Towards resilient educational systems in the EU

The availability of learning and teaching material poses a threat to the sustainability of education – even more so if online and hybrid teaching is to become the norm. The COVID-19 pandemic in the EU reinforced structural weaknesses in education and its delivery and revealed the lack of resilience of educational systems. This chapter looks firstly into the concept of a resilient educational system and to what extent it can be achieved by an educational exception. This is followed by an analysis of the current legal framework for the dissemination of knowledge in the form of the education exception within the European Union. Finally, this chapter concludes by exploring whether the discretion given to EU Member States when implementing the education exception has become legally insurmountable and whether machine learning is a way forward to create a functioning educational exception in digital and cross-border education.