During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in September 2020, the Rwanda Basic Education Board (REB) – in its efforts to improve the country’s school leaders – formed a learning partnership with the Education Commission, Education Development Trust, and WISE to undertake rapid research on school and system leadership during school closures and as they started to reopen for the first time.

Covid-19 caused considerable disruption to education around the world. Disadvantaged and marginalised learners have been particularly hard-hit. Naturally, earlier in the pandemic, the focus of much attention was on how to safely reopen schools, often with a preoccupation on hygiene and social distancing considerations. With schools in many jurisdictions reopening partially or fully, there is now a growing interest in the immensely important area of recovering the learning lost while pupils have been away from face-to-face education. These reports are a result of the first phase of a collaborative research programme undertaken with UNESCO.

Efficient use of resources depends upon many factors, but one key variable is the extent to which we design and implement activities which require funding in a way that is informed by relevant evidence.

Following Covid-19-related school closures across Rwanda, our Building Learning Foundations team commissioned an inequity impact assessment of the country’s primary-age school population to investigate how children from different backgrounds and contexts have fared during the period of closures, and to inform plans for school reopening.

The Covid-19 crisis has tested education systems in unprecedented ways. In this report, we summarise ten key lessons from the pandemic, which should be used to inform planning for the long-term reconstruction and recovery of education systems. These lessons are drawn from a thorough global review of evidence and policy throughout school closures and plans for reopening around the world, with a particular emphasis on examples of good practice.

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.