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Quote of the Month

Love has never been a popular movement.

James Baldwin

Five Years of Deprivation

There have been a plethora of articles marking the 5^th anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, where education features prominently – from Gordon Brown, to Human Rights Watch to Christina Lamb, and the Guardian’s report on the lives today of 12 Afghan women.

There’s even a new series on Netflix called “Kabul”. The sub-plots are a little lame, but it does powerfully capture the sense of chaos as the Americans packed up and everyone rushed to follow in their wake.

It also conveys the impending sense of dread among those who had lived through the Taliban regime of the 1990s, and the hopeful optimism of those who wanted to believe the Taliban might have softened. Five years on and we know who was right – but, even the pessimists underestimated how dark this would get.

This timeline of decisions shows how central education has been to the Taliban’s redrawing of the social fabric. Although undoubtedly there are some in the Taliban who are sympathetic to girls’ education (e.g. see here) – if they are advocating, it is only privately, and with little visible impact. If anything, as will be seen later, it’s getting worse.

What Has Been the Response ?

The response from development organisations focused on supporting education, and particularly girls’ education, in Afghanistan has been both impressive and wholly inadequate.

The impressiveness has been the sheer determination of small and large organisations to respond to the ever-worsening situation. They have reoriented, repurposed, reorganised and re-energised. By one estimate there are perhaps as many as 250 organisations supporting education in Afghanistan – from individual efforts by refugees to small NGOs to Universities.

The inadequacy is not the fault of any of these organisations – it’s the brutal reality that, collectively, all these efforts amount to a valiant attempt to use a sticking plaster to cover a gaping wound.

Take Charmaghz, an NGO that until 2025 was running a series of mobile libraries in and around Kabul recording more than 1 million visits from Afghan children since 2018. Last year, the Taliban forcibly closed the libraries. Charmaghz had to quickly pivot from a large-scale, conspicuous programme to an online education model that is delivered more discretely and safely but with a more limited reach.

Charmaghz’s CEO, Liz Robinson, says their ambition this year is to support the education of around 450 girls - far fewer than the Mobile Library program - though prioritising depth, learning and continuity for smaller cohorts through a mix of book clubs and online programmes. Demand is far higher than capacity, with more than 900 girls applying for 45 secondary school places.

There’s a similar story with the Alliance for the Education of the Women of Afghanistan (AEWA), a network of over 120 organisations working for Afghan women and girls’ education (more than 60% Afghan led). Lauryn Oates, the Executive Director of Right to Learn Afghanistan who co-chairs AEWA, estimates that the affiliated organisations (plus some non-affiliated) are currently reaching approximately 400,000 Afghan women and girls, ranging from clandestine secret schools of 25 to online university course for 10,000.

These examples are the reality of the reach of quality supported programmes in 2026 in an environment where it’s dangerous to even mention the names of staff working in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, these efforts, laudable as they are, pale beside the estimated 2.4m girls excluded from secondary and maybe 100,000 from higher education. Primary education has not been banned, but, even here change is significant, quality declining and, says Fatima Faizi, boys are also affected.

And the Next 5 Years ?

Could it get any worse than being the only country in the world to ban girls’ education ? Unfortunately, yes, much worse.

A recent report from the Hamrah Network called “Taliban Madrasas : Ideological Consolidation, Gender Persecution and Afghanistan’s Future Stability” says :

In under five years, the Taliban have constructed a parallel education infrastructure that now exceeds the reach of Afghanistan’s formal public school system, extending ideological control into families, communities, prisons, and orphanages.

In 2021 there were thought to be 5,000 registered Madrasas. By 2025 there were reportedly 23,000 Madrasas compared to 18,000 public and private schools. The Hamrah report comments :

The long-term implications are profound. A generation educated exclusively within this framework will inherit and enforce a social order in which gender persecution is not policy but doctrine — normalised, naturalised, and sanctified by religious authority. This is, by design, self-perpetuating.

This is existential – for women and girls in Afghanistan and for their supporters outside. “It is an education system built by a regime that expects to rule for generations to come.” says Lynne O’Donnell.

What has been the response of the international community ? “Fatigue” say several respondents pointing to the bandwidth consumed by the Gaza and Ukraine conflicts, not say nothing of Sudan and Myanmar. Others point out that, astonishingly, some international tenders in education from UN agencies require working with the Taliban. Donors, hamstrung by bureaucracy and an aversion to working around governments, seem stuck in an old mindset.

There is also a concern at creeping “normalisation”. There is a quiet drumbeat for re-engagement with the Taliban (e.g. “Is it time to talk to the Taliban ?” The Economist). The increasing official and unofficial contacts with the Taliban, and a reduction in public censure and criticism, emboldens those in power.

Hope and Expectation

In the midst of this bleak outlook, are there any reasons for hope ?

Lauryn Oates comments that among their members they see two distinct threads of response : innovation and collaboration. Innovation has been forced on organisations working out how to deliver programmes to girls and women in a country where women’s access to the internet is less than 10%, all the while protecting their identities. The result has been clandestine schools, children who cross borders to learn, and interpretation of the “rules” which do not specifically forbid online learning.

Just as importantly, there is evidence that organisations which once competed with each other are putting those differences aside, sharing best practice, and agreeing common standards for certification and recognition of prior learning. For example, a set of learning quality standards were piloted with five AEWA member organisations before being revised and rolled out more widely.

Are donor agencies and philanthropists raising their game in this way ? The jury is out. It does seem astonishing that a network like AEWA, set up to create this kind of coordinated, collaborative response should be struggling to receive financial support from donors or philanthropists (see this suggestion from Liz Robinson).

One of the strongest features of the Hamrah report is the really clear and practical set of recommendations for action that it sets out. In education this includes challenging UNESCO and UNICEF to document and amplify awareness about the madrasas programme ; supporting more scholarships for online education for women and creating alternate pathways for employment for women (e.g. hiring Afghan women to provide graphic design (see here) or other remote services).

What can you do ?

During the Cold War there was a clandestine programme of subversion involving smuggling books and art into countries behind the iron curtain, notably Poland, with considerable success (even credited with helping bring down the Jaruzelski regime). The current moment feels eerily similar, a struggle between the universal values of freedom to learn and develop with the values of an ultraconservative interpretation of Islamic law.

The lines have been drawn and education has been defined as the key battleground over which the soul of Afghanistan will be fought.

In the larger scheme of things, the Taliban represent a Canute-like cry against modernity. They are on the wrong side of history and will, in due course, be pushed aside or be forced to reform, whether that is in months, years or decades. As Murwarid Ziayee, Senior Director at Right to Learn Afghanistan points out, in the depths of the first Taliban rule she lost 5 years of her education. But, in 2001 she was able to rejoin her university and complete her studies. That’s the hope she gives girls now.

The tragedy is that the sacrifices for this theocratic experiment are being made by those who had no say in it, implemented at the expense of the least powerful in society.

The opportunity is that there is agency in all of us to play a small part in resisting this educational nihilism.

Time to get subversive.

Andy Brock, August 2026

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News

At least 300 children killed in Gaza in the 300 days since the “cease fire” says UNICEF. That this has become “normal” and accepted is shameful.

Harvard Graduate School of Education is running a 6 week online Education in Emergencies Certificate Program. Course Director is Robert Jenkins ex-Head of Education at UNICEF. Apply by 2^nd September.

Here’s a piece of good news : the Manahel programme (FCDO funded) has moved its team from Gazientep in Turkey to Damascus. Full report here.

And another…student power. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the creation of a task force to overhaul India's examination system, following weeks of youth protests (the “Cockroach” movement) about exam paper leaks resulting in the resignation of the Minister of Education.

Kenya announces fee free higher education starting September - if passed by parliament.

Development

Great piece by Dan Honig (“Mission Driven Bureaucrats” – and the underpraised “Navigating by Judgement”) in the In Development Magazine, on the mystery of why data collection in South Sudan around 2012 was so trusted when almost nothing else in the country was. A story of individual leadership, incentives not penalties, and the human factor as a key ingredient in what constitutes institutional development.

Liz Robinson (mentioned above) has a post titled The 50 Billion Dollar Question: Who Gets a Piece of the AI Pie, Who Doesn’t, and Who Decides? She analyses why organisations working on the frontline, in very difficult and different circumstances (e.g. no working with Taliban government ; difficult to attribute or measure results etc.) become illegible for funding from philanthropic organisations.

Yes, illegible, not ineligible. It’s a smart take on the “being in the right rooms, meeting with the right people” meme. Illegible means such organisations can’t be “read” and therefore understood as easily as those who are closer to the funders.

The premise of Robinson’s piece is the so called “third wave of American philanthropy” (range $37-100bn) that I mentioned last month (emanating from an article by Nan Ransohoff) – coming from the obscene amounts of money some individuals are going to make on the flotations of Anthropic and Open AI platforms and citing Open AI’s Foundation as one example of a charity which will receive this windfall.

For the sceptics among you – and there should be many – try Morgan Fairless’s thoughtful comment on this bubble of excitement and anticipation : “What if the Third Wave is a Puddle ?” More likely to be the shape of things to come ?

I was critical of the piece by Dean Karlan and Rachel Glennerster (last issue) that argued for picking simple solutions in a cash-starved aid world, but Dr. Madeleine Ballard, for similar reasons, is positively scathing. “Every one of these interventions depends on the thing simplifiers want to stop paying for : the delivery system.” In other words, paying for the ingredients and not for the meal (see Newman and Warner below).

AI Spy

Interesting addition from Dan Mayer to the commentary on Alpha Schools (highlighted in last issue). He raises the question of selection and cost as determinants of the “success” of children in these schools. His post here.

There’s a new World Bank report out : “Supporting cost-effective AI adoption in Education”. Similar themes to the Ed Tech report from Brookings mentioned last month. How do governments choose the best solutions in such fast moving environment ? With great care. Link to blog and report here.

Voices from the front

In a nicely written, and quite personal, essay entitled Fragile, Silent, Pitiable, Divided and Isolated: What is going on with our children ? Zhou Juan describes the “silent” internal lives of many Chinese children. She argues that withdrawn or phone-glued children are not “selfish” or self-obsessed but rather that their sense of self is under-developed as a result of a lack of meaningful social interaction.

It’s not a big leap from this to the concern expressed in Parul Minhas’s piece on how spaces for adolescents at school and community are under-designed, or just an afterthought. The needs of a 9-year old in terms of space, play and exploration are very different from a 15-year-old.

In the comments to this post Rebecca M^a Lozano linked this very short but worthwhile video of Spanish educator Gregorio Luri talking about the lack of risk taking in childhood (aka helicopter parenting). He has some arresting phrases including : “overprotection is a form of abuse”. It’s in Spanish, but you can turn on autotranslate (go to settings then refresh page).

Voices from the rear

(Gray and Published Research)

Kirsty Newman and George Werner of Luminos Fund have an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review called “Right Ingredients, Wrong Recipe: What It Takes to Really Get Children Learning”. It’s a timely piece focusing on the process and the results of education change, not just the inputs. It also presents very clearly that learning outcomes can only be achieved through behaviour change – and behaviour change takes patience, support and a very long time.

The comments include one well worth reading by Sandeep Mishra former country Director of STIR Education India. He identifies two additional points : the need for mentor teachers to continuously support change and the essential buy in of the bureaucracy to financial sustainability of reform.

If I have one niggle about the piece (and I’ve made it about other pieces too) “good examples” are cited from Vietnam, South Korea and Brazil. Rarely cited is the most successful example of education reform in our lifetimes – China. Whatever your view of China, it’s many educators’ blindspot.

There’s a new paper out on support to Higher Education in Gaza : “Remote higher education partnerships in crisis: reflections and practical insights from the Gaza education research virtual fellowship” Junina et al.

EGRA still lives, hurrah ! Version 3.0 just published - kudos to Heta Thukral and Aimee Reeves.

Podcasts, Films and Books

Anuja, a lovely short film (just 22 minutes) available on Netflix about two sisters in Delhi and the opportunity (taken, not taken ?) that education brings to change lives.

“What’s inside the Moon ?”. This is a marvellous, verbally evocative, and at times very moving, podcast (from the audio magazine Signal Hill) about educator and poet Kenneth Koch which traces some of the children (now in their sixties) who he taught poetry to in a rough public school in New York :

Koch did a lot to establish what is now taken for granted in public consciousness : that children can write poetry. It brings out the influence of teachers on our lives, the imagination that can be released in children who are given free rein, and the vulnerability and honesty that poetry inspires.

…when you’re a kid there’s a world of possibility that you wish for, and then when you’re my age you wish for…you wish things weren’t so painful.

Homer’s The Odyssey. There’s a reason it’s still published nearly 2,700 years later : it’s amazingly good. Whether you’ve seen the film or not, the poem and the stories in it are wonderfully lyrical, and foundational to much of western culture.

And finally

The late, great, James Baldwin, had many remarks, like this one, that seem prescient in times of tragedy and trauma. Or is it just that the form of our “modern” world seems changed, but its substance remains stubbornly the same ?

Choosing not to be a monster is an active choice, and more necessary than ever. You could be that monster.

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Quote of the Month

The meaning of your life is to find your gift. The purpose of your life is to give it away.

Pablo Picasso

Introduction

“The politics that made access possible are not necessarily the politics that will improve learning” says Dr Kenechukwu Nwagbo in this month’s guest post.

Her contention is that educators know politics matter to the changes they want to see in education - but are strangely shy to confront the political dimension of education change head on. Political economy analysis, she argues, is a tool to help educators name the issues, map them and draw up a plan to address them.

PEA challenges educators to equip themselves with the political tools to address this lacunae. Dr Nwagbo describes how Open PEA tries to put its prescriptions into practice by running bootcamps for educators and publishing plainly worded accessible analyses of development issues, including education, in specific contexts.

It’s time to bring politics to the centre of discussions about education change.

Andy Brock, July 2026

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Background

Access to basic education is one of the greatest political success stories of the last three decades. Quality has been a harder hill to climb. Does politics explain why ? I believe so and I think PEA is a strategy that can help educators.

Between 2007 and 2015, there were 43 million fewer children out of school, and since the SDGs were adopted another 110 million have enrolled. This has been driven by strong political coalitions of governments, donors, practitioners and civil society organisations that have prioritised education, mobilised resources and sustained commitment. Education for All, the MDGs and the SDGs made schooling a global priority.

But, progress has stalled : since 2015, out‑of‑school numbers have fallen by only 3 million, and over 200 million children remain excluded. The real challenge has shifted from access to learning. In 2018 the World Bank declared a “learning crisis” and recent figures estimate 70% of 10‑year‑olds in low‑ and middle‑income countries unable to read a simple text.

Easy Access, Hard Quality

Expanding access meant building schools, abolishing school fees, recruiting teachers and increasing enrolment. These were tangible achievements that governments could quantify, voters could see, and communities could immediately benefit from. New schools created construction contracts, generated employment and demonstrated visible investment in neglected areas. Fee abolition removed one of the biggest barriers preventing children from attending school. Rising enrolment numbers became powerful indicators of political commitment and progress.

Improving quality has proved much harder. Quality is far less visible, requires continuous investment and is far more dependent on a functional education system. It requires teachers to be recruited on merit, paid on time and supported to improve their practice. It also requires reliable learning assessments, effective school leadership, and strong monitoring and accountability systems. These are not one-off investments but continuous governance interventions. Their political returns are often slower, less visible and more difficult to attribute to a single administration than opening a new school or announcing free education.

If the politics of access defined the previous generation of education reform, then the politics of learning should help define the next. Fortunately, this is no longer a neglected area of research in the field of education and international development.

The Politics of Learning

As countries have struggled to convert schooling into learning, political economy analysis has become an increasingly important lens for understanding what is holding these reforms back. For example, in 2018, the World Bank acknowledged that countries must overcome both technical and political barriers to improve learning outcomes by building coalitions, aligning with the interests of important actors and taking an adaptive approach to facilitate change.

These ideas did not emerge in isolation. They build on a longer tradition of scholarship that has examined education reform through a political economy lens. Together, this emerging body of work has shown how power, formal and informal institutions, incentives and coalitions shape whether reforms succeed, stall or fail, and have proposed ways of working with, rather than around, these political realities.

