In those bleak days of the many lockdowns, with schools shuttered, it was, at times, hard to imagine that we would ever really return to something akin to normality.
Overcoming Covid-19 was achieved in large part thanks to the extraordinary ingenuity and creativity of scientists and their vaccines.
And as a result, for most students in most of the world, we’ve seen classrooms reopening and teaching and learning resuming over the past 12 to 24 months.
It is because of this collective effort that we are able to confidently predict that over the coming weeks most secondary students around the world will begin to sit their exams in fairly normal conditions after a year or more of fairly normal education.
It would be easy to kick back and relax in the comforting blanket of the familiar.
But this would be a mistake - for two main reasons.
The post-Covid problem of children’s wellbeing
Firstly, things have not, in fact, returned to pre-2019 life for a vast proportion of young people on this planet.
They continue to be affected by the dramatic and long-term consequences of the lockdowns and of their schools being closed for month after month.
Teachers and students tell us - and we see in research study after research study - that the pandemic ushered in a global increase in anxiety and a crisis in wellbeing among too many young people.
This is the hidden and long-term side effect of the pandemic presenting itself around the world.
And so the International Baccalaureate (IB) is now doubling down on its work in this area.
We are committing ourselves to new research into what we - and others - can do to help schools help their students to navigate this new world of worry and harm. You can expect more on this in the weeks ahead.
The IB will be in listening mode in the coming months. We understand that there will be students who, through no fault of their own, will struggle with school life. There are supports we can and will put in place for them.
But even with these options - sticking plasters, if you will - there is still a huge amount of work to do in this space for long-term recovery. We need to develop a better understanding of anxiety and of what schools and related organisations can do to help.
I have made this a key priority for the IB.
Building on schools’ digital developments
Secondly, we absolutely cannot simply forget the extraordinary advances that were made - by force of circumstance - in assessment and teaching and learning as a result of Covid.
Young people today are changed because of the pandemic - and so, too, must we be.
A Unicef report released a couple of months ago reveals stagnation in the improvements in access to digital learning that were made during the Covid-19 pandemic: one-third of nationally developed platforms have shut down entirely, are outdated or are no longer full functional, limiting learning approaches to help schoolchildren recover their education.
Throughout history, dramatic events have forced extraordinary innovation, and the pandemic was no different. The digital transformation of education, almost overnight, would have previously been unthinkable. During the pandemic, students and teachers were forced to stay apart from one another.
But there are still many students who don’t have physical access to high-quality education.
Because of distance, not staying in one place, having external pressures that don’t enable attending school in the normal way, finding it socially too stressful to attend school, being a refugee - there are many reasons why overcoming obstacles via digital means of schooling are important.
Embracing the power of online learning
Digital learning tools should always bring people together to learn because learning is a deeply social process.
Increasing access is one of the reasons why we are carrying out a root and branch review of our celebrated Diploma Programme (DP).
Indeed, we are piloting a number of really extraordinary changes, including a 100 per cent digitally taught version of the course and pathways that look at how we utilise project-based learning, for example.
There is a lot more than just that, too: I can say with a high degree of confidence that once this review is over, there will be a lot of innovative changes to implement.
Even though schooling and exams are largely “back to normal”, we must incorporate evolving change in order to future-proof teaching, learning and assessment.
Olli-Pekka Heinonen is the director-general of the International Baccalaureate
