Education | AJYAL

This approach aligns with Ajyal’s published description of its Education Programme, which focuses on providing children and adolescents with access to quality learning opportunities that enhance their knowledge and skills and open pathways towards a more promising and empowered future

Related source Ajyal’s official website

Ensuring the Continuity of Education During Emergencies

Ajyal’s first strategic direction is to ensure continuity of learning, particularly for children who have lost regular access to formal schools. In the current context, Temporary Learning Spaces are no longer merely physical substitutes for schools. They have become essential instruments for protecting children’s right to education, restoring daily routines, and creating a greater sense of stability amid displacement, fear, and uncertainty.

Ajyal has translated this strategic direction into practice by establishing, operating, and supporting Temporary Learning Spaces across different areas of the Gaza Strip, including both northern and southern Gaza. The Association’s published activities demonstrate the implementation of education components within emergency response projects, including the rehabilitation of safe learning spaces and the provision of educational and psychosocial support services to children.

Ajyal has also issued tenders for the rehabilitation of Temporary Learning Spaces under a project designed to empower conflict-affected communities in Gaza through safe and inclusive education

Through these spaces, Ajyal seeks to reduce the learning gaps caused by prolonged disruption and help children recover foundational competencies in reading, writing, mathematics, and science. The Association also implements interactive lessons that employ practical and participatory methods. One published example includes science lessons on human body systems delivered as part of the daily activities conducted in Temporary Learning Spaces.

This demonstrates Ajyal’s commitment to active learning approaches that move beyond memorisation and conventional instruction by encouraging children to participate, experiment, explore, and engage in discussion

Improving Education Quality and Building Teachers’ Capacities

Ajyal does not consider the provision of a physical learning space sufficient to ensure quality education. The Association therefore places significant emphasis on strengthening the capacities of teachers and facilitators and improving teaching methods.

Its Strategic Plan includes regular teacher training, the development and review of educational curricula and learning materials, and the enhancement of teachers’ ability to respond to the educational and psychological needs of children affected by conflict and emergencies.

Teacher capacity development is particularly important in the Gaza Strip, where teachers operate under highly challenging and unconventional conditions. They must address substantial differences in children’s learning levels, overcrowded spaces, shortages of teaching materials, and high levels of fear, anxiety, and difficulty concentrating among students.

Teachers therefore require specialised skills in education in emergencies, active learning, classroom management for mixed learning levels, psychological first aid, child safeguarding, and working with children with disabilities and learning difficulties.

Ajyal’s published activities show that the Association has conducted specialised training on education in emergencies and organised evaluation meetings for teachers working in Temporary Learning Spaces in southern Gaza. These meetings were intended to assess the progress of educational activities, identify operational and instructional challenges, and improve the quality of teaching and services provided to children.

Such activities reflect an institutional commitment to continuous monitoring, learning, and improvement rather than merely implementing activities without assessing their quality or outcomes

Ajyal has also worked to provide active learning materials for its Temporary Learning Spaces, enabling teachers to use more interactive and child-friendly educational techniques. Providing such materials forms part of a broader vision in which children are active participants in the learning process and are given opportunities to learn through play, experimentation, dialogue, and teamwork

Integrating Education with Psychosocial Support

Ajyal’s strategy recognises that children’s academic achievement cannot be separated from their psychological and social well-being. A child experiencing fear, loss, displacement, or instability may be unable to concentrate or participate in learning, even when teachers and educational materials are available. For this reason, Ajyal adopts an integrated approach that embeds psychosocial support within essential education services.

The Association’s interventions include social and emotional learning sessions, recreational activities, artistic expression, group games, and structured exercises that help children identify and express their emotions and build positive relationships with their peers.

In its published activities, Ajyal has explained that its Temporary Learning Spaces focus on social and emotional learning to strengthen children’s ability to communicate their feelings, establish positive relationships, and continue their academic learning

Through this approach, a learning space simultaneously becomes a place for education, protection, and recovery. This is particularly important for children who have experienced distressing or traumatic events. It can help them gradually restore their sense of safety, belonging, and confidence while reducing the risks of school dropout, isolation, and stress-related behavioural difficulties.

Published activities also indicate that education and psychosocial support facilitators operate across more than 12 Temporary Learning Spaces managed by Ajyal in different areas of the Gaza Strip. This demonstrates the expansion of an integrated education model that brings together academic learning and psychosocial well-being

Promoting Inclusive Education and Equal Opportunities

Inclusive education constitutes another central pillar of Ajyal’s strategic direction. According to its Strategic Plan, the Association aims to create learning environments that accommodate the needs of all children, including children with disabilities, and to ensure that no child is excluded because of disability, economic hardship, displacement, or access barriers.