The politics of education is not new. Practitioners have been navigating it for decades, through stakeholder engagement for example. The newness is the growing body of research that helps us to systematically capture, analyse and integrate these political realities in our approach to education reform.

Yet, despite these advancements, politics is often left unspoken in decision-making rooms and rarely discussed openly in policy and practice. Why ?

Why are educators so shy of politics ?

This has created a disconnect in what we know and what we do. Educators know politics matters, yet they rarely talk about it openly.

Ask almost any funder, practitioner or policymaker whether education reform is political and they will acknowledge the truth of it. Budgets are political. Teacher recruitment is political. Curriculum reform is political. Decentralisation is political. Education financing is political.

Yet, the moment the conversation turns to politics, many of us become uncomfortable. Not because we deny its importance, but because we worry about how to talk about it and the consequences of talking about it. This instinct is understandable: we want to maintain trusted relationships with governments, preserve access, reassure donors, and stay in the good graces of the very people we need to work with. There is safety in seeing education reform as a purely technical exercise, but, too often it means we replace “politics” with softer language, substituting it with words like “context” or “institutional analysis” and avoiding the P-word altogether.

Avoiding politics, namely, the power dynamics, incentive structures, institutions (or lack thereof) that shape education systems, means we ignore its consequences, and the role of politics in preventing us from improving learning outcomes, specifically.

A couple of years ago this conviction led me to bring together like-minded colleagues to establish the Politics of Education (POLED) Network at the University of Cambridge. As doctoral researchers, we believed there should be a space where researchers, practitioners and policymakers could simply talk about the role of politics in education, and especially how it affected the low and middle-income countries we worked in.

The Open Political Economy Analysis (Open PEA) Approach

So, joining the Open Political Economy Analysis (Open PEA) programme at the University of Oxford felt like the natural next step after my doctoral studies.

If POLED was about creating space for conversations about politics, Open PEA is about integrating these conversations within policy and practice.

Our goal is simple: to make political economy analysis accessible and actionable. To do this, we translate complex research into practical insights that help policymakers, practitioners and the general public to understand how power, interests and incentives shape the systemic challenges that they are trying to change. We do this using a simple five-part template to :

1. lay out the problem

2. identify the players

3. show the rules of the game

4. describe the state of play and

5. offer practical policy propositions in plain, accessible language

Open PEA writing bootcamps

One of our key objectives is to help practitioners use political economy analysis not just as an academic exercise, but as a practical way of designing, implementing, and thinking about reforms. To help realise this goal, in July, we hosted our first ever writing bootcamp, bringing together education researchers, policy experts/practitioners and funders to do something that rarely happens: work side by side to translate political economy research into plain-language policy products. Using Open PEA’s five-step framework, participants left not just with new ideas, but with practical outputs designed to respond to real-world challenges.

One researcher commented :

[I learned] how to think differently about a problem I thought I had a very good grasp on (given that it was my PhD thesis) and how complicated thinking and discussing politics really is (even when you think you have it figured out).

Another said :

Thinking and doing politics is hard! It’s why so many people avoid it and why these conversations are important.

I travelled to Nairobi a few weeks later on the invitation of the International Education Funders Group (IEFG) to deliver a similar training session for their network of education philanthropy donors operating in Kenya. We applied Open PEA’s approach to address a real challenge they faced: co-ordination.

Again, our approach gained real support and positive feedback with one participant reflecting that:

Often times our sector treats politics as something to avoid or confront. This session reminded me that politics is an inevitable reality that we must engage with if we’re to have the impact that we desire.

What’s Next ?

Basic education is experiencing a shift in its political and financial landscape. The COVID-19 pandemic has reversed years of progress and deepened the global learning crisis, governments have less fiscal space, and many international donors have radically reduced their aid budgets. If education systems are expected to deliver more with less, understanding how those systems really work is now more important than ever.

But, the politics that made access possible are not necessarily the politics that will improve learning. Researchers at our bootcamps pointed out that facilitating the integration of refugees into Kenya education systems involves a different set of actors, incentives and institutions than improving education quality in Nigeria, or strengthening outcomes-based financing in Ghana, or addressing barriers to the political saliency of quality education in Bangladesh.

Every stubborn problem has its own politics, which is why every Open PEA begins with understanding the problem before proposing solutions.

The political economy analysis of education that Open PEA is supporting can help policymakers and practitioners understand not just what the problem is, but why it persists and what can realistically be done about it. Developing these ideas into high-quality products, takes collaboration, time and funding. But, once published, they become public goods that educators can use, adapt and build into their own work.

Dr Kenechukwu Nwagbo, July 2026

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References

Open PEA’s first education product: The Practical Politics of Public Private Partnerships In Education: Lessons From Edo State, Nigeria will be released in mid-August. A summary can be found here.

Other products include the politics of cash versus maize in Malawi (here) and health financing in Nigeria (here).

If the mission of Open PEA resonates with you, then do get in touch at open.pea@bsg.ox.ac.uk.

There are three ways you can help.

Fund new Open PEAs (including training sessions) so we can continue developing practical, open-access analyses of the enduring problems holding education systems back.

Use our products in your own work and encourage others to do the same.

Share them widely to help put politics on the table in education policy and practice.

News

A new, and frankly depressing, report from UNESCOs Global Education Monitoring (GEM) team confirm the cuts to aid in education are even greater than the much-advertised 23% fall in global aid as a result of cuts around the North. Overall the figure is 30% cuts in education and 40% cuts to programmable aid for education in specific countries. This graphic makes the point.

Part of this story is the UK’s cuts to its aid budget. From a mandated 0.7% of GNI it is falling towards just above 0.2% says Ian Mitchell. Malawi and Mozambique lose around 90% of bilateral aid by 2028-29. Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda see theirs virtually eliminated and Afghanistan, the DRC, and Myanmar face cuts despite pledges to protect fragile states.

£2.4bn of the UK aid budget — more than supports Africa - is being spent in the UK itself. The shift toward fragile and conflict states is real on paper, but largely driven by protecting Ukraine, Sudan, Palestine, and Lebanon. All this means less support for girls’ education and weaker country systems, inhibiting development.

The British Council, doyenne of UK soft power, is to close 9 offices, including Mozambique and Tanzania, in an effort to make ends meet as their budget has been cut and the government takes its time to restructure a £197m loan made during the Covid era. Soft power is going digital supporters argue. Susannah Birkwood’s article in Devex Pro has more.

One person now in the eye of this storm is Kirsty McNeill recently appointed in the new Burnham government as Minister of State for International Development and Africa at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (now headed by Ed Miliband brother to David of IRC). McNeill was at Save the Children UK for 9 years before becoming an MP. In a unique first LinkedIn post as Minister she sets out how to get research across to her, how to have a meeting with her and how she thinks about campaigning. In other words – do your homework before talking to her !

Interesting to see ECW’s call for Crisis-Oriented Resilience and Emergency (CORE) Programmes in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Myanmar and South Sudan emphasising this “single, flexible, multi-year approach that serves as ECW’s primary country investment modality”. Are the silos between humanitarian and development aid starting to be broken down ?

Development

Alice Evans (as prolific a writer as her brother, educator Dave Evans) has an interesting piece on education and gender in China citing a new paper on women’s opportunities in the job market in China by Xiaoxia Huang. A key stat : adverts preferring male applicants have risen from 0.05% in 2005 to 30% in 2024 ! It seems the days of “women hold up half the sky” (a Mao era slogan) are in full retreat as the Chinese patriarchy reasserts itself. Education, Evans says, is not enough :

But herein lies the Great Gender Divergence… In much of the world education does not break patriarchal gatekeeping, because men either discourage women from leaving the house or by closing ranks at the top.

Shahidul Islam and John Richards have an article in Bangladesh’s Daily Star : “Why Bangladesh’s children are in school but not learning”. Some shocking statistics – a basic literacy rate of 42% in Bangladesh, 23% in Pakistan and 85% in Sri Lanka – and a massive drop off from government schools in Bangladesh (41% down in the ten years since 2013). But, while strong on analysis, my one gripe is that the authors offer few solutions other than hope that a new government will address all this.

I was thinking of this article when I read Dean Karlan and Rachel Glennester’s article “We Advised Different Governments on Aid Spending. Now We’re Calling for Radical Simplification”. The authors frame this is a response to the current fiscal reality. And they give an example of lesson plans and solar panels and improved data collection as a “layered” programme. But, this is really a “straw man” – the real example is in an article like the one cited above which demonstrates the complex nature of reform.

Just focusing on teacher training or curriculum or school leadership in isolation – the prescription Karlan / Glennerster would have – is to take us backwards into the world of single-issue programmes that proliferated 30 years ago and ignored the interconnectedness of education systems. Education systems are complex and reform demands complex solutions, not simplified solutions no matter how little money there is.

AI Spy

Norway has imposed a “near ban” on AI in elementary education. This is part of a general pushback in Scandinavia against unsupervised edtech / AI.

Recently there’s been a buzz around Alpha Schools, a private chain started in Texas. They condense 6-8 hours of schooling a day into two hours using personalised tuition from a bespoke AI software. Carl Hendrick, who I have quoted here before, has a piece (Children of the Magenta Line) that details his visit last year and why he became convinced of the Alpha approach. There is certainly much to commend the idea that learning can be imparted better through personal motivation and engagement and that it doesn’t need 6 hours sitting quietly in classrooms. Much is made of the socialisation, leadership and collaboration skills learnt through play and action in the rest of the day.

This 20-minute promotional video fronted by MacKenzie Price one of Alpha School’s founders makes the case passionately and with some data. But, watching this, a couple of things concerned me. There are no teachers, only “guides”. Really ? All academic content and support can be handled by AI ? Or is this a way of evading responsibilities and rights to employees ? And finally, none of the data cited was independent and, apparently, the schools have resisted independent verification. Expect more on this and other similar experiments as AI becomes more ubiquitous – but keep sceptical.

Voices from the front

The Foundational Learning Initiative for Government Led Transformation (FLIGHT – but no H ?) was formally launched at the Africa Foundational Learning Exchange (FLEX) in Malawi this month with Joan.osa Oviawe, formerly Chairperson of the Edo State Universal Basic Education Board in Nigeria, recently appointed CEO. More information here.

Interesting description and analysis of how one NGO – Can’t Wait to Learn – has transitioned a programme fully into the ministry of Education in Ukraine. Details here. Keeping the principle of government ownership as a central guide to decisions and being flexible about systems interoperability has been key.

Very insightful post from Euan Wilmshurst about the sizeable bias in philanthropic giving to health. He is quick to point out that this is not a comprehensive database and that a full picture may be more balanced. Another figure to note : Mastercard and Gates Foundation give more than 50% of all philanthropy (in these figures) to Africa.

Voices from the rear

(Gray and Published Research)

Brookings Institution have just released a new paper called “From Access to Impact : Government decision-making and scaling of EdTech in South and Southeast Asia”. There’s an excellent short video accompanying it. This focus, not on the edtech itself, but on how governments decide what to prioritise, is a welcome angle for discussion. Their six recommendations could easily be use as a checklist for governments trying to prioritise edtech spending. Fundamentally, edtech (including AI) needs to be seen as a tool in the classroom to enhance or catalyse learning, but not replace teachers.

The paper reminded me of Karim Mohammed’s piece in Issue #29 where he described developers of edtech and development actors (governments / donors / NGOs) talking past each other. Developers are interested in “demand” and development actors in “need” – not the same. To be successful that equation needs to be solved.

From the other end of the scale, designing edtech, comes another toolkit ; the subject of an EDC blog “A New Approach to Ed Tech”. “More than a sequence of steps, the toolkit is a shared way of working” say the authors, emphasising having educators and developers in the room together to design new programmes, piloting and adjusting often.

See also Nick Allardice’s really thoughtful, experience-grounded and operationally astute piece on the coming “wave” of philanthropy (driven by AI IPOs) and the barriers to scaling. Strong synergies with Brad Olsen’s piece on scaling in Issue #30, but even more nitty gritty detail.

A new paper : The politician, the press and the public: How politicians’ perceptions of the media shape UK aid allocations by Paul Clist and Martin Scott suggest politicians may be overestimating the role of the media in shaping public perceptions of aid when in fact it may be shaping their perceptions of aid.

Podcasts, Films and Books

Continuing the theme of Edtech, EdVance, Vika Pota’s podcast, has an interesting interview with the co-founder of LEAD schools in India, Smita Deorah ; “How India is scaling personalised learning”. LEAD provides a tech-based solution for schools in Tier 3 and 4 towns and has grown considerably since founding in 2012. But, it now describes itself as “multi-modal”, a recognition that tech solutions cannot simply replace books.

Deorah speaks passionately about the need for personalisation within Edtech solutions and the poor quality of teacher education in India, and she coins a neat phrase : working “vision backwards” i.e. start from the end you have in mind not from where you are. The podcast is a good intro one of India’s largest ed tech “unicorns” (valued at $1.1bn in 2024).

But, for something a bit more critical read “When schools drop out: Why edtech LEAD is struggling to find followers” by Samiksha Goel in Mint. Goel is pretty balanced on the barriers facing LEAD in terms of parental and teacher resistance to change while also noting LEAD’s own failings and internal challenges.

Also worth a listen, for those puzzling over how to build “belonging” without “othering”, is “If You Were In Charge”, a podcast with hosts Sanam Naraghi and Kavita Ramdas. The latest episode has a very thoughtful interview with john a. powell Professor of Law at UC Berkely whose whole career has been dedicated to this.

It’s summer, and following the death of one of the greatest cricketers ever, Gary Sobers, I’ve been reading CLR James “Beyond a Boundary” about West Indies cricket and the astonishing struggle to have a black cricketer as captain in the 1950s (eventually Frank Worrell). James has an interesting observation on the role of private schools developing cricket as a moral discipline, one that underpinned Victorian cultural life, and as a by-product, strongly influenced Chambertin the architect of the Olympic Games. He says :

The proof of its validity is its success, first of all at home and then almost as rapidly abroad, in the most diverse places and among people living lives which were poles removed …This signifies that it contains elements of universality that went beyond the bounds of the originating nation. It is the only contribution of the English educational system of the nineteenth century to the general educational ideas of Western civilisation.

And finally

Did you enjoy the World Cup ? Using humour to make a heartfelt and serious point, a group of Palestinian amputees came together to recreate the final - see this one-minute video.

Haogen Yao of UNICEF says he has a habit of ending talks with this quick test. Try it at the end of your next talk.

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Quote of the Month

To educate girls is to reduce poverty

Kofi Anan

Introduction

My guest piece this month is by Dr. Sharon Tao, Founder and Director of Level The Field, and previously Education Director of the FCDO funded Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) 2020-2024 (in which role we also worked together at Cambridge Education).

Sharon has been deeply immersed in fighting for girls’ education, gender equity and social justice for decades. Her thoughtful analysis assesses why girls’ education has slid off the international agenda and what should be done to bring it back to the centre of focus.

Andy Brock, June 2026

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The History / Herstory

A decade ago, girls’ education sat at the centre of international development. It was difficult to attend a major education conference, donor meeting or global summit without hearing commitments to girls’ learning. Governments competed to demonstrate leadership. New funding streams emerged. Large-scale programmes were launched. Champions spoke confidently about transforming the lives of millions of girls.

Today, the mood is very different.

At a time when nearly 133 million girls remain out of school and millions more face harmful gender norms that limit their learning, support for girls’ education is receding. Whilst this is often explained by shrinking aid budgets, funding tells only part of the story.

The decline of girls’ education is the result of deeper political, symbolic and discursive shifts, which have coincided with, and have often resulted in, reduced funding. These powerful forces once propelled girls’ education to the forefront of international development but now, as they recede, they are pushing it off the agenda at a remarkable speed.

When the Stars Aligned

Over a decade ago, these same forces were aligned. Financially, investment was growing. In the US, the Obamas spearheaded the Let Girls Learn initiative. In the UK, the Girls’ Education Challenge spanned £855m, 12 years and 17 countries. Such programmes reflected both the ambition and confidence of the period. Girls’ education was no longer an afterthought - it was a flagship development priority.

