Interview with theme convenors of one of seven UKFIET 2025 conference themes, ‘Learner safety and wellbeing’: Danielle Cornish-Spencer, Social Development Direct and Julliet Millican, Institute of Development Studies. The Call for Abstracts is open until 21 March 2025.

UKFIET 2025 conference: Why learner safety and wellbeing must be at the heart of education

Education should be a space where learners feel safe, supported, and empowered to thrive. Yet, for too many, it can be a site of harm – whether through exposure to violence, discrimination, exclusion, or systemic neglect. In the wake of ongoing conflicts, climate-induced disasters, and ongoing violence based on entrenched inequalities, we need to ask: how do we create education systems that not only protect but actively promote learners’ safety and wellbeing?

What excites us about this theme?

For both of us, this theme is about: exploring and centring the safety and wellbeing of learners, and their places of study, in education policy and practice. If this is to happen, safety and wellbeing must be embedded at every level of education – from institutional governance and pedagogy to teacher training and community engagement. This theme therefore allows us to think boldly about what it takes to create education systems that not only do no harm but actively serve as spaces of healing, resilience, and empowerment.

This theme includes two distinct areas:

  • Individual threats and marginalisation

In a time when the anti-gender movement is threatening hard-won progress, how do we ensure that advances in learner safety and wellbeing are not only maintained but strengthened? Beyond risk mitigation, we are keen to explore how education can proactively promote wellbeing – ensuring that learners, particularly those facing multiple forms of marginalisation, feel heard, valued, and supported in their educational journeys. This includes a deeper examination of the links between violence in the home, community, and schools, and how education systems can play a role in breaking cycles of harm.

  • Safety and wellbeing in humanitarian contexts.

When education itself is under attack, how do we protect learners and ensure continuity of learning? Educational institutions are increasingly targeted by armed actors – threatening not just access to education but their very notion as safe spaces. It invites us to look at how places of higher learning can not only protect those that use them, but also contribute positively with humanitarian and conflict response.

How does this theme connect to the overall conference and today’s global landscape?

The UKFIET 2025 theme – Mobilising knowledge, partnerships, and innovations for sustainable development through education and training – centres on collective learning and action. A crucial part of this is recognising that education cannot be sustainable if learners are unsafe, if their institutions are being targeted, if their mental health is deteriorating, or if structural inequalities continue to undermine their ability to engage.

The world is facing intersecting crises – protracted conflicts, increasing climate shocks, rising authoritarianism, and attacks on gender and LGBTQIA+ rights. In this landscape, ensuring learner safety and wellbeing is not just a moral imperative but a foundational step in protecting the right to education itself. Whether we are working on education in emergencies, safeguarding in schools, or rethinking curricula to centre wellbeing – this theme calls on us to be deliberate about integrating safety and wellbeing across all aspects of education.

What kinds of papers and sessions would we like to see?

We are keen to receive submissions that push the boundaries of how we think about safety and wellbeing in education. Some key areas of interest include:

  • Holistic approaches to protection in education: How are different actors (teachers, parents, policymakers, communities) coming together to create safe learning environments? How does safety and wellbeing at home link to learner safety and wellbeing in educational settings? What has worked to strengthen learner safety and wellbeing? How might we engage education systems in this important work, ensuring sustainable, long-term strategies are in place? 
  • Education in crisis and conflict settings: What does meaningful psychosocial support look like in education systems affected by displacement and violence? How do we engage as a global community to prevent attacks on education in crisis and conflict settings? How can institutions play a positive role in response?
  • Gender and intersectionality in safety and wellbeing: How are different groups of learners experiencing (or being excluded from) safe education? What strategies work to address gender-based violence, harmful social norms, and exclusion? How do we work within schools to prevent GBV in the short, medium and long term?
  • Beyond safeguarding, towards wellbeing and resilience: How do we create education systems that actively promote mental health, social-emotional learning and peaceful and inclusive societies?
  • Structural and policy shifts: How are education systems embedding conflict response, trauma sensitivity, safety and wellbeing into teacher training, curriculum development, and policy frameworks?

We also hope to see participatory and decolonial approaches that elevate the voices of those most affected – children, young people, and educators working in challenging contexts. The theme of this year’s conference really highlights the need for the ‘how’ to be explored, we want to hear practical solutions to these issues. We want to learn from successes as well as what hasn’t worked. There has never been a more urgent time to address learner safety and wellbeing in the wake of crises, and we look forward to hearing from as many of you as possible.