Developing a framework on school resilience for risk-informed decision-making

Abstract

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) 2015–2030 pursues the goal of preventing new risk, reducing existing risk, and managing residual risk through integrated and multi-sectoral interaction. It considers educational infrastructures pivotal, with the framework promoting resilient educational facilities as a global target for 2030. Schools, being a critical infrastructure, are crucial for building resilient cities and forming safe shelters or evacuation points in emergencies, alongside promoting a disaster risk curriculum. Asian countries have experienced multiple hazards and cascading risk patterns of climate change in the last few decades. Many countries such as India and Japan have generated school safety policies and disaster risk reduction plans for attaining the efforts of various frameworks, including SFDRR. While effective policies prevail, inefficient interoperability and disaggregated platforms result in poor ground-level management, such as in schools in hazard-prone areas. Past Incidents such as the 2004 Kumbakonam fire incidence, 2011 East Japan Earthquake, and Tsunami affecting schools point out the need of focusing on risk-informed school selection and planning rather than contemporary syllabus-based school selection.The study aims to develop a ‘School Selection Framework’, which analyses extrinsic and intrinsicfactors associated with school selection and safety, such as academic aspects, physical, human resources, and natural conditions. The methodology involves an integrative literature review on parental school selection, school safety, and resilience indices. It further identifies significant dimensions and indicators of school selection and safety to generate a conceptual framework for risk-informed school selection. The evaluation of articles based on the content analysis resulted in 18 significant dimensions contributing to school selection and school safety that was used to generate a conceptual framework for risk-informed decision-making. The study's outcome is to enhance the school selection process by mitigating the gap between the education system and disaster management, prompting the stakeholders to improve student safety.