Symbolically, girls’ education enjoyed an unprecedented level of political visibility. In the UK, girls’ education had high-profile champions amongst Prime Ministers and Special Envoys. FCDO’s Education Cadre sat within the ‘Girls’ Education Department’ - a telling signal that institutionally, ‘education’ and ‘girls’ education’ were synonymous. Globally, the UN’s dedicated Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI), drove leadership on girls’ education across the global development agenda. Such attention and clout resulted in girls’ education featuring prominently in G7 commitments, Women and Girls strategies and global policy discussions.

Discursively, there was broad consensus that educating girls represented one of the smartest investments countries and donors could make. The evidence base linking girls’ education to economic growth, improved health outcomes, reduced poverty and greater peace and security was widely accepted. The question was no longer whether girls’ education mattered, but how quickly progress could be accelerated.

As a term, ‘girls’ education’ became shorthand for gender equality, human rights and social justice - a banner for advancing the rights of the most disadvantaged. Yet these broader ideals also became obscured when collapsed into a catch-all phrase. And the increasingly literal interpretation of girls’ education as meaning all girls, rather than those facing the greatest barriers, planted the seeds for future backlash.

That said, these financial, symbolic and discursive forces reinforced one another. Political leadership directed funding. Funding generated evidence and results. Evidence strengthened the public narrative. Together they created momentum. That momentum however, has now stalled.

The Financial Retreat

The most visible shift away from girls’ education, particularly over the last two years, has been financial. Across much of the donor landscape, global development budgets have significantly reduced due in part to the dismantling of USAID and a contraction of ODA budgets across G7 donors. But, the challenge is not simply that aid budgets are shrinking - the rationale for aid is also changing.

Amid rising populism, economic uncertainty and existential threats, governments face mounting pressure to demonstrate how public funds benefit national interests. In this environment, business cases are increasingly expected to demonstrate tangible returns to security or trade, rather than broader commitments to social justice. The irony is that ample evidence links girls’ education to security and trade objectives. But these outcomes are indirect and realised over the long-term, making girls’ education programming the first to be deprioritised when budgets contract.

But, not all donors are retreating. GPE’s Girls’ Education Accelerator remains intact for countries where girls fall furthest behind. Yet GPE’s recent 2030 Strategic Plan signals a shift - gender has moved from a standalone priority to one dimension within a broader intersectionality lens. This is not inherently problematic, but it does mark a symbolic repositioning : girls’ programming is now part of an intersectional framework rather than a discrete priority.

The Symbolic Retreat

Less visible, but arguably just as important, has been a symbolic retreat. Dedicated girls’ education departments, both amongst donors and within ministries, have been reduced or absorbed into broader portfolios. High-profile leadership positions have been discontinued. Agencies that once played important global agenda-setting roles, have been scaled back. This reflects more than bureaucratic reorganisation. It signals a broader shift in what these organisations value and wish to be seen championing.

Today, international development no longer occupies the same place in public debate, and social justice abroad has become a less visible marker of political leadership than it once was. The result is not necessarily an explicit rejection of girls’ education. Rather, it is a gradual erosion of visibility.

This matters because development agendas are shaped by champions. They require individuals and institutions willing to invest social capital, build coalitions and maintain attention over time. But, in recent years, many of the symbols that once elevated girls’ education, have quietly disappeared. As a result, girls’ education increasingly risks becoming an ongoing responsibility but nobody’s priority.

The Discursive Retreat

Perhaps the most significant shift is occurring in the realm of ideas and narratives. Recently, a growing backlash has emerged against girls’ education. Much of this debate begins with the question, “What about the boys?” Yet this question often rests on misunderstandings about both the purpose of girls’ education and the nature of educational disadvantage.

The first is the literal interpretation of ‘girls’ education’ as referring to all girls. Viewed this way, the focus appears unfair: there are many girls who are privileged, complete their education and outperform boys. In reality, girls’ education has rarely been about all girls. It has focused on the most disadvantaged girls - those who, within the same vulnerable groups as boys, face additional barriers shaped by harmful gender norms. This distinction has often been insufficiently articulated, allowing a simplified interpretation to take hold.

A second misunderstanding comes from relying solely on aggregate statistics. National and global data often show girls matching or outperforming boys in enrolment and learning, but these averages mask within-group inequalities. Too often, disadvantaged boys’ outcomes are compared with girls’ aggregate outcomes, rather than those of girls from the same communities. When making comparisons within marginalised groups, the data picture shifts sharply.

Gender norms leave girls with less power, fewer resources, less freedom, and greater risk of sexual violence or early marriage - it is these disadvantages that produce worse outcomes and justify targeted support. Viewed this way, girls’ education is not preferential treatment but an effort to make up for inequalities that leave girls more disadvantaged than boys from similar backgrounds. Unfortunately, this nuance is difficult to capture simply.

Where Next ?

Reversing the current decline in girls’ education will require more than renewed funding. It will require a new narrative capable of realigning financial, symbolic and discursive forces to today’s political and funding environment.

Language is one starting point. If the term ‘girls’ education’ now invites a literal interpretation that obscures its original purpose, then terms such as disadvantaged girls, marginalised girls, or using the growing framing of ‘gender equality in and through education’ may better communicate the underlying objective. The goal is not to defend a label but to preserve the rationale it was intended to convey.

Equally important is recognising why asking “What about the boys?” has become more common. This question often reflects comparisons based on aggregate statistics, which can obscure inequalities within disadvantaged communities. Rather than using aggregate data in isolation, comparisons should also consider the conditions that shape learning : power, respect, resources and safety. The relevant question is whether girls and boys from the same family enjoy these in equal measure.

Different audiences also require different arguments. For donors and policymakers, demonstrating how investments in disadvantaged girls advance broader priorities - economic, stability or otherwise - is likely to be more persuasive than equity arguments alone. Moreover, within priorities like Foundational Learning, improving outcomes for the lowest-performing learners is one of the most effective ways to raise overall outcomes. As marginalised girls are often amongst those furthest behind, they represent some of the greatest potential for learning gains.

The same logic applies to implementation. Supporting disadvantaged girls should strengthen, not sit alongside, existing programmes. Addressing gender-related barriers requires not new resources but intentional adaptation - and in a constrained funding environment - demonstrating that such adaptations improve learning, equity, and value for money is likely to be the strongest case.

These arguments reflect a changing political context rather than a departure from the original ambition. The question is not whether girls’ education can return to the agenda in its previous form, but whether a new coalition and narrative can realign financial, symbolic and discursive support, before another generation of disadvantaged girls is left behind.

Sharon Tao, Director, Level The Field

News

258m children affected by conflict and crises, 93m out of school completely (ECW new report). What’s interesting about Matteo Velenza’s post is this : exclusion is mainly about poverty, displacement acts as a multiplier, conflict kills learning. He concludes :

None of this is visible in a single headline figure. It lives in the breakdowns by displacement status, severity and education cycle illustrated in the report.

It’s that nuance that is important, but it gets lost because it doesn’t fit a neat headline.

The Education Outcomes Fund has produced a 40-page impact report called The Shift. EOF CEO Amel Karboul is quoted saying :

This is no longer boutique experimentation. It is public systems work – with real scrutiny, real accountability, and real fiscal and political stakes.

Given the emphasis on accountability the report is rather coy about producing any concrete examples of cost-effectiveness which you would have thought would be the key feature they’d want to emphasise. EOF may be expanding considerably, but that doesn’t make their model the best fit, just one of the few with funding right now. The issues I raised in Issue 18 seem to remain.

Asyia Kazmi, formerly of Gates and now CEO of WISE has announced the 2026/2027 WISE Prize in Education. $100,000 for initial proof concept, a share of $1m to develop promising solutions further. Details here.

Dr. Natalia Gutaruk, who featured in the Issue #26 piece on education in Ukraine, and who teaches in a school just 40 km from the front line, has been presented an award for Educational Leadership by Osvitoria a Ukrainian NGO. This is a personal award for a person who significantly impacts the development of education and inspires the educational community. Congratulations Natalia !

It’s five years since the Taliban took over in Afghanistan. The impact on girls’ education has been disastrous. Charmagzh, a charity dedicated to educating Afghani girls, has just produced its 2025 Annual Report. Despite the body blow of having to close all their libraries, they have pivoted to exploring alternatives including book clubs and online training. A real testament to resilience and dedication to the cause of girls’ education.

Development

Is education exempt from the right-wing forces shaping many societies these days ? Sumauma, a newsletter that describes itself as “Journalism from the Centre of the World” has a must-read piece this month illustrating how education, and teachers specifically, are being targeted by landgrabbers and those who want to exploit the Brazilian rainforest. It quotes an agribusiness activist as saying “Only dipshits want to be teachers,” and goes on to say :

In Brazil, as in various other parts of the world, attacks on public education and especially the figure of the teacher have become systematic with the advance of the far right—and they were essential to Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018. During that year’s presidential election campaign, Paulo Freire (1921-1997), the greatest educational thinker in Brazilian history, was made a target—more than twenty years after his death.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce is a well-known children’s author and laureate, whose new book A British Childhood: How Our Children Live Now articulates the way childhood has changed and is changing dramatically. In many countries school is a dangerous place, but for some kids in the UK it’s the only safe and caring environment in their lives. In this extract, visiting a primary school in Liverpool, the headteacher warns him :

Oh. And maybe don’t go on about the summer holidays. They hate them.” Say again? “They don’t like the summer holidays.

AI Spy

Not only is China moving fast on development of AI, it’s also moving fast on setting up rules. It recently required labelling of all non-human content ; a ban on AI-human intimate relations under 18 ; a ban on service designed to mislead children. See this post for more detail.

Last month I recommended a podcast discussion with Estonia’s Minister of Education, Kristina Kallas. In late 2025 Estonia trained 3,000 teacher and made a bespoke socratic AI tutor available to nearly all schools and pupils in Estonia. Estonia has decided AI has a place in schools and is defining it’s place and limits. For a good overview see Al Kingsley’s summary.

Rebecca Winthrop, well-known to the education development community, published an article in the New York Times 28^th May on how AI is killing creativity in writing (maybe also creative writing). We’re all learning to drive AI – and the first rule of driving is not engage clutch, it’s engage brain.

The Global Coalition for Foundational Learning has set out some outcomes and principles for governments planning to use AI to increase foundational skills. They say :

If used responsibly, with a well-articulated purpose, emerging technologies, particularly generative AI, could help drive faster progress and expand opportunity.

The word “If” is doing some heavy lifting here.

Carl Hendrick writes a very well-researched blog called “The Learning Despatch”. At the end of May he published a dense, slightly ascerbic, but fascinating take down of “brain-based-learning” and the current tendency to ask that AI be more human-like, the opposite of what we should want he argues. Like other recent commentators, he points to AI’s best use being as a Socratic tutor alongside students, helping only when they are struggling, not to give answers, but to prod the learner to think in the right direction.

Brad Olsen and Jobin Thomas have a new blog “Will AI in education succeed ?” Their article asks this question by looking at the experience of other ed tech initiatives trialled in the past. Their conclusions chime with a growing consensus on AI’s best use as a supplement to the teacher in the classroom not a replacement. They also wonder if AI won’t be better used to support the infrastructure and organisation of schooling.

Voices from the front

The podcast episode on Ending Violence in Schools from CGD packs a lot in. Dipak Naker from the Coalition for Good Schools discusses the practical situation in Uganda and Gabriela Smarrelli of CGD highlights the international research with host Dave Evans. Many great observations but I’ll just highlight two : 1/ When children were surveyed through a tablet / headphones reporting rates for physical violence increased by 20%, and for sexual violence by 31%, compared to face-to-face surveys by an adult. 2/ Changing adult violence in schools is a long process that works best from the bottom up. Implementing the Good Schools Toolkit takes 18 months or more, but has been demonstrated to be effective. There’s international progress but more voices need to keep the issue visible.

Is Bangladesh in danger of drifting from “being a poor young country to being a poor old country”? Naomi Hossain’s article in The Daily Star : “The elite’s blind spot is deepening our education crisis” lays that question directly at the feet of the country’s elite, accusing them of complacency about the extent of the poor standards of education and hopelessness about remedying it.

A hard-hitting article from Allan Obua in Uganda – “From Kajubi to Competency: Uganda’s 35-Year Education Déjà Vu” in which he highlights how almost none of the 202 recommendations in a 1989 report have been implemented 35 years later. With a new Teachers Act and a new Competency-Based Curriculum he rightly asks “what’s different this time ?” His answer : it’s time for delivery and funding. Train teachers properly and fund education (Uganda spends only 2.2% of GDP on education cf. other countries in the region spending >4%). Will the politicians step up ?

Voices from the rear

(Gray and Published Research)

Nora Marketos’s Partnerships, Power and Localization series has a revealing interview with Devyani Pershad of Pratham. In her responses Pershad hints diplomatically at some of the tensions in partnerships whose aim is for the more experienced partner to withdraw over time. She talks about how some partners want to run before they can walk, how the more experienced partner’s overheads are under recognised, and how credit for the original support is often downplayed in the “story” of success.

There’s both an irony and a truth that the most successful development stories should obscure their origins. Lao Tsu (paraphrased here) said : “..of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say “we did this ourselves”. As Prashad notes uncomfortably :

…the shift of funding toward local organisations is right and important. But it creates a structural challenge for organisations like ours that sit in the space between global know-how and local delivery.

Sam Freedman has an excellent post on “The gap that never closes” in English education (see chart below). Many of the points are the same as made by my interviewees in the last issue of Re Education on examinations reform and why it is so difficult (spoiler alert : parents). Although there is understandable angst about the consistent gap, one good impact is the raising of the floor. Sam’s high-level conclusion : make examinations matter less. This is well researched, well-argued piece with resonance well beyond England.

Lee Crawfurd of CGD, a great champion of research into lead poisoning and education, has a new paper out. He matched data on polluted sites to the locations of schools across 17 low- and middle-income countries. About 1 in 10 schools, some 250,000 of them, sit within 5km of a known contaminated site - affecting millions of children.

Parthajeet Das writes an excellent Substack called It (Education) Matters. He writes in a very clear and readable way, jargon-lite. If you’re a practitioner working to implement education change, his latest piece on implementation is really worth a few minutes of your time.

Parthajeet Das

implementation, implementation, implementation

A few weeks ago, I told a friend that our organisation was expanding into more number of districts across three to four states — hiring close to a hundred more people to take our work closer to the ground. Her face did something complicated. And then she said, in a tone that was not quite disapproving but not quite enthusiastic either: “Are you guys get…

Read more

3 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Parthajeet Das

Podcasts, Films and Books

99% Invisible and the BBC have teamed up for a series called “A History of the United States in 100 Objects”. Episode #5 is called the Blue Back Speller, a pocketbook that taught children to read, spell and pronounce words. First published in 1783 by Noah Webster (or Webster Dictionary fame), by 1861 it was selling a phenomenal one million copies a year.

This podcast, with historian Imani Perry, really uncovers the role of this book in the emancipation through education of black children (ironically something Webster would have probably opposed). And, it also traces another story, about the role of education in the debates between Booker T Washington and WB Dubois about the path to integration and equality through education. A really good listen.

And finally

Reader tip : some of the articles I link to have paywalls. If you have the Libby app you can often access those publications for free.

South African newspapers The Star, The Cape Times and The Mercury among others printed a special edition on June 1^st called the Period Paper to highlight period poverty : a series of red stains seems to seep through each page (see Instagram post below). The articles pointed out that millions of schoolgirls in South Africa, and across the continent, can’t afford to use safe period products, saying “A newspaper can absorb the blood, but not the shame.” A powerful message delivered creatively.

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Quote of the Month

The unexamined life is not worth living

Socrates

Introduction

Socrates was undoubtedly thinking of self-reflection and introspection, not public high-stakes examinations, when he is said to have uttered his famous dictum.

The lives, or rather learning, of young people in modern society are rather more examined than not, often in extremely narrow ways. High-stakes exams, for entrance to secondary or higher education, can be life-changing, for both good or ill.

Yet curiously, given their importance, and the impact examinations have on teachers and the curriculum, very few education development programmes in the global south include examinations reform as part of their support to a Ministry of Education – why not ?

Andy Brock, May 2026

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Q1 : Do Exams Work ?

One reason may be the overwhelming focus of development support, at least in the last 10 years, on basic education. Perhaps understandable given the “learning crisis”, but shortsighted in terms of supporting national development and creating the social signals that encourage learners with the promise of better economic opportunities.

