Attacks on Education and Education Clusters

The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attacks (GCPEA) defines attacks on education as "any intentional threat or use of force—carried out for political, military, ideological, sectarian, ethnic, or religious reasons—against students, educators, and education institutions."

According to the report Education under Attack 2022, at least 5,000 reports of attacks on education and cases of military use of schools and universities took place in 2020 and 2021, directly harming or killing over 9,000 students and educators worldwide.

As part of efforts to establish a more systematic approach to respond to attacks on education at all stages of the humanitarian programme cycle, in line with the cluster's core functions, the Global Education Cluster initiated work on attacks on education. This workstream aims to define the scope and purpose of country clusters engagement related to the monitoring, reporting, and, most importantly, responding to the consequences of attacks on children's learning, safety, well-being and access to education.

The GEC has developed a guidance note which defines the roles and scope of education clusters as well as opportunities and limitations clusters and their partners should consider when monitoring, reporting, and responding to attacks on education. The guidance is also available in French and Spanish.

For further information and updated data on attacks on education, we invite you to visit the below websites from key stakeholders involved in this field.

- Save School Declaration

- GCPEA: Education Under Attack 2022: Report and Map

- Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism (MRM) on grave violations committed against children in times of armed conflict The MRM is established in country situations where parties to conflict have been listed in the annexes of the annual report of the Secretary-General on children and armed conflict. For the most updated annexes, you can refer to the last Secretary-General annual report.