Dear Colleagues,

The Special Issue of Sustainability on education policies will monitor education policy priorities and policy developments from early childhood education to adult education. The purpose is to provide a comparative understanding of the effect and impacts of education programs. We will focus on key education priorities examining recent interventions spanning from early childhood education and care to higher education and lifelong learning on topics related to school improvement, evaluation and assessment, governance and funding. 

Papers will tackle issues such as the division of responsibility between national and local authorities and schools, improving teacher qualifications, skills and training and defining national education priorities and goals. There is growing evidence indicating that teachers and school principals influence students’ achievement. Several studies have found that teachers and principals’ “value-added” (i.e., school-level year-on-year gains in student achievement, accounting for student and teacher and principal characteristics) varies widely across and within schools over time, reflecting that management and teachers practices matter for students’ opportunity to learn. Strengthening the teaching profession remains another crucial area of analysis (OECD Education Policy Outlook). Some of the articles will examine the efforts focused on promoting collaborative approaches, developing specific incentives or stimuli to attract and retain teachers and raising professional development standards and quality. Some of the articles will also use information based on international external and standardized tests such as PISA, TIMMS and PIRLS that are key to provide governments with diagnostic information on student performance and to make them more responsive to students’ needs. The choice to which school to send their child is another topic that will be analyzed. Economists have devoted considerable attention in the literature to school quality and student outcomes, and to the effects of school choice. Importantly, this literature mainly focuses on academic performance at school as the outcome of interest and often ignores that parents might value different school attributes when choosing their child's school.

In spite of the importance of education as a main driver of economic growth, not enough attention has been paid to the issues focused on in this Special Issue, which have a significant impact on learning. Education is considered one of the fundamental factors of economic growth and social progress. Furthermore, instruction time is the most obvious input in the production of education. The interest in education policies and human capital has multiplied with the emergency of the covid-19 crisis, which has led many countries to implement lockdown policies with drastic alterations of instruction time in many cases (DELVE Initiative, 2020; Burgess, 2020; Burgess and Sievertsen, 2020; Santibanez and Guarino, 2020; Kuhfeld et al., 2020). However, a precise estimate of its consequences on educational output will be only possible with the benefit of hindsight once international databases containing post Covid-19 information will be available. Even then, in many cases it will be difficult to appraise the specific contribution of the decision to close school doors on academic performance as this information will be contaminated by changes in other social and economic variables related to Covid-19, such as income and health. The contribution of this Special Issue of Sustainability would be to shed light on the policies that can compensate for the impact of school closures on student learning.

This issue will be related and will supplement existing literature such as:

Burgess, S., and Sievertsen, H. H. 2020. Schools, skills, and learning: The impact of COVID-19 on education. CEPR Policy Portal. Available online: https://voxeu.org/article/impact-covid-19-education.

Burgess, S. 2020. How we should deal with the lockdown learning loss in England’s schools. CEPR policy portal. Available online: https://voxeu.org/article/how-we-should-deal-lockdown-learning-loss-england-s-schools.

DELVE Initiative. 2020. Balancing the Risks of Pupils Returning to Schools. DELVE report No. 4. Published 24 July 2020. Available online: https://rs-delve.github.io/reports/2020/07/24/balancing-the-risk-of-pupils-returning-to-schools.html.

Kuhfeld, M., Soland, J., Tarasawa, B., Johnson, A., Ruzek, E., and Liu, J. 2020. Projecting the potential impacts of COVID-19 school closures on academic achievement. EdWorkingPaper: 20–226. Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University, https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.26300/cdrv-yw05.

OECD 2019. Education Policy Outlook 2019. Working Together to Help Students Achieve their Potential. OECD: Paris, France.

Santibanez, L. and Guarino, C. 2020. The Effects of Absenteeism on Cognitive and Social-Emotional Outcomes: Lessons for COVID-19. Annenberg Institute at Brown University. EdworkingPaper: 20–261. Available online: https://www.edworkingpapers.com/index.php/ai20-261.

Dr. María Teresa Ballestar
Dr. Aida J. García-Lázaro
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• sustainability education
• education policies
• public policies
• education priorities
• education programs
• school improvement
• teacher qualifications
• national education priorities
• students achievement
• students performance
• school quality
• students outcomes
• academic performance
• education measures
• human capital
• educational output