The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented global education crisis. It has closed schools around the world, resulting in about 1.5 billion out-of-school children and youth (OOSCY) in spring 2020, from preprimary through tertiary age (UNESCO, 2020a). The pandemic exacerbated global out-of-school numbers and drastically impacted student learning, with some research estimating more than a year of learning loss after only a three-month school closure (Kaffenberger, 2021). Today, the dialogue is evolving beyond schools reopening to focus on learning recovery, with countries implementing a variety of approaches for catch-up, remedial, or accelerated learning (Nugroho et al., 2020; USAID, 2020). Education leaders are facing calls to improve guidelines and/or policies in the face of highly varying curricula, pedagogy, certification, and promotion. This is the context to which this evidence synthesis responds. In using a novel approach to rapidly crowdsource a wide range of published and unpublished evidence related to accelerated education programmes (AEPs), and then synthesising this evidence, our aim is to build on existing critical AEP evidence by offering practical, contextually relevant points of guidance for those shaping policies and guidelines for AEPs.
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