Abstract
Despite growing interest in education for children in conflict and crisis (CAC) settings, evidence on how these children learn and develop—and how best to support them—remains limited. The fragmented research landscape across disciplinary traditions and sectoral silos limits holistic understanding and actionable insights to inform policies and programs. By focusing on four drivers of learning and development—access, quality, continuity, and coherence—the Education Research in Conflict and Crisis (ERICC) framework maps educational processes across local, regional, national, and global levels linking children’s experiences with system-level dynamics. Integrating diverse evidence into a coherent analytic structure, the framework provides a foundation for strengthening education system responses in CACs and generating systematic, actionable knowledge that enriches the global evidence base.
Keywords
Children living in contexts of conflict and protracted crisis are among the most educationally disadvantaged worldwide (UNESCO, 2015). As of 2024, an estimated 234 million school-aged children across 60 countries are affected by conflict and crisis (CAC), with 37% out of school (Education Cannot Wait [ECW], 2025). These staggering figures highlight the urgency for a systematic approach to address their educational needs. In pursuit of the broader objective of Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality education for all (United Nations, 2016), civil society organizations, governments, and funders have, for decades, made significant efforts to ensure continuous access to quality education in CACs.
As of 2025, the field stands at a critical juncture. Abrupt program cancellations, a drastic decline in funding and political support, and surging needs—marked by a 35-million increase in children affected by CACs within just 3 years (ECW, 2025)—demand urgent collective action and innovation. Yet a persistent lack of evidence continues to hinder informed decision-making, leaving children in CACs underserved amid rapidly shrinking resources and support (Burde et al., 2023; UNESCO, 2015).
Although emerging research is beginning to fill this gap (Aber et al., 2021; Arakelyan & Ager, 2021; Burde et al., 2023; Kim et al., 2024), the knowledge base remains fragmented across disciplinary traditions and sectoral silos, limiting a holistic understanding of the educational landscape and failing to provide actionable solutions to drive policies and programs in CACs. For example, our bibliographic analysis (2008–2023) revealed that the keywords “education in emergencies” and “refugee education”—the two main subfields—overlap in just 3% in their publication records despite the similar research topics and target populations (Kim & Woulfin, 2024). Similarly, studies reviewing psychosocial and educational interventions aimed at improving children’s well-being and learning in CACs from public health (e.g., Kamali et al., 2020) and education (Burde et al., 2017, 2023) perspectives rarely cite common sources. Such disconnects overlook synergies and promising solutions, such as noneducational programs that benefit education outcomes.
To effectively support CAC-affected education systems, we need a unified framework that provides a common language, overarching structure, and analytic approach to integrate the fragmented knowledge in this field. Addressing this, we propose the education research in conflict and protracted crisis (ERICC) framework (Kim et al., 2022). The framework focuses on education provision for and experiences of children in CACs and serves as an analytic tool advancing three purposes: (a) evidence organizing—creating a comprehensive map for synthesizing existing evidence across diverse topics and disciplines; (b) evidence building—guiding new research foci and questions and building theory of change for promising policy and practice; and (c) evidence-based decision-making—providing a unified vision that enables researchers, practitioners, policymakers and stakeholders to build consensus and make informed decisions. Ultimately, the framework seeks to translate individual studies into a systematic, interconnected knowledge base guiding research, interventions, and policy reforms to support education in CACs and beyond.
ERICC Framework
The ERICC framework is developed through extensive stakeholder consultations and built on theories and evidence from various disciplines, including developmental science (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Tseng & Seidman, 2007), education and peacebuilding (Novelli et al., 2019; Pherali, 2019), sociology (Dryden-Peterson, 2016), and political science and economics (Burde et al., 2017; Homonchuk et al., 2024; Pritchett, 2015; Sarwar et al., 2024). Integrating these perspectives, the framework employs a process-oriented, social-ecological approach to capture the complexity of education systems in CAC contexts. This approach enables us to explore how and why CACs affect education systems; identifying how, for whom, and under what conditions education works to support children’s learning, development, and well-being; and what (intervention) works to improve education in the CACs (Aber et al., 2021).