That promise feels shakier than ever because it’s consistently undermined by the gatekeeping function of national exams. For example, in Kenya, only 27.4% of students achieved the C+ grade required for university entry in the 2024 KCSE and in Nigeria, the 2025 WASSCE saw only 38.32% of nearly two million candidates qualify for university admission.

Such figures serve to emphasise the overwhelmingly academic focus of secondary education transitions, yet many question whether these exams are actually measuring learning, even for university. Parthajeet Das of Central Square Foundation, an Indian NGO, says :

Our examinations are still testing for memory, testing for what you have crammed in your head…as opposed to testing for learning

Lawrence Dogbatse, Deputy Register of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), Ghana, agrees :

Generally, examinations, especially in Ghana and West Africa, still do a reasonable job of measuring content knowledge, recall and the basic understanding. However, often they fall short of assessing competencies, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and practical skills.

In 1973, Kenneth Arrow, an economist, wrote a seminal paper called “Higher Education as a Filter” – arguing that education qualifications (and the exams that lead to them) acted as a screen for higher education and employment alike, testing for performance ability rather than acquired skills. Little seems to have changed since then.

A recent book about the “gaokao”, the Chinese university entrance test, called “The Highest Exam”, (Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li – see my review below) points out that there is evidence to show that Chinese students’ learning stagnates at university, reinforcing the notion that high-stakes exams are gates to be hurdled not summative assessments of development.

All this might just be acceptable if there was a level playing field in test taking – but, this is not the case. Social class and family circumstances tend to be among the best predictors of success in exams : nearly 30% of the places in top UK universities go to the 7% who are privately educated.

Georgie Billings, Head of Assessment Quality, Cambridge University Press and Assessment, says exams :

…tend to encourage negative washback and over reliance on drilling. They also tend to privilege students who can afford to have private tuition.

Parthajeet Das adds that the language of exams seldom accommodates the mother tongues of many Indian communities, and notes that in India another equity issue is a lack of standardisation of examinations between different states. Jia and Li point to a further aspect – the persistent rural / urban bias in the gaokao, a phenomenon widely found in other countries.

Adding to this litany of criticism, is the uneven provision for children with special needs. In Public Examinations Examined, written pre-Covid, the authors say :

While systems in which participation rates are low may not yet have come to terms with these issues, they should be prepared to deal with them as participation rates increase.

Review of The Highest Exam

Q2 : Assess the Washback Effects of Examinations

So much for pupils, what of the impact on teachers and the curriculum of high-stakes examinations ?

Research into the impact of high-stakes examinations, where teachers face accountability pressure tied to results, shows that teaching to the test is not an aberration, rather it’s a rational response – sometimes by individual teachers, sometimes by whole schools, or even education systems.

The higher the stakes, the earlier teaching to the test starts and the narrower the range of learning covered, the more the content conforms to what can be measured and tested. In “The Highest Exam” Jia recounts how in high school the first two years were exclusively devoted to the content of the gaokao and the third year almost exclusively to exam preparation with weekly testing.

Unsurprisingly, such pressure create two additional temptations – cheating and external coaching.

A study in Indonesia of widespread cheating on national exams showed that when the government introduced computer-based testing between 2015-2019 (in a bid to prevent cheating) test scores dropped dramatically by about 0.5 standard deviations. But, over the next two years, scores rebounded showing that teachers and learners had to shift their focus onto actual learning. Not all washback is bad.

In some countries cheating spills into coaching and the creation of an entire shadow tutoring system aimed at passing exams. A paper by Ian Hardy et al published in 2025 on the effect of the “shadow education” system in Bangladesh argues that such systems go beyond a response to high-stakes pressures into a kind of institutionalised cheating – one only available to those with the resources to pay.

Mark Bray’s 2021 analysis of private supplementary tutoring in Africa also found extensive evidence of exam-led teaching and its social and cultural foundations across the continent — with specific documented examples from Botswana, Ghana, Malawi, and Tanzania.

But, perhaps the greatest washback effect is the perpetuation of the widely held belief that exams are the culmination of a meritocratic process in which all have equal opportunity. Georgie Billings says :

It’s a kind of meritocracy lie really, the idea that exams are some sort of great social leveller.

Sammy Wright in his recent book “Exam Nation”, about the English education system (see my review below) goes further :

..the heart of the problem is that the idealised “meritocratic” logic of the system results in schools whose purpose is not the general education of all pupils according to their natural aptitudes, but rather the sorting of kids into the positions in society that they “merit” according to an academic scale. The most pernicious result of this is that the pupils themselves can see the lie for what it is.

Review of Exam Nation

But, not all education systems are dominated by examinations. Some of the best performing systems in the world place very little emphasis on high-stakes exams. In Finland, Iceland, and Sweden, the upper secondary diploma that students receive is based entirely on teacher-assigned grades. Norway, Denmark and New Zealand also have large elements of the final assessment dependent on teacher assigned grades. Pressure has not been removed, rather it has been distributed across years of continuous work and assessment.

Q3 : Why is it so difficult to reform examinations ?

Given the evident shortcomings of examinations, and the fact that working alternatives exist, why are high-stakes examinations so difficult to reform ?

Moreover, why do donors and philanthropists studiously avoid supporting, or even advocating for exam reform, when it is probably the single area most likely to create impact, especially for disadvantaged children, in an education system ?

Rachel Outhred, Managing Director of Oxford MeasurEd, is direct :

I think the major reason why it’s difficult to reform exams is that the systems are working exactly the way that they were designed to work. And those who have the power to reform exam systems are the ones that currently benefit from it the way that it currently is.

Jia and Li point to a linked reason – the power of parents (largely middle class), even in an autocracy like China. Li worked on a project to reform the gaokao for over two years until it was suddenly cancelled without explanation. He reflects :

…China’s people have relied on one test for their whole lives. They trust the gaokao. Reforming the gaokao is the equivalent of reforming the entire education system.

In this respect parents are simply responding rationally to the rules of the game as they change. In Kenya a major initiative to abolish the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) in order to reduce the scramble for placement slots at secondary school may already be running into trouble as parents work out how to gain competitive advantage in the new system.

This neatly demonstrates the equity paradox of examinations – they are simultaneously a source of inequality and the instrument that prevents worse (but usually different) inequality. They are, to paraphrase Churchill, the worst form of assessment…apart from all the others.

Even where serious attempts have been made to reform high-stakes examinations progress has been difficult. In Singapore attempts to shift from academic stratification to holistic development over the last two decades have simply led to more parental investment in tutoring, as the terrain for gaining competitive advantage has started to shift.

Georgie Billings points out that real reform of examinations into more competency-based assessments “requires cultural acceptability of those forms of assessment as valid and reliable” in order for it to be widespread. Additionally, the investment in teacher training needed to change from examinations based to continuous assessment is a huge barrier to change.

Lawrence Dogbatse agrees and points out that, as Ghana has moved to make 30% of the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) assessment based, the training of teachers and the formation of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) for teachers has required a significant investment of time and resource. Continued development of continuous assessment, he says, will be possible only if teacher integrity and quality assurance are strong.

Perhaps reform will be driven by the feet of parents not bureaucrats. In India some private and not‑for‑profit schools are experimenting with broader assessments, portfolios, and holistic development, often in response to parental demand. Parthajeet Das says parents are increasingly sceptical of narrow exam success and recognise that exam scores alone do not guarantee access to higher education or employment, especially as many universities rely on their own entrance tests.

Q4 – Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) change examinations ?

Given all the barriers to change that stand in the way of reforming examinations, it’s tempting to see AI as a potentially significant disruptor.

Proponents argue that the individualised learning support which AI will increasingly offer has the potential to be matched by individualised continuous assessment – potentially lessening the additional workload for teachers. Others point out that, as AI improves, the fear of subjective judgements that bedevil non-exam-based assessment may recede.

In fact, that fear even applies to exam-based assessment as Daisy Christodolou in her piece “The Ethics of AI Assessment”, notes. She reports that with human marking, in GCSE English Literature, you currently only have a 52% chance of getting your true grade.

Parthajeet Das for one is cautiously optimistic. The key thing, he says, is that the promise of AI in assessment is that “it solves for scale”. Rachel Outhred also sees the potential in AI to help with assessment but makes a critical distinction : “I think AI will help us with examination products, but not with examination systems.” It may increase efficiency and standardisation, she says, but examination systems are too complex and too political.

Lawrence Dogbatse provides a note of scepticism. The value of immediate feedback that AI promises is clear, he says, but : “what’s it trained on and is it replicating colonial biases ?”

Georgie Billings is less certain that AI assessment is the direction of travel. She reflects that for AI to really play a significant role in assessment there needs to be a high degree of public trust. She points to an upsurge of interest in viva or oral examinations because they are hard to game and she wonders instead whether AI may better play a role alongside portfolio assessment, deepening and enriching holistic assessment in ways we can’t yet envisage.

ONE MINUTE LEFT

Perhaps, given the complexity and the highly political nature of examinations reform it’s little wonder donors and philanthropists have been leery of entering this space. Yet, as the political economy movement within the sphere of education development gathers momentum, can it be avoided much longer ?

The tension between AI personalised learning and high-stakes exams is set to become the defining characteristic of education development over the next decade – and one where external supporters of education development in the global south may have a role to play.

High-stakes exams won’t soon be replaced by AI due to the signalling and filtering functions they serve. But, in addressing this tension there is an opportunity to reshape assessment in education systems more radically, more holistically as a result of the likely disruption to the status quo that AI is going to cause.

Nonetheless, any movement away from the comfort blanket that exams represent will require widespread debate and extensive public awareness in order to create trust and confidence in alternative models.

References and Resources

(Research supported by Claude)

Higher Education as a Filter Kenneth Arrow (1973)

Shadow Education in Africa: Private Supplementary Tutoring and its Policy Implications Mark Bray (2021)

Testing times: The affective impact of tests in Bangladeshi schools Ian Hardy, M. Obaidul Hamid, Vicente Reyes, Louise G. Phillips (2025)

Assessment Reforms in Singapore Tan, K (2022)

Public Examinations Examined Kellaghan, Thomas; Greaney, Vincent M. (2019)

The Ethics of AI Assessment Daisy Christodolou (2026)

“The Highest Exam” Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li (2025). My review of the book.

“Exam Nation” Sammy Wright (2025). My review of the book.

News

The world out of school population has risen for the seventh year in a row – standing now at 273m according to the World Bank.

Infinite Jaz, a newsletter written by a Jewish American, Jasper Diamond Nathaniel, about Israel-Palestine affairs, reports on a really disturbing new phenomenon : deliberate settler attacks on schools in the West Bank. As he puts it “What would happen if this occurred the other way around? If Palestinian militants from the West Bank broke into Israel or a Jewish settlement and shot up a school, killing a child and an adult and wounding four others? Is there any doubt that this would be breaking news in every major outlet of the Western world?”

According to UNICEF more than 200 children have been killed in Lebanon by the IDF since the 2^nd March. Remarkably, even amidst all this inhumanity there are astonishing and inspiring stories, Ben Phillips posted this about the Palestine Marathon.

A new report on initial teacher education has been published by the World Bank : From Prospective to Prepared Teacher: Initial Teacher Education. The launch is on 2^nd June.

Euan Wilmshurst’s indispensable guide, the Global Education Events Guide, has transitioned from spreadsheet to website. It’s free, shareable and editable. Also invaluable.

Development

Interesting piece by Richard Ough an ex-DFID Economist, called “Friendly Fire : How Aid’s Defenders Helped Its Critics”. He articulates something I’ve felt and been writing about sporadically for some time – how quickly many in the aid sector accepted the cuts, and rather than fighting back and defending aid with all its imperfections, leapt to get to the forefront of the new paradigm. Talking of the sector he says :

Most of all, it would have refused the premise that aid’s imperfections invalidate its purpose…Some old habits deserve to die. But there is a time to improve the ship and a time to stop it sinking.

While Ough has some good points, Dan Banik’s piece “The crossroads may be the best road” shows African development specialists struggling to see the future through the fog. A lot of the comments he cites have the feel of wishful thinking, hope without (yet) substance to feed it.

I came across an organisation recently who could potentially be of use to NGO’s and small charities in the education sector : A4ID. They are a UK-registered charity with a global network of legal firms who offer pro bono services to smaller organisations who may not be able to afford expensive legal services. They have a presence in Kenya, India and the UK and their support covers over 150 countries. Their website is www.a4id.org and this link shows a specific piece of legal work they have helped coordinate supporting girls’ education in Afghanistan.

You’ve indulged in cognitive offloading, now try “cognitive surrender”, as described by the Economist. What’s next - cognitive abdication ?

David McNair’s post identifies something long known in the development sector – most citizens haven’t a clue how much is spent on aid (usually overestimating by as much as 20x). Yet, politicians routinely lament the lack of support for development from the public, which is their job to explain. A straw man held up by straw men.

No country is immune to the digital curse. The Chinese state is trying to get people reading more – but, only the “right” kinds of books of course.

AI Spy

In “Pakistan’s AI Reckoning” Hassan Aslam Shad makes a pithy and well-argued case for Pakistan to quickly move to address structural lags in the approach to AI, including the observation that devolved responsibility for education requires urgent coordination. “What is missing is a mechanism that requires coordination rather than merely encouraging it. Without it, even well-designed initiatives risk working at cross purposes.”

Fab AI report the results of an eight-week RCT in Sierra Leone to understand how Gemini models impact student outcomes. Results indicated an improvement of roughly 1.2 to 1.7 years of typical learning progress in low-and-middle-income countries.

Voices from the front

The World Bank has approved a $600m loan to the Philippines to address learning gaps – covering over 21m children. Unusually for the Bank, all the money is to be spent on “software” i.e. no buildings.

Mark Smith has a pop at the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP) asking “When is a bad buy not a bad buy”. A room full of books is different from a library with a trained librarian he argues. It’s a strong case.

The Ministry of Education in Chile becomes the latest in what is now a flood of countries and states banning mobile phones in the classroom.

Voices from the rear

(Gray and Published Research)

Malala Yousafzai has a new TED talk (11m) in support of girls in Afghanistan and across the world. “If we start with something, work together and stay ambitious, hope stops being something we wait to feel and becomes something we create”.

New research from Greer at al “Supporting children’s mental health and emotional wellbeing in and through education in contexts of conflict and protracted crisis: A narrative, thematic evidence review” synthesises more than 100 studies since 2020. Local contextualisation of response seems to be the key need.

UKFIET has published a new set of blogs from South Korea, India, Pakistan and Kenya. The most intriguing one is “The sound of equity: Teachers’ school journeys captured through soundscapes” in which Singal, Khanna and Diksha in their research with teachers with disabilities use soundscapes as a reflective tool for teachers with visual impairments. Shame they couldn’t have shared an example rather than only describe textually.

Open PEA, the brainchild of Peter Evans and Stefan Dercon, recently published a very readable and pithy paper called “Cash versus Maize in Malawi”, lead author Edward Archibald. This is Open PEA’s first full product – more is to come aiming firmly at the development mainstream, not the PEA niche.

What’s relevant for those of us interested in learners learning more than eating is the forensic analysis of the system, the system actors and the interplay of incentives that leads to poor outcomes for the country, and the propositions for political feasible change.

You could apply the same to many education systems – and in fact, hot off the press, there’s a new short paper on the politics of education PPPs in Nigeria by Open PEA’s Kene Nwagbo.

Podcasts, Films and Books

If you missed it earlier, I have reviewed two recent books about exams that I would highly recommend.

Review of The Highest Exam

Review of Exam Nation

I found Top Class’s recent podcast fascinating : “How Estonia delivers world class education : a conversation with Estonia’s Education Minister”. The discussion is particularly engaging on Estonia’s response to AI. Kristina Kallas, the Minister, has a bold take on what it means for teachers – more of them ! It’s also clear that teachers in Estonia are highly respected – more powerful than politicians - and the country spends 7% of GDP on education. Estonia - the place to be !

And finally….

An astonishing chart published in the Financial Times 16^th May showing a correlation between the take off of smart phones and falling fertility rates. Correlation is not causality (see photo below), but the chart is nonetheless pretty arresting.

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The thrust of this book isn’t hard to decipher, the witty title says much, but also undersells it.

