioners in affected countries to share best practices

During 2011, GCPEA has completed the following activities to promote evidenced-based programmatic measures:

• Convened a Knowledge Roundtable in Thailand in November of 2011 attended by teams of education sector practitioners, human rights activists, ministry of education officials, NGO representatives and UN agency staff from 15 countries: Afghanistan, Central African Republic (CAR), Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), India, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Myanmar/Burma, Nepal, Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Pakistan, Philippines, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Zimbabwe.  

• Produced a study of programmatic measures to protect education from attack, based on information provided by teams attending the Knowledge Roundtable in addition to a series of phone interviews and information obtained through document reviews

• Created a data base of over 800 practitioners from 70 countries

• Commissioned a paper outlining research priorities for effective practice in protecting education

GCPEA will continue to build on the network of practitioners created and the baseline knowledge already established as it coordinates activities in the coming years.