Specifically, the ERICC framework (Figure 1) acknowledges the multifaceted influences shaping educational processes and explores two primary pathways across local, regional, national, and global levels: educational experiences pathways and education policy operation pathways. Educational experiences pathways occur through children’s direct interactions with local systems—for example, households, schools, communities. These pathways are shaped by children’s characteristics and developmental processes and local systems’ capacity and conditions (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Tseng & Seidman, 2007). Education policy operation pathways unfold across local, regional, national, and global levels, where decisions about educational policy, financing, and data systems are made and managed. These pathways are influenced by the power dynamics and resource distribution among humanitarian aid and development stakeholders, social groups, and individuals that affect goals, policies, programs, and practices in education (Homonchuk et al., 2024; Pherali, 2019). This political economy also determines how education shapes societal conditions, either perpetuating conflict or advancing social cohesion, equity, and peace with justice (Pherali, 2019). By linking micro-level experiences with macro-level societal impacts, the ERICC framework provides a holistic view of the roles and pathways of education for both children and society at large.

The education research in conflict and protracted crisis (ERICC) conceptual framework.
The ERICC framework’s holistic approach addresses and complements the existing theories’ limitations when applied to CAC-affected contexts. For example, we rely on ecological and developmental models (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Tseng & Seidman, 2007) to identify and describe how multiple levels of contextual influence affect children’s learning and development, but these frameworks are not tailored to conditions unique to CAC settings. Education and peacebuilding frameworks (Novelli et al., 2019; Pherali, 2019) help identify the macro-level social justice and reconciliation functions of education but do not systematically integrate the dynamic interplay of actors and contexts at the child, school, community, and policy levels. Other frameworks from political science, sociology, and economics provide in-depth analyses on governance and institutional arrangements and challenges facing CAC-affected populations (e.g., Burde et al., 2017; Dryden-Peterson, 2016; Pritchett, 2015) but provide limited insights into children’s experience within education systems affected by the political economy and intersecting levels of influence.
The ERICC framework uniquely addresses these gaps by offering a transdisciplinary, context-sensitive structure and common language to analyze and integrate educational processes, settings, and actors across multiple levels and domains of education systems that are traditionally addressed in disciplinary and sectoral silos. By facilitating cross-sectoral evidence synthesis, it connects developmental, sociological, political, and economic perspectives to identify common key mechanisms. For example, when examining “access” to education, the framework integrates interventions from diverse disciplinary and sectoral traditions—for example, conditional cash transfers, school meals, and community campaigns—as access-improving programs, enabling comparison of their relative impacts and exploration of their collective synergy. This comprehensive approach supports evidence-based strategies to address gaps, design policies, and evaluate interventions.
Key Mechanisms of the ERICC Framework: Drivers of Learning and Development in CACs
The ERICC framework is built around four key drivers of learning and development in policy and programmatic interventions: access to, quality of, continuity in children’s educational experiences and coherence in policy processes. These four drivers maximize the potential for inclusive and equitable achievement of children’s holistic learning outcomes and societal impact through education.
Access
CACs can cause partial or complete loss of access to education for many children. As we have seen most recently in Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar, and Sudan, physical damage to school buildings, repurposing of schools as shelters and for military operations, and severe security issues facing children and their families and teachers make school operations nearly impossible (Global Coalition to Protect Education From Attack [GCPEA], 2024). When families are displaced because of violent conflicts and insecurity, children’s access to education is disrupted, and children face challenges integrating into new systems in host communities or refugee settlements (Antoninis et al., 2024). During the COVID-19 pandemic, school closures paralyzed education systems’ capacity to offer access to education (UNESCO et al., 2021). Such threats and challenges due to political unrest and other sociopolitical, economic, geographic, and security conditions in CACs compromise education systems’ capacity to provide access to education (GCPEA, 2024).
