Abstract:

The concept of school resilience has gained increasing attention in educational research and policy, yet a question has received relatively limited attention in existing research: is school resilience an emergent organisational property, expressed through shared routines, culture, and collective practices, or does it reduce to the resilience of the individuals within it - resilient teachers, resilient students, resilient principals? This presentation brings together two complementary lines of work to examine how current research and practice approach this question, where gaps persist, and what remains genuinely open.

The first line of evidence is a scoping review of 94 peer-reviewed articles on school resilience (Mikalauskaite, 2024), conducted following PRISMA-ScR guidelines across EBSCOhost and ERIC databases. While bounded by its database scope and search criteria, the review reveals a pronounced pattern: the vast majority of articles addressed resilience at the individual level - student resilience (n=70) and teacher resilience (n=17) - with only five articles examining resilience at the organisational school level. This finding points toward a relative underrepresentation of the organisational perspective, though it does not preclude relevant work outside the review parameters.

The second line of evidence draws on a mapping and analysis of existing school resilience self-assessment frameworks conducted within the SAMER Erasmus+ project (Schools' Ability to Adapt in the Modern Educational Context, No. 2025-1-LT01-KA220-SCH-000356077). A review of 43 international frameworks and tools found that existing instruments vary considerably in their focus - ranging from individual-level tools targeting teachers or students separately, to whole-school frameworks - with comparatively few tools explicitly designed to assess functional resilience: the school's capacity to maintain its core functions and adaptive capacity as an organisation under everyday educational and social tensions (Kaim et al., 2023).

The presentation reflects on plausible reasons for these patterns - including the strong tradition of psychological resilience research, the greater availability of validated individual-level measurement tools, and the genuine methodological challenges of operationalising resilience as an organisational property. It concludes by returning to the opening question: is school resilience an emergent organisational property, or the sum of resilient individuals within it? Based on the evidence reviewed, this remains genuinely open - and the answer matters for how schools are supported, studied, and strengthened in complex and changing contexts.

Keywords:

School resilience, organisational resilience, teacher resilience, scoping review, self-assessment frameworks, protective factors, resilience measurement, functional resilience, adaptive capacity.