This is not a book about exams, grades and testing as much as it’s a book about English education in general : what’s good about it, what’s not, what should change but won’t, what might change and should be tried.

Naturally, at the root of the issue is that much of the system and how it works is shaped by an obsession with testing.

Wright tours the country asking pupils about their experiences of schooling, asking their opinions on what it’s for, why they are motivated or not motivated at school, how they view grades, exams, teachers…

What emerges is a complex picture recognisable to anyone who has children navigating an education system. Firstly, that “school” is not a monolith and the stages of schooling – particularly primary and secondary – need to be discussed differently not lumped together. Secondly, pupils – and by extension how schools interact with them - cannot be understood without their family circumstances, their individuality, their peer group pressures and the demands of the society around them.

This may seem prosaic, but as Wright delves deeper and deeper into the issues schools and teachers need to deal with : from safeguarding, to behaviour, to absenteeism, to SEND, the sheer complexity and sensitivity of the myriad demands on schools becomes bewildering.

Within that landscape the national obsession with grades and testing forms a structural scaffold that drives expectations and behaviours. Wright is ambivalent about exams, understanding their signalling importance while lamenting the way in which they narrow the experience of learning into what is measurable and therefore valued. He says :

Teaching without testing whether something has been learned is a dangerous game. But to teach to the test can undermine the usefulness of what you teach in the first place.

The early chapters of the book focus on these “paradoxes” at the heart, not just of English education, but of modern education systems. He outlines how privilege, of background and home circumstance, provides hidden advantage and he dismantles the falsehood of meritocracy that underpins so much of the story we tell ourselves about what our education system is for.

..the heart of the problem is that the idealised “meritocratic” logic of the system results in schools whose purpose is not the general education of all pupils according to their natural aptitudes, but rather the sorting of kids into the positions in society that they “merit” according to an academic scale. The most pernicious result of this is that the pupils themselves can see the lie for what it is.

The book is structured in three parts – what is school for, what is it like and how can it be done differently. The first two parts are crafted around, and illustrated by, the stories of specific children ; children who are good and bad at exams, children with behaviour issues, children who have been excluded or who have SEND. Anchoring the dry, technical issues in the real experiences of exemplar children gives the book a strength and immediacy which keeps the reader engaged. It’s good storytelling.

Wright writes warmly and affectionately about the pupils he teaches and the ones he interviews here. His empathy for the children he speaks to is evident, and, this combined with a good northern sense of humour makes for easy reading. His analysis is sharp, deep and borne of long experience, but he allows his humanity and passion to come out, often in prose which is lyrical. Teaching is storytelling he says:

The stories we read, and borrow from, give us a pattern that can make sense of the incomprehensible complexity of our own lives. They give us something we never find anywhere else: a beginning and an end, and a path from one to the other. It doesn’t matter how simplified they are. A map works not by showing everything, but by highlighting the most significant and unchanging landmarks – and stories are a map to regions of the human heart that are otherwise unnavigable.

Wright ends his book with five suggestions for how to improve the education system. They are generally modest, sensible and grounded – the most radical is a “Passport Qualification” taken a year before GCSE’s allowing a much broader and richer assessment of ability plus time to explore different futures. This would address one of the English system’s weakest aspects, over-emphasis of academic routes and a tendency to force specialisation much too early.

“What we measure defines what we do” he says – break up OFSTED, get rid of key stage 2 SATs. Continue with oversight and accountability but push the national conversation to a broader discussion of what we, society, value – which is more than a number and a grade. It’s not hard to agree with such appeals, it’s good common sense. But, in our fragmenting polity how are we ever going to agree on such defining issues ?

This is a great guide to the current state of English education – with many observations and conundrums that are relevant well beyond England’s shores. It’s thoughtful, caring and wise. It does not pretend to have all the answers, but it provides a map for the debate. It may be more like a “buried treasure” map than an Ordnance Survey, but you have to start somewhere. This book is a pretty good place to begin.

Andy Brock - May 2026

For two days each year in June, China comes to a standstill. Unusual sights abound: men put on qipaos, traditional dresses typically worn by women, as a symbol of luck ; police stand on street corners, silencing drivers to ensure minimal disturbance ; temples overflow with relatives sending out final prayers ; crowds, unusually quiet, gather in hushed vigils outside thousands of schools. State media in all forms zero in on the one event affecting millions of students and their many family members who have invested time, money and, above all, hope in the outcome of these two days. The gaokao, China’s national college exam, grips the country.

This description of the one-shot, high-stakes exam that will, each year, shape the lives of 13 million students in China, opens “The Highest Exam” by authors Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, two Chinese economists and academics now living in the USA. While the book will be of great interest to Sinophiles, it has a much wider relevance in the way it centres high-stakes examinations as ciphers of social values and political tensions in any country.

The picture the authors paint is both well researched and deeply personal. They are products of this highly competitive system, but have both lived, studied and worked abroad long enough to come to the subject with a dispassionate eye.

Don’t be misled by the title - “The Highest Exam” is not a dull book about a national exam, it’s a book about a power struggle, between a State that wants to shape the productive forces that drive its economy and power, and families who want to improve or consolidate their access to future wealth and power. Sometimes these forces are in alignment, sometimes in tension.

Commenting on how one of Deng Xiaoping’s first acts as leader was to restore the gaokao, abolished by Chairman Mao, the authors note :

Mao took issue with the system’s maintenance of China’s social hierarchy. But whereas the Qing dynasty doubled down and refused to reinstate a channel for social mobility, Deng reneged on Mao’s promise, recognizing the power the education system exerted over the masses and reinstating the gaokao. Along with it, he reinstated China’s hierarchy.

That hierarchy includes the institutions of the state – the military, social services, business - which all follow a similar “tournament” process when selecting or promoting personnel : a competitive, apparently meritocratic system, which often ranks people against each other in uncomfortable ways (to Western eyes).

The lowest-level employees in the warehouses of a Chinese grocery store chain, who likely never finished high school, have their packing efficiency ranked and displayed on TV screens.

How does this square with China’s well-known reputation for “guanxi” (important social connections) and high levels of corruption ?

Guanxi and corruption are examples of the weaknesses of institutions, institutional rules and the rule of law, the authors state. They suggest that ranking, exams, tests and “meritocracy”, are all responses to these weaknesses. “Scores” they argue, due to their quantitative nature, are more “objective” and harder to game.

Thanks to their transparency and objectivity, scores have become the best tool that Chinese people have to fight against the inevitable corruption and abuse of connections they encounter with existing institutions. Through this lens, it is China’s education system that allows average citizens to even the playing field. A single metric – the gaokao - minimizes the avenues through which corruption can occur and heightens the sense of transparency.

This is not the same as saying the gaokao is “fair”. The book looks in some detail at the biased quota system (against rural areas), the influence of shadow tutoring and the advantages (sometimes) of minority status.

Nonetheless, this theme of trust in “scores” in a low trust environment recurs. And it largely explains why attempts to reform the gaokao have failed. Hongbin Li was involved in a project to replace the gaokao with a series of tests like the Advance Placement (AP) system in the USA, where the stress of one major test could be replaced with several tests taken at different times in the year. After several years of work the project was abruptly stopped without explanation. His conclusion was :

…China’s people have relied on one test for their whole lives. They trust the gaokao. Reforming the gaokao is the equivalent of reforming the entire education system.

Reforming high-stakes exams is politically fraught in any society, so the fact that even in an autocracy it’s nearly impossible to achieve, says a great deal about where power lies. Not always, as is commonly thought, in government, but as far as education is concerned, in the aspirational middle class parents (and grandparents) who view high-stakes exams as a tournament whose rules are known, which can be gamed by money and tutoring, and which is as “fair” as can be expected in an unfair world. Change that at your peril. Even Mao did not try to reform the gaokao, he abolished it and sent the youth to the countryside.

As an analysis of China’s gaokao, its historical antecedents (from the original imperial exams to the present) and its function in Chinese society as a gateway to betterment that is both hated for its pressure, but strongly trusted, this book, with its broad sweep, complemented by real stories and detail, is a highly perceptive and entertaining read.

It would have been interesting to learn more about the impact of the gaokao within the education system itself - the “washback” on teachers and schools (what is taught and how), though this does come out when they make comparisons to the US education system where both authors have schooled their children (for a good example of this see my review of Other Rivers).

Equally, the book was written just a little too early to give much space to the potential impact of AI on the gaokao. China’s enthusiastic embrace of AI, and AI’s potential to provide individualised assessment, will surely challenge the dominance of the gaokao in the future.

To understand any education system, how students pass through the system and into higher education or employment is a pretty good way to assess what the system values. In China, as in many other education systems, it is memorisation, obedience to rules and diligence that is highly rewarded. Entrance to higher education is a sorting stage, privileging the most advantaged.

That is not new and has been true of exams since they first appeared. Where “The Highest Exam” has broadened the canvas is in mapping in great detail how high-stakes exams are both a product of their societies and influence them.

The gaokao may be the most extreme example of this. It both shapes, and is shaped by, the forces of change in Chinese society. It holds a mirror up to Chinese families, State and society. The reflection that comes back shows intense personal competitive forces, driving national development goals, and a disregard for those who don’t fit. A reflection both beautiful and flawed.

Andy Brock - May 2026

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Quote of the Month

Going to scale is the Holy Grail of donor-funded international education development projects. Scale is seen as both a requisite for and the logical culmination of any “successful” donor or government-funded education program.

Mary Burns

In Conversation with Brad Olsen….

This month’s feature is all about scaling in education ; what it means, why so many global educators talk about it, and whether in the current resource-stretched world it’s still a relevant topic ?

Brad Olsen is a Senior Fellow in the Center for Universal Education at The Brookings Institution. In his career he’s been a high school teacher and principal, and a Professor of Education in California and Colombia. Master of the arresting metaphor and quoter of Joni Mitchell, he has wide-ranging interests in global education grounded in real classroom experience.

Brad has written extensively on scaling and systems. He leads the the Millions Learning team and, together with Brookings colleagues, has produced a number of very readable blogs and research reports on this topic. One of the best, written with colleagues Molly Curtiss Wyss and Maya Elliot, gives a sense of his approach : “Enacting deep change in education. Scaling and systems transformation are engaged—should they marry?”

Our conversation is too long for the newsletter email format, so it’s best to read in the app on Substack. Nonetheless, to whet appetites, the first part of the conversation is provided below with a link to the rest. Click the button below to go straight to the full aticle.

Brad is an engaging speaker and a deep thinker who has some profound things to say about one of the key issues in our sector : do read the full conversation.

If you’re working in global education are you worrying about scaling ? If you’re not worrying about scaling, should you be ?

Andy Brock, April 2026

Read the Full Article

The Historical Context

Andy

Let’s kick off with a bit of history. I’m interested in the history of the development of education systems – how they “scaled”. If you could go back to, say, the history of education in Scotland, how did that go from being a handful of schools in the 15^th Century to a school in every parish within 100 years? What were the processes and drivers that enabled that? So, let’s talk a bit about how you see the history of education development in those broad terms.

Brad

Sure, that’s a good place to start. I feel like there are four histories that come together when you think about contemporary scaling.

For the first history—education as a formal practice—we go all the way back to China 1,000 years ago. Before that, education was a process of generations informally passing down their knowledge, skills and culture. So, education became formalised in China and in other countries, but it took another significant change near the end of the 19th century, with the emergence of scientific efficiency, industrialization, and what’s now called the factory model of schooling.

That’s one’s history. I think a second history is when people began to think of education as a system. That started, arguably, in the 20th century. First in the early 1800s and then again in the 1950s two kinds of systems thinkers emerged : those who thought about systems in terms of mechanical processes and those who thought about systems in terms of biological processes, two schools of thought if you will. Sadi Carnot described the steam engine as a system of interdependent parts in 1824 and Biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy outlined in 1950 a theory of systems : think of the human immune system or a social group.

Then, I think there’s a third history to consider – which comes from the private sector. The private sector has been strategising about what it means to penetrate a new marketplace with a product for quite a while – in fact, that’s where the term scaling first originated.

Some people think that it’s solely about technology, but it’s not. It started with how do you get a new product, say a toothpaste, into the marketplace? And we can learn a fair amount from the private sector history of scaling, but there are also limits because scaling a product in a marketplace is so incredibly different from what it means to scale a public sector program.

The fourth history is when we get to scaling. In the private sector, scaling is about bringing a product to market and getting everyone to use or want it. But it’s in the public or social sector that most of education scaling is located. I’m simplifying a lot here, but I think that it really started in the 1960s when a widespread belief began to take hold that government wasn’t really capable of improving social life all by itself. People began asking who else - NGOs, social institutions, community groups - who else could work to improve education, whether as a system or a set of institutions?

I believe that’s when the modern conception of scaling first began, but for several decades scaling was understood as short-term project implementation. And in fact, I think that we still suffer from a short-term project mentality when we talk about scaling — thinking there are discrete projects that can be carefully and successfully dropped into a system and will automatically stick.

This logic holds that scaling is a technical process and implementation is relatively simple and straightforward. If the education reform or innovation model is good, it’s going to take hold. In the United States, that flawed view of improving education started in the 1960s with the post-Sputnik math and science curricular reforms. And it was a disaster.

Electrifying Failure

As a result, in the 70s and 80s, a group of researchers including Milbrey McLaughlin, Paul Berman, and Seymour Sarason asked, how can a well-meaning implementation attempt with a high-quality innovation fail so badly? Along with Michael Fullan and Alan Pomfret, they were the first to propose that implementation itself is a science—an area of study of its own. They pointed out that if you’re not taking into account the culture of the place and the systematic components of the context—in this case the schools and surrounding policy environment, the place will reject the new innovation the way a body sometimes rejects an organ transplant

And so, I think in some ways that created at least the beginning of focusing on how a great innovation needs to be actually developed for scaling, and need to be scaled carefully. John List’s thoughtful book The Voltage Effect comes to mind here. He says not only was the era of short-term project-minded implementation something that often failed, and therefore sacrificed opportunities for potentially good systems change, but it also turned decision-makers cynical and untrusting of program developers, because they had spent their reputational capital supporting innovations that did not take hold at scale.

So, all four histories when combined lead us to this notion that the idea of introducing or embedding a new program, an idea, a practice, or an initiative in education for sustained use is not simple. It’s complex. And complex is very different from complicated. It requires political buy-in. It requires multi-stakeholder coalitions that are durable but flexible. It requires a sort of cultural and socio-political component. It often requires a decade or more.

There needs to be capacity. There needs to be thoughtful, multipartite engagement in what it means to prepare the new practice or innovation, prepare the place, and then make sure that the two sides come together in productive ways so that there’s sustained impact—and that it doesn’t fall apart as soon as the funding ends or get washed out by the larger system.

The Velcro Partnership

Andy

Let me pick up a couple of points there, zoning down onto the development sector and education development in particular.

I think you’re absolutely right that people seeing scaling as being about projects, but, there’s there seems to be a dilemma - that is that aid agencies want to fund things that are durable and sustainable, and I think that desire has morphed into seeing scaling as the equivalent of sustainability.

I like the distinction you made in your recent paper between scaling and systems transformation. I think these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, confusing the whole discussion about what’s being attempted.

But, if one accepts all the things you’ve just said about how complex it is to actually scale something within an education system, aren’t you really saying that it can’t be done by outsiders ? Outsiders are not there long enough, their funding isn’t there long enough, they aren’t there long enough, and so on.

And yet, many of the systems we’re discussing are actually relatively dysfunctional. That’s why donors and philanthropies are there supporting. So, can you actually scale change if the driver is from outside of the system ?

Brad

Yes, I think you can. I mean, I don’t believe that there is no role for outsiders. And the metaphor that I like to use here is Velcro (hook and loop fasteners often in clothing). A trusting partnership, you know, is like Velcro: one side of the piece of Velcro is useless without the other side. And even if you have both sides, they don’t do their job until they’re hooked together. But when they are, it’s working as it’s supposed to.

So, I absolutely think there’s a value for outside actors, organizations and agencies. I think that when you talk about aid agencies, you have to remember that they themselves are beholden to incentives, boards, and funders. And those incentive systems often privilege quick wins, short-term thinking — i.e. what can we get out of it? Sometimes funding groups themselves have in-built limitations. Even with the best ones (for example, I think GPE is working hard to get it right), find it’s hard to do, no matter how good your intentions are. Funding and donor organizations are big, slow systems with lots of moving parts, and they have to answer to others.

