The Covid-19 pandemic has been intensely disruptive to education all around the world. With children in many countries continuing to face prolonged absences from the classroom, innovative solutions are needed to maintain education continuity, especially for the most vulnerable students. Such crises require solutions that go beyond the resources of the ‘traditional’ education workforce, with local communities and inputs from other sectors playing a potentially important role in ensuring continuity of learning. This report, the second in our Learning Renewed series, explores the solutions adopted by our team in Kenya, where we have redesigned the roles of community health volunteers (CHVs) to support continuity of learning for the vulnerable girls we work with, and identifies key lessons which may prove valuable both during and beyond the current crisis.

Education policymakers around the world have long shared a key priority: achieving high-quality teaching and learning at scale. This requires strong delivery systems at every level. While there is significant evidence on the important roles played by teachers and leaders, comparatively little attention has been paid to the role – and potential – of middle-tier professionals such as supervisors, instructional coaches and mentors at the regional, district and sub-district level. These actors are key intermediaries in education systems, but their role in teaching and learning improvement has often been overlooked in research and policy debates. In our latest report, together with IIEP-UNESCO and the Education Commission, we highlight the potential of these middle-tier actors as a critical part of the ‘machine’ for quality teaching and learning at scale.