This report focuses on the social and economic resilience that might be achieved by well-designed and well-targeted investment in education. It provides a review of the individual and social returns of education in terms of both economic and non-economic effects. The most important economic benefits for individuals include better skills, better employability, increased productivity and higher earnings. Among the non-economic benefits associated with education are better health, lower crime rates and higher levels of trust, tolerance, and civic and political engagement. At the societal level, the most relevant returns from education are associated with higher GDP growth, better diffusion and adoption of technologies, higher innovation capacity, stable public finances and better social cohesion. We show that European countries, which are endowed with better education, both in terms of quantity and quality, recover faster from economic shocks and have better economic resilience. We also provide evidence that individuals who are more educated are more flexible and adaptable to new technological advances, and we discuss the specific skills that are expected to be most in demand in the future. We point out that access to high-quality preschool education for disadvantaged children is one of the most important policies to tackle existing inequalities within a society. The report also discusses the implications of the COVID-19 related school lockdowns in early 2020 on individuals (students, teachers and parents), educational institutions and systems, and suggests that if not tackled adequately during the recovery stage, the immediate adverse consequences -- such as interrupted learning and skills formation, exacerbated educational inequalities and rising dropout rates -- could lead to high social and economic costs in the long term.