And yes, the weaker, less functional LMIC governments may be more likely to say yes to any innovation or effort that has money attached to it, so they may end up approving projects that don’t fit the needs of their location, which is completely understandable.

But, if you’ve got a relatively strong, relatively coherent, functional government that can work as an equal partner with aid agencies, then I think you’ve got the potential for that healthy Velcro partnership. Those governments are close to the people; they’ve got a commitment to secure local ownership of reforms and hopefully the capacity to do so; they’ve got an understanding of the local contours. Those are all incredibly important ingredients for success.

The actors and institutions inside a country also have weaknesses and blind spots, think equity considerations for example. The external actors and groups have different weaknesses and blind spots too, for example development fads. So, each side’s got some strengths and weaknesses and that’s why I really love this idea of creating a kind of healthy partnership—that’s the Velcro. I definitely think it’s viable.

Click the link below to read the whole conversation, including :

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

READ THE FULL ARTICLE

News

ODA cuts are not only the most severe on record (23% down says Essi Lindstedt) but there is a further drop of 6% to come (Dan Banik). The steepest cuts of all are in the UK where, though aid spending has fallen on refugees (slightly), humanitarian aid is up, but at the expense of aid to Africa (CGD). In a crassly political move, the spending on British Overseas Territories is doubling (Euan Ritchie). Susannah Birkwood provides a good overall summary here and an article in The Economist, Good or Bad ODA, desperately spins some positives while acknowledging the damage done to the UK’s reputation.

In education, ECW is a “winner” with £80m committed over the next 4 years.

All this is dressed up as “unavoidable” and partly blamed on the poor support from the British public – a claim challenged by a wide range of sources (see Issue #21). There seems to be increasing irritation too with the FCDO framing of this change as being : from donor to investor ; grants to expertise ; services to systems ; and international to local. This is a wholly inaccurate presentation of FCDO’s development history.

“The Global Education Monitoring Report 2026 : Access and Equity, Countdown to 2030” was launched in late March. Hamish Higginson and David Archer both welcome it, but also point to gaps.

Development

Lant Pritchett has a new Substack with a four-part series on poverty called “Low Bar Poverty Lines - Ending the Reign of Error”. The first challenges the “low bar” of the $-a-day poverty line ; the second focuses on the MDGs and particularly the failure to have a goal for national development ; the third looks at chickens, “chicken feed” and the distraction caused by RCTs ; the fourth, and final part proposes different, more economically sound, methods of measuring poverty gaps in ways that actually help countries.

Because one of his main interests is education, school / education examples feature prominently (though, warning, it is economics heavy). The pieces are all excellent – he’s a very cogent, witty and occasionally acerbic, writer – and his insights into both the economics of development and politics are really worth contemplation. Sample quote below :

The MDGs broke down national development into discrete targets and specific “projects” with their own accountabilities, ignoring overall national development on which all these parts depended.

Have sympathy for Chinese youth – they are a potential canary in the world’s…solar array (?). Youth unemployment hit a record high of 19% in August 2025 (even though this is likely a significant underestimate). This excellent article by Barclay Bram of the Asia Society Policy Institute looks at the issue in depth including the impact of AI on entry level jobs. Public sector jobs are, once again, the most desirable - and pretty hard to get :

With 1.2 million applications for just shy of 8,000 positions (at the China National Nuclear Corporation) …the odds were roughly 150 to 1.

Alex Evans has a blog called Make the World Safe Again about the future direction of aid. It’s worth reading, though, for me, it has some jarring notes. In its pragmatic suggestions of “riding the rapids” and “safety”, it feels like a country turning inwards, driven by fear, unsure of itself.

Don’t miss Peter Evans’s very funny and self-deprecating piece on how to get your project approved by a Minister, including a starring role for the “Sofa of Destiny” !

AI Spy

Hasan Rizwan has a great (if overlong) article on an issue that resonates with last month’s feature on ed tech – and speaks to the need for educators to drive ed tech not vice versa. He’s says that builders of apps / products are so excited about how fast apps and products can now be built that they aren’t seeing the truck hurtling down the road to hit them – trust. This quote sums it up :

Building is comfortable. It’s what they’re good at. It’s measurable progress. Trust-building is uncomfortable. It requires talking to people. It requires empathy for problems that aren’t technical. It requires creating experiences, not just functionality.

Aza Raskin of Your Undivided Attention podcast, and also the inventor of the infinite scroll function, discusses the recent successful court case against Meta – found liable for not putting in place protections against social media “addiction” for young people. Just 20 minutes long this podcast is a window on what it takes to defeat these Goliath-like social media companies.

On the same topic, in an article provocatively entitled “How Evil is Mark Zuckerberg ?” Ian Leslie also looks at this case, but puts it in a wider perspective by reviewing a just published book “Careless People” by ex-Facebook staffer Sara Wynn-Williams (tldr : good, but major flaws). He’s more sympathetic to Zuckerberg than Raskin, but has less direct experience than the latter.

Is it only a matter of time before the great polymath and summariser of education research papers, books and films - Dave Evans - is replaced by AI ? Jacobus Cilliers just published an AI generated summary of every paper presented at the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) 2026 Conference in Oxford. There’s a whole section on Education. Expect more in this vein after every conference.

Tandem, an ed tech organisation promoting early childhood development through responsible use of AI, are developing AI generated stories to teach kids about…AI. If you’re a parent they’re looking for real world feedback. It’s a 5-minute exercise. See here.

Voices from the front

The Commonwealth Education Trust published a sobering piece about a Rohinga refugee called Imran Mohammed. He has spent 35 years in a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazaar. This is resilience personified, combined with the promise and dignity that education provides. He’s now a Director and teacher.

The Big Issue – the magazine produced for homeless people in the UK - has no less than three pieces in this month’s issue about education. There’s Ariana Mouyiaris on the importance of play, even in war zones. Then Isabelle Macae on how the story of “The Boy who Harnessed the Wind” has been made into a musical and finally Flutra Gorana of War Child on how millions of children are at risk of the escalating violence in the middle east.

Voices from the rear

(Gray and Published Research)

I wasn’t at CIES in San Francisco this year, but the conference seems to have had some “definite ambivalence” (a good oxymoron) about it. Attendees reported a mix of optimism and grief ; excitement about AI and serious concerns ; frustration that FLN “is sucking air from the room” but a recognition that, for FLN (and the whole “what works” question), it’s not now about evidence, it’s about implementation ; and finally, excitement for local agency tinged with concerns for where the real power lies. (Needless to say, flavour of the times the “middle tier” got plenty of mentions). Deborah Greebon and Mainak Roy both highlighted their disconcerting feelings. Other good summaries include : Samantha Ross, Victoria Egbetayo and Euan Wilmshurst.

My old organisation, Cambridge Education, has been holding a series of Legacy Seminars as they prepare to close their doors. You can find all the sessions here - it’s worth dipping in ; 45 years of high quality learning on display.

There was a lovely little nugget from Rwanda in the Systems Coherence session (perhaps better labelled Systems (In)Coherence ?). The government identified it’s own money to put into teacher training (big win !) but, then said, for budgetary reasons, the money needed to be spent within one month. Maybe doable….but, the kicker was the money could only be used for training, not to buy the materials the teachers were to be trained in - because that came from a different department ! Not a unique story by any means, but symptomatic of the real challenges of “systems coherence”.

In a provocative piece, Cornelius Chipoma challenges what he sees as the almost exclusive focus on primary education and deliberate underinvestment in secondary in Africa in “The Slow-walking of Secondary Education in Africa”.

Harry Patrinos and George Psacharopolous have published a new paper on a familiar subject - the private returns to education - only this time it’s not about well-evidenced correlation, but about that much trickier link, causality. In their paper “Causal returns to education” they find causal returns to schooling average 10% a year globally and say :

Schooling yields substantial earnings gains, especially when policies expand participation among constrained groups.

Podcasts, Films and Books

BBC “The Moral Maze” had an episode recently on “What is Education For ?” As they don’t define education at the beginning, it’s a bit of a messy ramble, but some good attempts to wrestle with the importance of intrinsic / extrinsic motivations.

The Kindergarten Makeover part of a BBC podcast called “People Fixing the World” features the work of Lively Minds in Ghana focusing on parents helping their children - and themselves. Good listen. It also includes, in a poem at the end, this lovely phrase - “the rehydration of hope”.

Series 3 Episode 71 of Let’s Talk Education Africa was on “Teacher Motivation for Lasting Education Reform”. Worth listening to for the very articulate and clear-thinking guest Modern Karema of STiR Uganda.

“The Highest Exam : How the Gaokao Shapes China” Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li. Really insightful study which will feature in a future issue.

I have long been a lover of Shakespeare and an admirer of Maggie O’Farrell’s brilliant, and very moving, novel “Hamnet” about the death of Shakespeare’s son (in which the playwright is named just once). So, it was with some trepidation that I watched the recent film of the book, worried that it might not match the hype from all the accolades and awards it has garnered.

My fears were misplaced : it is, simply, a very tender and terribly moving film. The thought of losing a child is viscerally painful to most parents. That deepest fear is illustrated here in a way that is both raw and understated. Afterwards, I could not help thinking about the 40,000+ parents of children killed in Gaza...

And finally….

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In Conversation with Brad Olsen….

This is the full text of my conversation with Brad Olsen of the Brookings Institution. See Issue #30 for the introduction.

Andy Brock

The Historical Context

Andy

Let’s kick off with a bit of history. I’m interested in the history of the development of education systems – how they “scaled”. If you could go back to, say, the history of education in Scotland, how did that go from being a handful of schools in the 15^th Century to a school in every parish within 100 years? What were the processes and drivers that enabled that? So, let’s talk a bit about how you see the history of education development in those broad terms.

Brad

Sure, that’s a good place to start. I feel like there are four histories that come together when you think about contemporary scaling.

For the first history—education as a formal practice—we go all the way back to China 1,000 years ago. Before that, education was a process of generations informally passing down their knowledge, skills and culture. So, education became formalised in China and in other countries, but it took another significant change near the end of the 19th century with the emergence of scientific efficiency, industrialization, and what’s now called the factory model of schooling.

That’s one’s history. I think a second history is when people began to think of education as a system. That started, arguably, in the 20th century. First in the early 1800s and then again in the 1950s two kinds of systems thinkers emerged : those who thought about systems in terms of mechanical processes and those who thought about systems in terms of biological processes, two schools of thought if you will. Sadi Carnot described the steam engine as a system of interdependent parts in 1824 and Biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy outlined in 1950 a theory of systems: think of the human immune system or a social group.

Then, I think there’s a third history to consider – which comes from the private sector. The private sector has been strategising about what it means to penetrate a new marketplace with a product for quite a while – in fact that’s where the term scaling first originated.

Some people think that it’s solely about technology, but it’s not. It started with how do you get a new product, say a toothpaste, into the marketplace? And we can learn a fair amount from the private sector history of scaling, but there are also limits because scaling a product in a marketplace is so incredibly different from what it means to scale a public sector program.

The fourth history is when we get to scaling. In the private sector, scaling is about bringing a product to market and getting everyone to use or want it. But it’s in the public or social sector that most of education scaling is located. I’m simplifying a lot here, but I think that it really started in the 1960s when a widespread belief began to take hold that government wasn’t really capable of improving social life all by itself. People began asking who else - NGOs, social institutions, community groups - who else could work to improve education, whether as a system or as a set of institutions?

I believe that’s when the modern conception of scaling first began, but for several decades scaling was understood as short-term project implementation. And in fact, I think that we still suffer from a short-term project mentality when we talk about scaling—thinking there are discrete projects that can be carefully and successfully dropped into a system and will automatically stick.

This logic holds that scaling is a technical process and implementation is relatively simple and straightforward. If the education reform or innovation model is good, it’s going to take hold. In the United States, that flawed view of improving education started in the 1960s with the post-Sputnik math and science curricular reforms. And it was a disaster.

Electrifying Failure

As a result, in the 70s and 80s, a group of researchers including Milbrey McLaughlin, Paul Berman, and Seymour Sarason asked, how can a well-meaning implementation attempt with a high-quality innovation fail so badly? Along with Michael Fullan and Alan Pomfret, they were the first to propose that implementation itself is a science—an area of study of its own. They pointed out that if you’re not taking into account the culture of the place and the systematic components of the context—in this case the schools and surrounding policy environment, the place will reject the new innovation the way a body sometimes rejects an organ transplant

And so I think in some ways that created at least the beginning of focusing on how a great innovation needs to be actually developed for scaling, and how it needs to be scaled carefully. John List’s thoughtful book called The Voltage Effect comes to mind. He says not only was the era of short-term project-minded implementation something that often failed, and therefore sacrificed opportunities for potentially good systems change, but it also turned decision-makers cynical and untrusting of program developers, because they had spent their reputational capital supporting innovations that did not take hold at scale.

So, all four histories when combined lead us to this notion that the idea of introducing or embedding a new program, an idea, a practice, or initiative in education for sustained use is not simple. It’s complex. And complex is very different from complicated. It requires political buy-in. It requires multi-stakeholder coalitions that are durable but flexible. It requires a sort of cultural and socio-political component. It often requires a decade or more.

There needs to be capacity. There needs to be thoughtful, multipartite engagement in what it means to prepare the new practice or innovation, prepare the place, and then make sure that the two sides come together in productive ways so that there’s sustained impact—and that it doesn’t fall apart as soon as the funding ends or get washed out by the larger system.

The Velcro Partnership

Andy

Let me pick up a couple of points there, zoning down onto the development sector and education development in particular.

I think you’re absolutely right about people seeing scaling as being about projects, but, there’s there seems to be a dilemma - that is that aid agencies want to fund things that are durable and sustainable, and I think that desire has morphed into seeing scaling as the equivalent of sustainability.

I like the distinction you made in your recent paper between scaling and systems transformation. I think these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, confusing the whole discussion about what’s being attempted.

But, if one accepts all the things you’ve just said about how complex it is to actually scale something within an education system, aren’t you really saying that it can’t be done by outsiders ? Outsiders are not there long enough, their funding isn’t there long enough, they aren’t there long enough, and so on.

And yet, many of the systems we’re discussing are actually relatively dysfunctional. That’s why donors and philanthropies are there supporting. So, can you actually scale change if the driver is from outside of the system ?

Brad

Yes, I think you can. I mean, I don’t believe that there is no role for outsiders. And the metaphor that I like to use here is Velcro (hook and loop fasteners often in clothing). A trusting partnership, you know, is like Velcro: one side of the piece of Velcro is useless without the other side. And even if you have both sides, they don’t do their job until they’re hooked together. But when they are, it’s working as it’s supposed to.

So, I absolutely think there’s a value for outside actors, organizations, agencies. I think that when you talk about aid agencies, you have to remember that they themselves are beholden to incentives, boards, and funders. And those incentive systems often privilege quick wins, short-term thinking—i.e. what can we get out of it? Sometimes funding groups themselves have in-built limitations. Even with the best ones (for example I think GPE is working hard to get it right), it’s hard to do, no matter how good your intentions are. Funding and donor organizations are big, slow systems with lots of moving parts, and they have to answer to others.

And yes, the weaker, less functional LMIC governments may be more likely to say yes to any innovation or effort that has money attached to it, so they may end up approving projects that don’t fit the needs of their location, which is completely understandable.

But, if you’ve got a relatively strong, relatively coherent, functional government that can work as an equal partner with aid agencies, then I think you’ve got the potential for that healthy Velcro partnership. Those governments are close to the people; they’ve got a commitment to secure local ownership of reforms and hopefully the capacity to do so; they’ve got an understanding of the local contours. Those are all incredibly important ingredients for success.

The actors and levels inside a country have weaknesses and blind spots, think equity considerations for example. The external actors and groups have different weaknesses and blind spots too, think development fads for example. So, each side’s got some strengths and weaknesses and that’s why I really love this idea of creating a kind of healthy partnership—that’s the Velcro. I definitely think it’s viable.

Scaling and Systems - Marriage or Serial Monogamy ?

