How COVID-19 could trigger organisational innovation in education

The outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing school lockdown measures taken revealed the limits of organisational innovation in education confronted suddenly with having to limit social contacts between pupils, students and teachers. Fully, online education models designed using the physical class model as organisational set-up and organized in a couple of weeks’ time, were totally inappropriate to compensate for school closures. The organisational innovation which education systems across the world could benefit from following the COVID-19 pandemic, consists of exploiting in a more flexible and hybrid way best practice online education to the benefit of a more inclusive school and learning system. Schools – both as an institution as well as a building – represent in many ways our last chance for the promotion of social equality: allowing for exchanges amongst youngsters with different social background. Giving explicitly schools the tasks of providing access to best practice digital education and freeing time for physical education addressing “face to face” socially isolated pupils and students from poorer and more marginalized neighbourhoods could be a lasting, major organisational innovation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.