Improving school systems at scale insights

With finite financial resources for education around the world, ministers and policymakers are rightly preoccupied with efficiency and value for money. In our recent side event to the Global Education Summit, ‘High-Impact Domestic Financing: Evidence, Equity, Efficiency’, we heard fascinating insights from ministers and experts into how evidence of different types including disaggregated datadata is being used in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to inform cost-effective, impactful policy which holds the potential to transform the chances of the most vulnerable students. In this commentary, we examine three key themes which emerged from their discussions.

Accountability, quality assurance and school inspections have long been at the centre of Education Development Trust’s work in the Middle East. Drawing on this experience, we explore the importance of accountability and the use of evaluation as a tool for improvement.

Across the world, disease outbreaks have negative impacts on children’s learning, safety and wellbeing. As the Covid-19 pandemic draws on, the education sector must urgently learn how to mitigate its effects on learners in a wide variety of countries. Our Principal Consultant, Joe Hallgarten, reflects on evidence from the Ebola crisis in West Africa and the lessons that can be applied in the context of Covid-19.

Following a disappointing PISA performance in 2009, the Welsh government developed a curriculum planning tool called the Literacy and Numeracy Framework, borne out of international best practice, to identify the expected outcomes for students. The government then needed a strategic partner to help implement and embed the new Framework to improve literacy and numeracy in students aged 4 to 14.

Having been a teacher, manager, researcher and trainer working in primary, secondary, further and higher education as well as a special school and pupil referral units, Matt Davis is now regional director for the UK at Education Development Trust.

Having been a teacher, manager, researcher and trainer working in primary, secondary, further and higher education as well as a special school and pupil referral units, Matt Davis is now regional director for the UK at Education Development Trust.

Lucy Crehan, associate for Education Development Trust, comments on how other countries have succeeded in placing good teachers in rural schools.

Susy Ndaruhutse, former Head of International Development and Education reflects on when Education Development Trust (then CfBT) was first invited to Rwanda in 2001 – 7 years after the genocide that killed around 1 million Rwandans. Her remit was to support the ministry of education rebuild the country's education system.

What happens when strategic leaders from more than 20 local education systems across England come together to discuss education reform? This thinkpiece captures the questions raised, their implications and some possible solutions.