Andy

I like your Velcro metaphor. But, let me press you on the time issue. We’ve both been involved for decades in discussions about the short political cycles that drives most aid agency funding. But, it seems to me that this short-termism becomes even more acute when you start talking about scaling (and connecting that with systems strengthening in general), because we know that the changes needed are often generational, or may take several decades to show observable and measurable results. And even an agency like GPE is still subject to the vicissitudes of funding like everybody else at the moment.

So, the question is, should donors actually be promoting scaling with their limited funds ? Should they be talking about system change, about significant scaling, if the reality is that the only way to be successful in this Velcro partnership is for the external partner to be there, and to be committed, for a long period of time.

In another paper you use the metaphor of a marriage – that it’s for life. In other words, we’re not getting divorced in two years’ time just because my parent has changed their mind. But, sometimes that’s actually what’s happening.

Brad

OK, I’m going to play with that metaphor. When I talked about marriage, I was talking about scaling and systems change. But, you’re asking about the relationship between the donor agencies and the locations ; that’s a bit different.

That relationship might be better seen as serial monogamy, and I’ll tell you why. It might not be the same aid agency that sticks with the country over 25 years. And so, I’m not trying to be glib here, but let’s play with the metaphor. What if you had six six-year relationships with six different aid agencies for a total of 36 years of committed support? Then you’ve got the potential for system change.

But glibness aside, I really do think that countries and decision makers and groups that have ideas about systems change need to find multiple kinds of flexible funding that last for the several years of a scaling journey, but that are interlocking.

We need to think about scaling in four phases. First, there’s developing, refining, and proving the innovation, in other words proof of concept, and that tends to be relatively easily funded – getting five years of funding to show that an innovation is viable.

But then the next phase is the question of - is it scalable and how can scaling capacity be built ? Though I’m pretending it’s sequenced, it shouldn’t really come after the proof of concept, but should be in place during the course of the proof of concept, but it’s too often separate. This part of the work is where we need to ask : the innovation might be a great thing, but can it be scaled? What does it take for it to scale? So, that’s your second phase.

And then you’ve got a third phase: building capacity on the ground, adopt your a scaling pathway, create a scaling strategy, prepare the locations for scaling, make sure there’s significant capacity in all of these different locations, make sure that there are stakeholder supports inside and outside government, collect and use data along the way. That’s what we might call the middle phase. That’s really hard to fund.

So maybe that six or eight-year period has a different set of funders that help one through that. I’ve heard it called the Valley of Death. I hate that phrase because it’s fatalistic, but I get the point that that it’s a difficult, arid desert that scalers must walk through.

And finally there’s the fourth phase, which is how do we engage in the change management and sustainability so that the innovation, now tentatively in place, lasts the test of time? And that, again, is not quite as difficult to fund as the middle phase because the effort is proven now. It’s got a lot of success and attention.

And so I’ve proposed four different phases: proof of concept, scalability, the valley of death, and sustained use. Maybe each of those needs a different aid agency to commit for five or six years, and then you got 4 * 6, that’s twenty-four years of funding. It’s not as easy as that, it’s really hard to do in reality. But you get the point.

With respect to the funding aspect of your question my answer would be : Yes, more. Yes, but. And Yes, and. Let me explain :

Yes, more : scaling actually matters more now, because we can’t waste those limited funds that exist. We need to and follow the evidence about what works in scaling and draw on successful scaling principles and practices. Chasing after non-scalable innovations or trying to scale reach but not impact, or working to scale without really knowing how it works... those are wastes of resources and social capital and should be avoided

Yes, but : scaling needs to be integrated with systems change to make a lasting difference. This is how to defend scaling currently. It’s not enough that an innovation works and scaled- does it change the system so the system—schools or a teacher network or a governance level—produces better outcomes year after year?

Yes, and : developing, piloting, and scaling the right low-cost or no-cost innovations might be a most promising direction right now because they cost less, do not always need government approval, are often home-grown so typically have equity considerations and local ownership built in. And additionally, they can work to increase innovative thinking, a scaling mindset, and reform ownership at local levels through practice and repetition.

Scaling - A Clash of Agendas

Andy

That’s clearly set out, but one difficulty is that donors have their own agendas. They always want to have something a bit different, even to the point of getting competitive. Maybe that will dissipate a little with the reduction in funding.

But, you’ve also got this element where donors feel they need to make a mark. Like a new boss coming in, and things are going fine, but they feel they need to shake things up to establish themselves. You see that with donors too. They look at an initiative and say we can’t just do what they did before, no matter how successful it is. We’ve got to do something different.

Brad

Yes, that’s true and, personally, I struggle with this. Joni Mitchell has a great line in one of her songs where she sings love has two faces, hope and despair. I think that my view of the global educational development architecture has two faces: hope and despair. So, what you’re saying is true. I don’t know how we get out of it.

And yet, I have conversations with people who work in these development or funding organizations and they too are struggling with this. I don’t know how to get through it, but I think we have to keep talking about it and be honest about it.

I’ve also noticed that there’s a difference between these conversations I have where sometimes people are faking their way through the conversation, toeing the party line, talking from the perspective of the aid agency. It doesn’t ring true to me. But then I have other conversations with folks who are very genuine about it. They’re like, ‘look, we know this is a problem and we’re trying to remedy it in this way.’ ‘We’re accepting that we’re part of the problem as well as part of the solution.’ I hope that the wise people are continuing to work through it. They’re smarter than I am and I hope they get it right—and soon.

Scaling Impact not Innovation

Andy

I think we have similar views on that. But, let me come back to another thing you said when you were talking about the phases of scaling – about planning for scaling right at the very beginning, before you have actually proved that your concept is workable and doable.

So, I would tend to agree with that, but I can also see where people are coming from who say, well, how can you do that if you haven’t actually proved that something works ?

So, maybe the question is the opposite of the one I asked before : should aid agencies be saying almost everything that they do should be scalable?

For example, if you assume from the outset that an intervention will work and can scale, you start planning in that way. So, your thinking is not “can I service 200 schools”, but “how do I get my service from 200 to 2,000?” That means designing the prototype service or material now so that what works at small scale can be reproduced easily, cheaply, and reliably by others at much larger scale.

I think it’s rare to see that kind of discussion in education, in the kind of areas that we’re talking about. Do you think that’s what agencies should be thinking about when they’re funding education in developing countries ?

Brad

Yes, I do think they should be thinking about that. And we, at Millions Learning, have about 10 principles of scaling that we will say whenever we have the chance. And number one is plan for scaling from the beginning. I must say at this point that quite a lot of what I have learned recently about scaling impact in education comes from the Research on Scaling in Education (ROSIE) project we in Millions Learning lead. ROSIE is part of the Knowledge and Innovation Exchange—or KIX—and KIX is a fantastic multi-year multinational education initiative supported by the Global Partnership for Education and the International Development Research Centre. It’s thanks to them and this work that I have been able to learn so much over the last five years.

My colleague Larry Cooley is really wise about all this. He says, when you’re thinking about scaling, don’t think about restaurants, because a really good chef can make maybe one or two really successful restaurants. Not a hundred. Larry says public sector programs don’t work that way. They don’t succeed if there’s only one or two of them. Scaling them is required due to the scope, severity, and depth of the educational dilemmas around the world. They must, if they’re good programs, find a way to impact more people so that they can expand and deepen the quality of people’s lives across whole swaths and so they can change systems. So, I believe it doesn’t make sense to spend too much time or money developing a thing that cannot be scaled.

Now, should aid agencies be thinking about that? Yes. I would not want to spend a ton of money thinking about how to scale a digital learning device in Guatemala before I’ve thought through whether in fact it can be implemented in three quarters of the country and in places without stable electricity, let alone internet. And whether the hardware can be maintained—especially in humid climates or where rodents might eat the rubber casings of the cable, whether the software is going to be updated regularly, whether people will really learn to use it, whether it’s only going to be the wealthier families that have access to the digital learning.

So, sure, I do think that it’s important that we always think about the scalability question, and just I want to get something else in, which is sometimes people mistakenly talk about scaling as increasing the reach or the size of a thing.

But, it’s not about growing the innovation itself ; it’s about scaling the impact of the innovation.

And that’s a subtle distinction, but an important one. The innovation or the program or the initiative is just the means to an end. The end, the goal is the impact that the innovation can offer. Improved early-grades literacy in Sri Lanka, better tertiary school access for girls in West Africa. Teachers supported to develop the kind of agency to enact their professional judgment in a classroom. It’s not the innovation, that’s what gets you there, but the impact. A lot of people, when they talk about scaling, are talking about scaling the innovation. I’m interested in scaling the impact of the innovation.

Andy

But, it is a distinction though, isn’t it? Because if your impact is from a small number to a much larger number, then the innovation and its ability to expand in that way is also a critical part of that equation, isn’t it?

Brad

Absolutely. Absolutely. But it also raises things like optimal scale—something that Rob McLean talks about regularly.

Sometimes a particular initiative in a particular location for a particular purpose has a ceiling to it. Essentially, you are losing impact as your marginal increase sees diminishing or flattening returns. The economy of scale might turn negative.

For example, when innovations are relatively small or when they’re being piloted, there are all kinds of potential biases. There’s more attention paid to it, there are more resources given to the innovation. Many times the participants opt in, they’re volunteering so you might have a group of teachers incredibly focused on girls’ education because that priority brought them into the pilot. And so, at a small scale, they’re committed, maybe they work harder they typically do. This can artificially inflate the results and therefore the proof of concept.

The aid agencies might say, you know, this is absolutely scalable and will bring the same level of success and maybe it will, up to a point. But, maybe the funders or operations teams haven’t thought about what happens as you move to new unfamiliar locations where teachers are not already interested in the topic but are now required to participate, or they’re suffering from reform fatigue because they have to learn a new program every other year. You’ve got effects and variables that don’t show up at small scale that happen at large scale. And so the question should never solely be, how well are we growing the thing? It would be, are we still getting sufficient impact as it scales? And if we’re not collecting data and we’re not looking at that question, we might get to a point where the scale has got bigger than the impact is useful.

Scaling as Franchising

Andy

Yes, exactly. And that may be a qualitative dimension of the innovation that needs to be seen not just the quantitative impact. If Larry Cooley says that scaling is not about single restaurants, it’s also not about McDonald’s then, is it ?

Brad

It could be. There are multiple ways to scale and one of them is to franchise your innovation. Maybe Teaching at the Right Level (TARL) is an example of this. I want to be careful and a I don’t want to get it wrong or offend anybody, but TaRL is a promising methodology. It originated in India about 20 years ago. It’s now showing up in many places—Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America. Groups will work to take the TaRL model with permission, sometimes rename it, adapt and scale it in new locations. They still must adhere to fidelity to the TaRL model, but TaRL is essentially being franchised.

To go with the McDonalds analogy, they still have to talk to the Ray Kroc headquarters regularly and it has to have the golden arches and other definable features, but different groups can adopt, adapt, and scale it. To me, that sounds like successful scaling by way of franchising.

Andy

Besides the scaling and system change differentiation, and the Velcro model that we’ve talked about, I’m interested in where you think there are good examples of system level scaling, maybe like the example you’ve just given of TaRL. Are there examples where you actually see something really scale, not just in one district, not just in one set of schools. What good examples do you think there are of system level scaling ?

Brad

First, I want to say that small innovations can be very impactful: the right small innovations pressed into the right system levers in the right ways can absolutely catalyze systems change. It doesn’t have to be a giant macro innovation or comprehensive initiative - I’ll get to those in a second.

I think that there’s some real value in thoughtful micro innovations. And as an example, Larry Cuban wrote about the fact that in the beginning of the 20th century in the United States, someone decided to unbolt the classroom desks from the floor. And that revolutionized pedagogy—suddenly students could look at and talk to each other; the teacher could organize students for learning in flexible ways.

Scaling as Autocatalysis

Andy

So, pause on that, because that’s a good example to interrogate. How did that move from the first school that decided to do it, or the first district that decided to do it, to everybody deciding to do it? Was that an osmotic process or was it a deliberative process where somebody said, hey, great idea, now everybody else should be doing this.

So there’s also a bit here about “nudgeonomics”, where one little tweak over here has a kind of ripple effect. You actually don’t have to do anything other than do the small tweak because the system, specific individuals or groups of people, will make it happen. So, does this Larry Cuban example fall into that category ? Is it an example of a kind of “natural” scaling ?

Brad

I think it is, with a caveat that I’ll say in a second. We might call that organic diffusion. But, you know, when I think about systems change, I feel required to think about complexity theory. I think complexity theory is the best way to understand systems change.

And there’s a concept in complexity theory called autocatalysis, which I think you’ve essentially just described, which is that a system is made-up of all of these interdependent parts. The parts are dynamically interacting with each other. The stuff—or energy— of the system is actually not the parts themselves, but the active relationship between or among the parts.

And here’s the autocatalysis part. Autocatalysis is basically self-catalyzing, right? And so, if you change one part in a complex adaptive system, it will by definition change other parts, which then change other parts that ultimately loop back to change even the part that initially set the change in motion.

But, here’s my caveat, I don’t know the specifics of Larry Cuban’s example. I’d have to look into how and why the unbolting of the chairs happened. It may have had something to do with John Dewey and a pedagogy of student inquiry rather than rote instruction, and that someone or several people believed that such enquiry can only happen if the students’ curiosities are put at the centre of the learning teaching equation and get to learn by talking and working with each other. But, which came first, the idea or the action, I don’t know.

But, what I do think is that the unbolting of the desks was not an isolated act. It’s an autocatalysis. Because of this unbolting, teachers could stand in different locations. Students could look at each other. When students look at each other, they have to have something to say. Small groups of students could work on something together. So, all of a sudden you had a systems change because of one small thing.

Now, I don’t know whether the unbolting was the first thing or the tenth thing, or whether this was a sort of accidental diffusion movement or a deliberate strategy. That would be a cool dissertation for someone to write: unbolting of student desks as pedagogical revolution.

But it’s clear that there are small innovations that can lead to big changes. One of the things that I found recently in research we did on mid-level education governance in low- and middle-income countries is that many, mid-tier folks like district, province, or municipal officials in very low-income countries do not have the money or the bandwidth to engage in scaling innovations—at least as I’m defining them.

But then, when we asked them what they’re doing in their present work, they told us about tiny little tweaks or modifications that they are bringing to multiple locations. I would call that scaling innovations. And so I think there’s something to be said for these low-cost or no-cost responsive changes to identify challenges in an education system that themselves can become sustainable and can lead to impact and may set in motion other kinds of changes. So, we shouldn’t discount the power of small innovations.

System Level Scaling

Now, you asked about scaling at the larger system level or country level and I think that there are some programs that have been able to successfully scale across countries in ways that have led to dramatic systems change. And I’ll put Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) as one of those.

The International Baccalaureate Program is another innovation that has scaled. It started in 1968 originally as a curriculum for global elites to focus on interdisciplinary, inquiry-based instruction, rigorous academics, and the kind of flexibility that allowed each location to adapt the program for its own needs but still within a set framework. And then in 2017 it shifted to include middle class and lower middle-class locations. And it’s now in something like 1,000 locations. That’s a program that has scaled across the world and whose impact has been impressive.

There’s a really interesting report that came out in 2022 by Amanda Datnow and her colleagues (Transforming education for holistic student development). What the research did was focus on systems change as primarily about centering holistic student development. They referenced Chile, Ireland, and British Columbia and Canada.

But, other country systems that have engaged in the integration of scaling and systems change in successful ways would include Vietnam, Singapore, and Delhi, India.

What seems to work is that you get the government and a bunch of NGOs who are on the same page and willing to work together. There’s also some kind of that serial monogamy funding situation present. And there is the courageous leadership that is patient enough to know that it takes 20 years. There is a recognition that you need to build it on the unique contours of the location i.e. what works in one place doesn’t work in another place.

Vietnam over the last 20 or so years is a good example. They had a relatively weak economy but a strong teaching force, a culture and history that privileges education and an authoritarian political system. So, they centred their reforms around student assessment models – placing kids at the centre of the reforms.

The result was a complex education systems change designed around student assessment and teaching quality, knowing they’d got buy-in, knowing they’d got education as a cultural high priority, knowing they’d got a strong teaching workforce, knowing they’d got a relatively coherent policy context - and you get it right, and they did.