Access to education means much more than school enrollment—a metric commonly used to measure educational access. It should include addressing barriers to attendance and engagement in learning opportunities, such as poverty, gender inequality, disability, community safety, and geographic isolation that prevent children from attending school regularly and participating fully in educational activities (World Bank, 2018). Community and parental attitudes toward and awareness of educational access are also crucial (Kabay et al., 2025). In the context of distance learning—as observed widely during the COVID-19 school closures—access also means the availability of functional technology and internet connectivity (Tadesse & Muluye, 2020). We therefore expand the definition of educational access here to the opportunity and capacity to participate in educational experiences and consider it a necessary condition for the other drivers of learning: quality, continuity, and coherence.
Quality
Access alone is insufficient to promote children’s learning and development without ensuring quality. Despite the Education for All campaign’s success in increasing school enrollments, little of this increased access translated into actual learning (World Bank, 2022). In low- and middle-income countries, seven out of 10 children experience learning poverty and are unable to read and comprehend a simple story by age 10 (World Bank, 2022). This reflects the failure of education authorities and international agencies to adequately invest in key aspects of education quality, such as developing a skilled teaching workforce, providing sufficient educational resources, creating safe and secure learning environments, and implementing robust data systems to diagnose and improve education quality. Recognizing this gap between access and learning, the global community has increasingly prioritized improving quality of education (United Nations, 2016; World Bank, 2022).
Quality of education is often measured by and equated with “learning outcomes”—defined as meeting minimum academic competencies, for example, basic literacy (World Bank, 2022). However, this framing does not specify the quality of what we should improve to help learners gain higher learning outcomes, creating uninformative, circular logic: improving quality by improving the very outcomes used to define it. This narrow focus on minimum competencies also overshadows broader educational goals, such as fostering holistic development and learning beyond achieving basic literacy. Without identifying concrete mechanisms of change, it is difficult to determine which aspects of quality should be prioritized to improve holistic learning outcomes.
In our framework, we define quality as the degree to which a child’s educational experience fosters meaningful learning and well-being through their interactions with both resources (and their organization) and social processes within their local systems (Tseng & Seidman, 2007). Resources include financial (e.g., school budget) and physical infrastructure and materials (e.g., school building quality, learning devices, teaching and learning materials), learning content (e.g., curricula) and human resources involved in the delivery of education (e.g., teacher qualifications and competence, parental education), and how they are allocated and managed. Social processes involve relationships, norms, practices, and social interactions (e.g., instructional quality, social and emotional support, parental involvement, community support) that are necessary to safeguard and improve children’s holistic learning, development, and well-being. Paucity and deteriorating quality of educational resources and processes due to CAC—manifested in poor or damaged physical infrastructure, inadequate teaching and learning materials, and displaced, undertrained, and/or undersupported teachers—results in a diminished educational experience for children (Saha et al., 2023; Sarwar et al., 2024).
Continuity
Disruptions and inconsistencies dominate educational experiences in CACs. Children often endure interrupted schooling due to forced migration. When they have some degree of stability, such as in refugee camps and host community settlements, they face social, economic, and legal barriers to access and remain in school systems (Dryden-Peterson, 2016; Shuayb et al., 2014). Interrupted schooling, inconsistent remote learning modalities (Freel et al., 2023), and exposure to violence also impede continuity (Kim et al., 2020, 2024; Shuayb et al., 2014), often leading to school dropout. Children enrolled in nonformal or informal education programs in humanitarian settings face inconsistent provision, shifting curricula, and changing regulations and policies (Saha et al., 2023). Short-term program cycles, economic hardships, lack of accreditation, and little prospect for progression to higher levels of education further jeopardize continuity.
In contrast, sustained and consistent access to education can inspire hope, motivate children to stay in school, and empower them to envision a positive future. Yet the importance of sustained exposure to and consistency of educational experiences is frequently overlooked in the literature, leaving glaring gaps in understanding how to maintain continuous learning among displaced, highly mobile, and marginalized populations.