Inclusion does not simply mean allowing a child with a disability to enrol in a learning space. It requires accessible facilities, appropriate teaching methods and materials, trained teachers, assistive services and devices, and sustained engagement with families to address the barriers preventing children from participating effectively.

One practical example of this direction is Ajyal’s implementation of an eyeglasses campaign for children in Gaza, supported by Olive Kids Australia. The campaign was designed to help children overcome vision-related difficulties and improve their chances of accessing equitable education within Temporary Learning Spaces.

This initiative demonstrates that Ajyal treats health-related barriers as part of the broader challenge of access to education rather than as an entirely separate issue

Related source Eyeglasses campaign for children

Ajyal also works to strengthen child safeguarding standards within educational environments. Under the initiative “Towards Child-Friendly Learning Spaces,” the Association conducted sessions to raise the awareness of volunteers working in Temporary Learning Spaces regarding child protection standards in humanitarian action.

These activities contribute to ensuring that learning environments are safe from abuse, exploitation, discrimination, and other risks, while establishing mechanisms to identify and respond to child protection concerns

Engaging Families and Communities in Education

Ajyal believes that children’s education is a shared responsibility that cannot be carried by educational institutions alone. Its Strategic Plan therefore emphasises strengthening collaboration with families and local communities, conducting awareness programmes for parents and caregivers, and helping them understand their children’s educational and psychological needs.

Ajyal also encourages parents and caregivers to support their children’s attendance and follow up on their learning progress. The Association has conducted training days and sessions for the families of children enrolled in Temporary Learning Spaces. These activities have addressed psychosocial support, positive communication with children, and ways to create safe and supportive home environments.

Such activities are particularly important in situations of displacement, where parents and caregivers face considerable economic and psychological pressures that may affect their ability to support their children’s education. By engaging families, Ajyal seeks to transform them from service recipients into active partners in protecting children’s right to learn.

Ajyal also establishes community committees linked to education projects and organises meetings with community leaders, parents, teachers, and partner representatives. This engagement helps identify needs, select suitable locations for learning spaces, monitor children’s attendance, respond to complaints, and promote community ownership of educational interventions.

Non-Formal Education and Children’s Personal Development

Ajyal places clear importance on extracurricular and non-formal activities as part of an integrated educational approach. Reading, arts, sports, theatre, drawing, competitions, and practical science activities help identify children’s talents and strengthen their creativity, communication, teamwork, and problem-solving skills.

One published example is the implementation of educational and extracurricular activities by Ajyal Library in partnership with the Tamer Institute for Community Education as part of a reading campaign and Global Action Week for Education.

This collaboration reflects Ajyal’s interest in promoting a culture of reading and transforming books and libraries into tools for learning, expression, and community engagement rather than treating them solely as sources of information

Artistic and recreational activities also enable children to express their experiences safely and provide moments of normality within an exceptionally difficult environment. For this reason, Ajyal does not regard extracurricular activities as secondary additions. Instead, it sees them as educational and psychological tools that can improve attendance, participation, well-being, and academic performance.

From Emergency Response to Sustainable Education Recovery

An analysis of Ajyal’s strategic directions shows that the Association seeks to move progressively from emergency education responses towards a more sustainable education recovery model. Temporary Learning Spaces address immediate needs, but they also establish a foundation for remedial education, teacher training, active learning methods, inclusive education, and stronger partnerships with families and communities.

The Strategic Plan outlines a progressive pathway for the Education Programme. It includes increasing the number of teachers receiving training, developing educational materials, rehabilitating facilities to accommodate children with disabilities, expanding academic support and extracurricular programmes, and increasing parental participation.

This approach indicates that Ajyal intends to measure the impact of its interventions not only through the number of activities conducted but also through improvements in education quality, children’s participation, well-being, and ability to continue learning.

Ajyal’s vision for education can therefore be summarised through five interconnected dimensions: safe access to learning, quality teaching, psychosocial support, inclusion and non-discrimination, and partnership with families and communities.

The integration of these dimensions makes the Education Programme more capable of responding to the complex realities of the Gaza Strip, where learning loss cannot be addressed in isolation from fear, displacement, poverty, disability, and the deterioration of the wider learning environment.

Within Ajyal’s strategic approach, education is not merely a temporary service delivered during an emergency. It is an investment in protecting children, rebuilding their confidence, and strengthening their ability to participate in the future of their communities.

Through Temporary Learning Spaces, teacher development, active learning, psychosocial support, extracurricular activities, inclusive education, and family engagement, Ajyal works to transform education into a space for safety, hope, and recovery—and into one of the essential foundations for the long-term rebuilding of Palestinian society.