Facing the Future: Why Understanding Emerging Change Is Essential for Education System Resilience

Enhancing education system resilience has never been more urgent as the world faces a polycrisis— where challenges such as climate change, migration, species loss, conflict, and political instability compound and intensify one another. In this environment, disruptions evolve rapidly and unpredictably, turning once‑manageable issues into wicked problems that can overwhelm leaders and policymakers.  Education systems, like all systems, are deeply vulnerable to such turbulence: change creates uncertainty, disrupts assumptions, and exposes fragilities. Therefore, strengthening resilience depends on anticipating disruptive or transformative shifts early. The sooner we engage with emerging change, the more options we retain, whether to influence its direction or adapt effectively to its impacts.

The GPE KIX Global Horizon Scan Report: A Thematic Overview of Education System Disruptors and Transformers —along with accompanying change cards —provides an overview of a wide spectrum of disruptors and transformers across different spheres of life, illustrating implications for education systems and their resilience. Produced through the Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (GPE KIX) Observatory on Education System Resilience initiative, the scan is based on a 10‑month global horizon scan conducted in 2025. It provides a comprehensive snapshot of emerging changes and trends, highlights the dynamics within each change dimension, explores how trends are interconnected and mutually reinforce each other, and demonstrates how specific disruptors can collide to accelerate their speed, scale, and impact. The report also considers how strategic responses to these disruptions can generate positive and enabling changes that could improve education system resilience.

The report organizes horizon scan findings using the PESTLE‑V framework, which examines seven dimensions of change: politics, economics, society, technology (including science and innovation), law, environment, and values. Together, the wide range of disruptors and transformers presented in the report show how emerging and ongoing changes can profoundly affect education systems. All of this is unfolding in postnormal times, when facts are uncertain, values are contested, stakes are high, and decisions are urgent—conditions that heighten the complexity of the challenges education systems must navigate.

Take, for example, the economic dimension. Geopolitical realignments and conflicts over resource access are deepening economic uncertainty, while speculative technology bubbles and concentrated digital monopolies are fueling volatility. These shifts contribute to an emerging “post-aid” world in which traditional development assistance is declining. Such turbulence affects education systems: reduced global aid and trade revenues threaten education budgets, undermine investments needed to strengthen resilience, and jeopardize learning outcomes. New geopolitical alliances may introduce alternative funding opportunities but they can also bring ideological pressures that shape curricula and teacher training.

Or consider the technological dimension. Two powerful clusters of change—rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and breakthroughs in the life sciences—are transforming how we think, learn, and relate to knowledge and living systems. AI is reshaping research, analysis, creativity, and even emotional connection, while innovations in biotechnology expand our capacity to manipulate life from molecules to ecosystems. In education systems, digital technologies can improve planning, communication, inclusion, continuity of learning, and data-driven decision-making. Yet resilience can be undermined by misinformation, AI hallucinations, cyber risks, inequitable access, and technical failures. Education governance will also be challenged to balance the potential cognitive drawbacks of AI-mediated learning with emerging forms of cognitive enhancement—from neuroscience advances to biohacking.

However, the most disruptive and transformative impacts often emerge not from single changes but from the collision of interconnected disruptors, which amplify one another, accelerate their speed, and intensify their effects. For example, droughts affect schools and their surrounding communities. Limited access to clean water undermines school sanitation and hygiene, reducing attendance—particularly for girls—and heightening the risk of disease outbreaks. Drought also diminishes water availability for agriculture, hydropower, and river transport, weakening local economies and infrastructure. In regions where rivers and ecosystems are legally protected, competing demands for scarce water resources become even harder to reconcile, increasing the likelihood of conflict.

While changes can disrupt education systems, they also create opportunities for transformation. For instance, advances in real-time translation and interpretation software—becoming increasingly sophisticated, accurate, and affordable—can help preserve language diversity and Indigenous cultures while making their use in schools more feasible. This will positively impact access to education through easily translated teaching materials, assessments, and exams, as well as improved communication with learners and communities. Such tools will be especially valuable in regions accommodating migrant children or in refugee settings.

The global horizon scan presented in this report identifies current and emerging disruptive and transformative changes across a range of dimensions. Its purpose is to raise awareness of these changes and their implications for education system resilience. It is important to note that these changes will not affect all contexts in the same way. As part of the GPE KIX Observatory initiative, regional observatories will conduct local scans to build contextual data that will inform the next stage of foresight methods—such as futures wheels and scenario building—supporting discussions about the possible on-the-ground impacts and strategic implications of the changes and their potential combined effects.

We invite readers to reflect on how the changes outlined in this report might affect their own education systems and communities. System resilience begins with the resilience of each component, each participant and their interactions. In light of these changes, education and other relevant stakeholders may ask what they can do differently with the resources they have at hand and the people with whom they work. To support this reflection, GPE KIX has proposed a framework for education system resilience, which includes five components: overall system strengthening; anticipation of disruptions; planning for system strengthening, risk anticipation, and disasters and emergencies; responding to and recovering from crises; preventing and mitigating future disruptions—with gender equality and social inclusion being a cross-cutting consideration.  

The future will continue to throw changes our way and, while this may seem overwhelming at times, it is never too early to study the challenges we might face, now and in the times to come. We must ask ourselves how we can design education systems that are resilient today and able to evolve for future communities. Change is inevitable, and without resilient education systems, the resilience of our societies will be at risk.