We specify continuity of education as an important driver of learning and development and define it as sustained exposure to educational experiences that allows progression in learning and grade/school transition. Continuity in education goes beyond uninterrupted schooling; it requires systems that ensure consistent learning, progression, and support for displaced and marginalized learners, making education a stable pathway for growth even in CACs.
Coherence
A child’s access to and quality and continuity of their educational experience depends on the coherence and conditions of the education system across local, regional, national, and global levels. Education actors within the system may or may not be aligned in procedures (e.g., teaching workforce management procedures, data use and monitoring protocols, school management structure and protocols, accountability policies), capacities and resources (e.g., teaching workforce capacities, organizational capacities, financial/physical resources), or incentives and goals (normative, material, political) to effectively develop, implement, and maintain coherent policies needed to achieve educational access, quality, and continuity.
Education systems coherence—emphasizing the alignment of policies, resources, and actions across school, community, and regional/national levels—is increasingly recognized as a key driver of change in low- and middle-income countries (Kaffenberger & Spivack, 2022; Pritchett, 2015) and in CAC contexts (Homonchuk et al., 2024; Kim et al., 2024; Tubbs Dolan, 2017). Coherence in education involves coordination among stakeholders at all levels, including governing authorities (e.g., ministries of education), their formal and nonformal school systems, and local implementers (e.g., schools, nongovernmental organizations [NGOs], communities, teachers, and parents). In CACs where humanitarian aid and financial support are in place, the influence, decisions, and actions of global actors (e.g., donors, multilateral organizations, international NGOs) and their interactions with other stakeholders play pivotal roles (Tubbs Dolan, 2017). Coherence, or lack thereof, in procedures, capacities and resources, and incentives and goals within and across stakeholders and levels of action (local, regional, national, global) can facilitate or impede access, quality, and continuity of education (Homonchuk et al., 2024; Sarwar et al., 2024).
For example, horizontally at the national level, lack of coordination between government entities in teacher professional development and management and use of education data (e.g., Abdul-Hamid & Yassine, 2020) or insufficient operationalization of policy targets and funding to drive and monitor policy implementation with accountability (e.g., Rauschenberger & Sabella, 2023) create system incoherence, jeopardizing effective policy decision-making and implementation. At the local level, a disagreement over educational objectives between schools, contesting education providers, and communities may hinder children’s access, quality, and continuity (e.g., Kabay et al., 2025). Vertically, national funding systems that do not reflect the unique needs of conflict-affected states (Sarwar et al., 2024) or mismatches between government policies on language of instruction and the capacity of local teachers and community preferences to implement them (e.g., Piper et al., 2018; Saha et al., 2023) lead to inadequate education provision that fails to meet children’s needs.
Pathways to Learning and Development for Education in CACs
The ERICC framework identifies specific pathways by which drivers of learning and development improve educational policy and experience outcomes in two sets of interconnected pathways. These pathways explain conditions, drivers, and outcomes of education processes in broader CAC and societal contexts and what interventions can target within these processes. Specifically, education policy operation pathways (Figure 1, top half) describe policy decision-making and systems operation processes across local, regional, national, and global levels, and educational experience pathways (Figure 1, bottom half) describe the processes involved in children’s direct experience of education at local level.
Education Policy Operation Pathways
Policy conditions that enable or constrain effective policy decision-making processes and implementation include available financial (e.g., education budget), sociopolitical (e.g., social norms on educational investment, perception of refugee population), and human (e.g., workforce capacity) resources and the landscape of the political economy and accountability systems (e.g., data and monitoring infrastructure and capacity, policy and procedures on accountability mechanism). These policy systems enablers and constraints contribute to (in)coherence of education policy decisions and system operations (Sarwar et al., 2024). The coherence within and across policy systems can affect inclusivity, effectiveness, accountability, and adaptability of education systems operation, which can then result in effective provision of access, quality, and continuity to support children’s educational experience.
