What the project does
The Resilient School is an initiative of Oberon and Resilt. We map how crisis-resilient education in Utrecht is, from the everyday incident to the large system-wide crisis, and translate that into concrete options for schools and school boards.
Schools in Utrecht already face serious events on a regular basis: the death of a pupil or colleague, aggression and violence at home, in the neighbourhood or in the schoolyard, and threats against teachers. How a school handles those, from ad hoc to considered and by protocol, is a good indicator of how it will handle larger disruptions. And those are coming: heat, cyber threats, prolonged power or IT outages, subversive crime, a next pandemic.
What has been missing so far is the school sector itself. There is no systematic picture of how resilient Utrecht's schools are, and schools do not yet have an obvious place in the resilience networks emerging in the city.
One picture, two lenses
The project delivers one integrated baseline measurement, built from two perspectives.
- Resilt uses data to map the technical side: energy, IT, water and buildings. Where do the critical dependencies and vulnerabilities sit?
- Oberon examines the qualitative side: what do school leaders and school teams have available in tools, skills and psychological reserves to absorb both small incidents and large crises?
Together that forms a crisis-resilience picture with scores per school and per board, readable in the boardroom and in the city council alike.
How we go about it
The approach starts and ends with the schools themselves. Alongside that we set up a steering committee with school boards and relevant partners, and we build on the Chief Resilience Officers Network and the Resilience Community of Practice, where infrastructure companies, insurers, care institutions, financial institutions, installers and safety services already work together.
Beforehand we design scenarios that schools recognise: incident scenarios around bereavement, aggression and threats, and system scenarios around prolonged power or IT outages, cyber incidents, extreme weather and pandemics. The analytical framework combines the UNDRR resilience cycle and Resilt's ISAFE model with Oberon's resilience matrix of systems, organisation and people, supplemented with psychological safety, collective efficacy and crisis self-efficacy among leaders.
Phase 1, exploration with pilot schools. We talk with the Utrecht school boards and ask them to nominate two pilot schools, one primary and one secondary. With them we map the current state, the technical and qualitative resources available and the improvements they want.
Phase 2, resilience scan of the school sector. On that basis we design a monitor covering more than 125 schools in Utrecht across primary, special and secondary education: technical data on critical dependencies through ISAFE, linked to a workable survey for school leaders with validated scales for team resilience and self-efficacy.
What it delivers
- A repeatable crisis-resilience monitor, so progress becomes visible
- A confidential crisis-resilience profile per school and per board, with concrete options for action
- A vulnerability map per neighbourhood: where is reinforcement needed most?
- A practical training programme, for instance a crisis first-response course for education professionals, with regular refresher days
Who does what
Oberon has been the research agency for education and youth for thirty years, based in Utrecht and well connected in the city's education sector. Oberon acts as lead author: qualitative fieldwork, synthesis and reporting. Resilt supplies the infrastructure data and the visualisations for the large-scale scenarios. In a follow-up phase, such as the annual training programme, Resilt takes the lead and Oberon stays involved in evaluation and monitoring.
Join in
Are you a school board member, school leader or education policy maker, and would you like to think along or nominate a pilot school? Send us a message.