Consider the refugee crisis in Cox’s Bazar, illustrating the constraints on coherence and its consequences. Seven years after the mass displacement of Rohingyas from Myanmar, the political and security landscape in Bangladesh is even more volatile, with education for Rohingya children remaining a deeply contentious issue. Governance and decision-making mechanisms are often opaque, restrictive, and ad hoc, leaving critical policies—for example, curriculum choices and language of instruction—subject to political whims and compromises among actors of competing interests, including the national and local Bangladesh governments, humanitarian and development agencies, donors, NGOs, Rohingya community leaders, and host community. These dynamics have led to abrupt policy shifts, program restrictions, and politically driven regulations that rarely serve the population’s needs (Hoque & Khandaker, 2022). Although education providers in Cox’s Bazar have managed relatively strong horizontal coherence in coordinating their operations, persistent vertical incoherence across national, state, and local levels undermines the system’s ability to deliver educational access, quality, and continuity for Rohingya children (Homonchuk et al., 2024).
Educational Experience Pathways
Local conditions that put children at risk or protect their learning and well-being outcomes are those that can directly hinder or facilitate children’s access to, quality of, and continuity in educational experiences. Households, schools, and communities have different financial, physical, and human capacities, resources, and arrangements, which determine the degree of educational access, quality, and continuity (Arakelyan & Ager, 2021; Tseng & Seidman, 2007). Children’s characteristics (e.g., gender, disability, social group membership), histories (e.g., exposure to violence, interrupted schooling, historical privileges and grievances), capacities and skills (e.g., learning levels, social skills), and relationships (e.g., with teachers, parents, community members) further influence their access to education and its quality and continuity (Arakelyan & Ager, 2021; Kim et al., 2020). These risk and protective factors, compounded by CACs’ conditions, shape children’s educational access, quality, and continuity available within local systems—schools, households, and communities. The coherence across these systems—for example, alignment between community expectations and school curricula, mother tongue and instructional language, and teachers’ motivation, professional development opportunities, and dignified salaries—serves as critical mechanisms supporting access, quality, and continuity. When children cannot access education, receive poor-quality education, or struggle to remain and progress within the system and when households’, schools’, and communities’ visions, policies, programs, and practices are misaligned, children’s outcomes suffer. These compromised educational experiences disrupting key drivers of learning and development lead to poor achievement and (in)equities across academic performance, social and emotional learning, and physical and mental health outcomes.
For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health concerns led to widespread school closures, depriving many children of access to education (UNESCO et al., 2021). For those who maintained access through remote learning, education quality suffered due to underresourced systems and limited time for educators to adapt to remote instruction. Many teachers lacked training in effective remote teaching strategies, including addressing reduced social interaction and attentional challenges due to stress and home distractions. Education continuity was further disrupted by shifting public health measures, quarantine requirements, and fluctuating access to in-person, hybrid, or remote schooling. Conflicting parental perspectives compounded these challenges—some advocated for in-person learning to mitigate the learning loss and to support parents’ work routines, and others prioritized health and favored extended closures. These disruptions in access, quality, and continuity resulted in substantial learning deficit globally, disproportionately impacting marginalized and disadvantaged households, schools, communities, and children (Betthäuser et al., 2023).
Interventions Targeting Drivers of Learning and Development
The ERICC framework posits that to improve achievement and equity in CACs, educational interventions must primarily and directly target drivers of learning: access, quality, continuity, and coherence. A comprehensive review of interventions targeting these drivers of learning and development is beyond the scope of the article. Instead, we provide examples of existing interventions in Supplement A, available on the journal website.
Thus far, the evidence on the effectiveness of educational interventions in CACs remains scarce. Existing research shows mixed results and high heterogeneity, with little information on how, for whom, under what conditions, and at what cost these interventions work (Aber et al., 2021; Burde et al., 2023; Kim et al., 2024). To generate actionable evidence for effective program and policy design and implementation, it is critical to identify and test specific pathways and conditions that enable these interventions to succeed.
Application of the ERICC Framework
The ERICC framework is a versatile tool designed to advance evidence organizing, evidence building, and evidence-informed decision-making. It organizes existing evidence into key components—such as conditions, interventions, drivers, outcomes, and societal impacts—and maps pathways between them, enabling evidence synthesis to integrate and expand education research across disciplines. For example, the ERICC framework has guided a series of comprehensive evidence reviews and meta-analyses of interventions to improve drivers of learning across different disciplines and sectors in CAC contexts (Diazgranados & Thuo, 2025).
In practice, the framework has tangible impacts by guiding the identification of evidence gaps, informing research agendas, and supporting localized study designs. For example, the ERICC framework was used to map, organize, and synthesize existing evidence gaps to inform the development of collective research agendas across researchers, policymakers, in-country education providers, and funders in CAC-affected countries (Rinehart et al., 2025; Zetnan & Teresa, 2025). Additionally, the framework supports the Interagency Network for Education in Emergencies’ Evidence Platform Reference Group in developing a dynamic, web-based database of synthesis-ready data drawn from a comprehensive corpus of evidence on education in CACs, alongside a living “Evidence Gap Map.”
The ERICC framework also facilitates evidence-informed decision-making at multiple levels, including resource allocation, strategy development, and program or policy design and implementation. For example, it has been used in consultation workshops, where stakeholders collaboratively identified enabling and constraining factors critical to program success, developed strategies to address them, and aligned on shared goals based on local needs and priorities (Nasser et al., 2024; Rinehart et al., 2025). In addition, by providing a structured yet adaptable conceptual map, the framework supports the design of targeted interventions and the development of theories of change—critical functions to maximize impact with strategic allocation of resources in CAC contexts where resources are scarce and needs are high (Aber et al., 2021).
Despite the utility of the framework, applying it in diverse, resource-constrained CAC contexts is not without challenges. Chief among these is the need to translate its conceptual structure into actionable steps that are accessible and relevant to a wide range of stakeholders. For example, fostering a common understanding and building consensus among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners—each with their own priorities and interpretations—is a complex task that demands significant facilitation efforts and the cultivation of trust to bridge disciplinary and sectoral divides. With its comprehensive, transdisciplinary approach, the ERICC framework strikes a balance between being specific enough to guide actionable decision-making and abstract enough to adapt to diverse contexts, thereby facilitating cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration.
Looking Ahead: Toward a Systematic, Inclusive, and Actionable Evidence Base for All
The recent surge in armed conflicts, for example, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and civil wars in Sudan and Myanmar, and climate disasters and public health crises highlight the urgent need for innovative responses to educational challenges in CACs. Addressing these challenges requires a robust evidence base to guide strategies for preparing, adapting, and rebuilding education systems. The ERICC framework seeks to transform fragmented responses into policies and programming grounded in a systematic, inclusive, and actionable knowledge base.
Beyond the application in CACs, we hope this framework contributes to integrating evidence from CAC contexts into the broader, mainstream, “global” education science with a common language, structure, and method applicable across research contexts. Traditional power imbalances in knowledge transfer often result in assumptions that approaches from Western, high-income countries (the “Minority” world) are universally applicable, while evidence from the “Majority” world is shaped by agendas set by international agencies and Western institutions. As CACs rise globally, insights from CACs can enrich and expand the global evidence base, fostering a more inclusive and actionable foundation for advancing education for all children.
Supplemental Material
sj-pdf-1-edr-10.3102_0013189X251406243 – Supplemental material for A Conceptual Framework for Education Research in Conflict and Protracted Crisis (ERICC): A Holistic Approach for Systematic Field Building
Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-edr-10.3102_0013189X251406243 for A Conceptual Framework for Education Research in Conflict and Protracted Crisis (ERICC): A Holistic Approach for Systematic Field Building by Ha Yeon Kim, Carly Tubbs Dolan, J. Lawrence Aber, Silvia Diazgranados and Tejendra Pherali in Educational Researcher
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Supplementary Material
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