Now, what’s happened, as I understand it—but I might be wrong—is they’re now becoming a victim of their own success. They’re doing so well economically that the best and the brightest who come out of college don’t necessarily want to be teachers. They want to go into digital technology or wherever the money is.

So, teaching is suffering. But also, there’s a backlash because there was such a strong focus on academic achievement at the expense of social emotional learning. So, outcomes and test scores went up but stress and anxiety among learners did so too.

Overall Lessons

So, what are the lessons from these several countries that I’m talking about?

It would be that the governments were on board and willing to commit to a multi-year, even a multi-decade direction without changing at every election.

There was broad stakeholder support inside and outside government.

The efforts were built on the specific and unique cultural and historical needs and assets of the location, and teachers and children’s learning were put at the centre of the equation, meaning that the catalyzing innovations around which the systems change occurred had fertile ground to grow in.

Further Reading

A visual guide to rethinking pathways to scale in education (The Brookings Institution)

3 reflection briefs for scaling impact in education around the world (The Brookings Institution)

Unlocking the potential of middle-tier education governance for scaling impact in low- and middle-income countries (The Brookings Institution)

Millions Learning (The Brookings Institution)

Learning at Scale (RTI)

Journeys to Scale: Accompanying the Finalists of the Innovations in Education Initiative (R4D)

The Education Scaling Navigator - A Tool for Understanding Scaling Frameworks (Hundred.org)

Implement at Scale (Hundred.org)

The Myths of Scaling-up (Mary Burns)

Despite successfully supporting the Government of Ghana to integrate and scale a parenting programme into its pre-primary system, Lively Minds have taken the courageous step of re-thinking their scale approach as they begin work in Ethiopia and the Gambia – why ?

Lively Minds first focused on early childhood development in Ghana in 2008, starting with a community development model that empowered parents to help their own children, then adapting so it could be delivered through the public kindergarten system.

With support from several innovation funders between 2016-19 they conducted a larger pilot across six districts in Ghana, including a rigorous RCT. The results demonstrated that mothers—92% of whom had never been to school—generated learning gains equivalent to a full year of formal schooling.

That success led to an agreement in 2019 by the Ghanaian Minister of Education to adopt and scale the programme, a huge win for Lively Minds. The rollout was successful, reaching 64 districts and 3,500 schools and the Government are now funding it and preparing to roll out to all the remaining districts nationwide

So, a clear example of a successful pilot going to national scale – why change ?

Alison Naftalin (Founder / CEO of Lively Minds) and James Adongo Awini (Director of Delivery) explain that this is a major strategic shift as they start working with Governments of Ethiopia and Gambia. They feel the previous theory of change used in Ghana and Uganda — build a comprehensive model, prove impact, then have governments adopt it — is now unrealistic.

They point to the fact that large donors (like USAID / FCDO in the past) rarely fund replication and note that integrating a model that requires bespoke training and monitoring systems is inherently fragile.

Instead, Lively Minds now aims to work directly with governments to co-design zero‑running‑cost models, integrating only essential components directly into existing government structures. That’s the approach now taken in Ethiopia and the Gambia.

The goal is to ensure sustainability from the outset by adapting to each country’s capacity—whether through pre‑primary, health, or local government systems, or via radio-only delivery where infrastructure is limited.

Read more about Lively Minds and their work in Ghana, Uganda, Ethiopia and the Gambia.

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Quote of the Month

“Technology will not replace great teachers but technology in the hands of great teachers can be transformational.”

George Couros

Introduction

This month’s guest post from Abdul Karim Mohamed, an African Start-up investor, Ed Tech enthusiast, and MD of Insight54, reads like a script for “Raiders of the Lost Ark” : there’s gold treasure out there if only educators can understand the hieroglyphics that unlock the secrets of the Ed Tech investor.

But, the hieroglyphics turn out to be a new language, not an ancient one, and time is limited for educators to start learning that language – leading them to the untold riches that will replace all the money draining out of global education….

Luckily, Karim’s piece is not given to this kind of hyperbole and is instead a powerful and cogent argument that should have all educators who work with ed tech, and all ed tech purveyors, asking themselves some challenging questions.

• Do I understand how to pitch to ed tech investors in ways they can respond to – especially distinguishing between “need” and “demand” ?

• Is my ed tech product really just a solution in search of a problem ?

• Is it, in fact, a Forever Pilot, a Digital Toy or a Research paper ?

The journey begins….

Andy Brock, March 2026

The $4bn Ed Tech Paradox

If you put a Teacher, a Minister of Education, a Non-Profit Director, and an Investor in a room to define “EdTech evidence”, you’ll get four different answers.

● For the Teacher, it’s the moment a disengaged learner leans in.

● For the Minister, it’s national literacy and exam scores.

● For the Non-Profit, it’s a rigorous Randomized Control Trial (RCT).

● For the Investor, its value creation—measured through user engagement, retention curves, and unit economics.

The reason for this disconnect is a fundamental Diligence Divide: those with the contextual expertise and the people with the capital are speaking two entirely different and often incompatible languages.

A recent article in The Economist highlights the global stakes of this disconnect: despite $30 billion in annual spending in the US, independent research found that most EdTech delivered only marginal learning gains or no effect. While companies tout large RCT results, students often describe the products as “repetitive, rigid and boring.” A review of 119 studies from 2010–2023 found that fewer than 10% even measured student engagement, a core signal of product value to investors. This disconnect shows the EdTech diligence divide is not uniquely African, but global.

As global education aid (ODA) collapses by $3.2 billion over the next twelve months, the need to bridge this diligence divide has moved from a theoretical exercise to an existential necessity. The Diligence Divide in African EdTech isn’t just a semantic disagreement. It is the primary reason why, despite over $4 billion in private capital currently sitting in Africa-focused funds with education mandates, EdTech accounts for less than 3% of private investment on the continent.

As capital for education becomes more scarce, simply peddling the narrative of innovation or the potential of the latest ‘flavour of the month’—generative AI today —will no longer suffice. During the UN’s Finance for Development Conference in Seville last year, the overwhelming message was a mandate to mobilize private capital, as outlined in the Seville Commitment.

We are entering an “innovation freeze”. Donors are leaving, and investors aren’t filling the void. The reason isn’t a lack of brilliance from founders or a lack of need from students. For African EdTech, there is already billions in private capital with an education mandate; unlocking it requires moving past ‘innovation theatre’ and adopting a shared evidence language that standardizes the metrics of Efficacy, Engagement, and Economics.

The Diligence Divide: ‘Need’ is clear, ‘Demand’ is opaque

In the development sector, “Need” is a moral and social calculation. It is measured by the size of the deficit: the 250 million of children out of school, the learning poverty statistics, or the shortage of physical classrooms or teachers. But in the world of investments, “Need” is a mirage. The only thing that moves private capital is Demand.

The distinction is critical. Need is a state of lacking; it describes what people should have to survive and thrive. Demand, however, is an active choice. It is the result of value creation so acute that a user—whether a parent, a student, or a teacher or education bureau — sees the value of your solution and is willing to invest in it, paying consistently over time.

In the current ecosystem, we have two groups of people talking past each other.

● Donors and Philanthropists Solving for Need: This group views evidence primarily through the lens of Pedagogical Efficacy. They ask: Does the tool improve test scores? Success is measured through long-term Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) and raw enrollment numbers, where evidence is synonymous with social impact.

● Investors Solving for Demand: The investor’s lens is focused on Economics and Engagement. They aren’t just asking if a tool can teach; they are asking if a user wants to learn with it so much that they return voluntarily. Investors look for “stickiness”, evidence that the product creates enough value to pull a user in without a constant “push” from a grant-funded or subsidised project.

This divide is where billions of dollars go to die. Consider the experience of a $50 million African investment fund with a specific education mandate. Last year, their investment team evaluated a pipeline of startups at an industry pitch event. They watched a dozen EdTechs present slide after slide detailing the “Need”—the tragedy of learning poverty and the massive youth bulge. But when the team looked for “Demand,” they found a void. There was no data on if or how much students used the products.

The founders were pitching the Problem to an audience looking for a Market. Until we reconcile these two languages, the “Innovation Freeze” will continue leaving the $4 billion in private capital exactly where it is now: on the sidelines.

The Market vs. The Addressable Market

One of the most persistent failures I see is the “Tech-First” trap. Founders often build sophisticated, proprietary platforms—essentially building their own private roads—when the users are already gathered on the highway (i.e. existing distribution channels like WhatsApp).

We talk about the “Total Addressable Market” of hundreds of millions of students, but we ignore the Realistic Addressable Market. If your solution requires a high-end device, a stable 4G connection, and a credit card for a subscription, your TAM isn’t “Africa”; it’s a tiny sliver of urban elites.

If we want to scale, we have to meet teachers and parents where they are. In the African context, that means building on existing rails—ubiquitous, low-data platforms like WhatsApp—rather than proprietary Learning Management Systems (LMS) apps or websites. WhatsApp is often described as Africa’s operating system, much like WeChat in China.

WeChat Mini Programs are lightweight applications built inside the messaging platform that allow users to do everything from shopping to accessing public services. Used by 95% of Chinese companies, they generate over ¥3 trillion ($415 billion) in annual transactions. Using familiar distribution channels is not lazy engineering; it is a prerequisite for economic viability. Leapfrogging a poor business model is impossible, no matter how good the code is. We need to stop building solutions in search of problems and start designing for the realities on the ground.

Borrowing the “Rails”: Lessons from Other Sectors

The dynamics behind the Diligence Divide in African EdTech are not unique. Faced with similar disconnects between private capital and education stakeholders, other parts of the global education ecosystem have already built the market rails needed to bridge this gap. For example, the Regional Education Finance Fund for Africa (REFFA) bridged the gap between schools and local banks. By creating standardized education loan products and risk-assessment tools, they translated seasonal school cycles into a language banks could trust. This unlocked over $208 million in financing, empowering 6,000 schools to shift from survival to infrastructure growth[1] (the EduFinance program has done similar work). Investable EdTech sits at the intersection of efficacy, engagement, and economic viability. Unlocking the $4 billion sitting on the sidelines will require connecting these rails, not more “innovation theatre.”

The Path Forward: From Need to Demand

Despite structural challenges, this is an exciting moment for African EdTech. From local angels to global private equity, investors see the opportunity and are actively seeking ways to diligence and deploy capital. The conviction exists. The capital exists. What’s missing are the market rails required to deploy it. These rails include entrepreneurs leveraging existing distribution channels like WhatsApp[1] , but also shared evidence language that standardizes the metrics of Efficacy, Engagement, and Economics.

We’ve seen this before. Nearly 20 years ago, One Laptop Per Child generated excitement similar to today’s AI wave. But devices procured on moral need rather than sustainable demand now sit gathering dust, unused in storage boxes across classrooms in Africa.

If African education is to successfully leverage technology and attract private capital, it must shrink the Diligence Divide. We already have brilliant founders and billions in interested capital. What we need now is a shared language of proof to bridge the gap between them.

A more detailed analysis of the African EdTech Diligence Divide can be downloaded from InSight54’s website.

News

The US airstrike which killed at least 170 people most of them primary school girls in Iran is continuing to generate headlines and condemnation, as it should. Almost certainly a failure of intelligence – like the whole debacle itself.

Noise, but not enough of it, in the UK about the ban on students from Sudan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Afghanistan due to “abuses” of the student visa system. Even if there are abuses, the numbers are miniscule in the grand scheme of things. The four countries represent a total of 3,875 visas per year – about 0.5% of the 750,000 the UK grants annually, so it seems the “tough” headlines are more important than the actions.

Does the government think punishing the whole class for the sins of a few is a fair policy – even shooting itself in the foot by stopping students on its own FCDO funded Chevening Scholarships ? These four countries all demand our sympathy not our censure. There are some real, and very sad personal impacts of this performative policy e.g. see this post re Sudan and this legal letter from the Oxford Sudanese Society.

The What Works Hub for Global Education has announced it’s call for submissions for a conference in Oxford in September – see here.

In the UK the government has published a new White Paper on SEND and inclusion. Sam Freedman, one of the most astute local commentators and author of a highly successful Substack called Comment is Freed, has produced a clear and understandable assessment of the technical and political challenges the White Paper addresses. The issues are not exclusive to the UK and, in fact, any educators trying to make education systems more inclusive would benefit from reading this thoughtful analysis.

Finland always seem to be ahead of everyone else. They’ve just released their Vision for Finnish comprehensive schools 2045. The Minister of Education, Anders Adlercreutz, said :

The vision takes a strong stand on the fact that, in the midst of the changed operating environment, there is an increasing demand to reinforce not only basic skills but also our ability to work together. These changes are guided by building, hope, agency and our common good.

In other words, human skills.

This year’s CIES conference is in San Francisco - the theme is
Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World. Given the decimation of USAID it’s impressive that CIES still continues, even publishing the venues for the next two years.

Development

Harry Patrinos points out that Singapore’s obsession with education extends to its banknotes. It’s the only country with a picture of a classroom on a banknote. A single-minded focus on education as a driver of growth and social mobility is one of the reasons, perhaps the principal reason, behind Singapore’s success. Even though Singapore is a small city state, there’s much to learn from that focus.

The Independent Commission on Aid Effectiveness (ICAI) set up to monitor first DFID now FCDO aid effectiveness has recently been in the spotlight as Baroness Chapman appeared to call its continued existence into question as parts of FCDO belt tightening. This piece by Euan Richie of CGD lays out the case for how ICAI is seen within FCDO. But, as we know, evidence based decision making is something that is preached rather than implemented by many governments.

Devex reports that the close out of USAID has slipped its timetable and is “getting messy”. A small team is trying to wind up thousands of contracts and push through millions of dollars owed. The administrations political intentions seem otherwise.

Parthjeet Das, whose newsletters are always interesting and entertaining, muses on the Yuval Hariri’s book Nexus, focusing on some key principles that underpin life and education.

AI Spy

I liked this quote from Anurag Shukla on the growing concern about screens, print and cognitive stagnation / decline.

If advanced economies that invested billions in digital substitution are now reporting stagnation or decline in reading outcomes, we cannot assume technological scaling is pedagogically neutral. The medium shapes cognitive habits. Print scaffolds linearity, depth, and persistence; screens tend to privilege speed, skimming, and interruption.

Fab AI has produced a very timely paper “Talking Teachers’ Language” about how well AI deals with languages other than English, focusing especially on African languages. The graphic below gives a flavour.

An OECD report “Digital Education Outlook 2026” finds an “illusion of false mastery” in using AI. Improvements that are built on sand. Good summary from Rahim Hirji.

This piece by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop in The Washington Post has gained some traction. They argue schools should teach agency over AI not just how to use it / prompt it. It’s a good point but some of the comments suggest the distinction is more blurred, and teaching how to use AI can also be teaching agency. See too this Brookings report co-authored by Winthrop “A new direction for students in an AI world: Prosper, prepare, protect.”

Voices from the front

Issue 232 of The Continent has an interview with Rahilla Iliya, one of the girls who survived the 2014 Nigerian Chibok kidnapping by Boko Haram, an event that led to worldwide condemnation and the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. 12 years on, and largely forgotten, some girls like Iliya who were not rescued are now doubly forgotten, having escaped to a third country, but receiving no help to return.

Power Teachers Africa are celebrating the impact of their PTL model in Uganda with 2025 results now out. This graphic says it all.

Voices from the rear

(Gray and Published Research)

GPE has published the results of a Remedial education program in Senegal that includes work by Mamadou Ly of Associates for Research in Education and Development (ARED), and winner of the 2025 Yidan prize, Gates Foundation and the American Institutes for Research (AIR). There are six lessons – much that is familiar to education development in any context – but the costs, understandably, look high. Cheap doesn’t get these results.

The Ed Tech Hub has produced an assessment of ed tech financing across Southeast Asia. Chimes very closely with some of the themes in Karim’s piece above – money is not necessarily the key issue.

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And finally

Perspectives

My wife and I were in Cambodia earlier this month and visited both the Killing Fields and Angkor Wat. The first a merciless reminder of the worst humans can be, the second a reminder of their finest achievements.

We also visited the Cambodia Landmine Museum in Siem Reap, established by an ex-Khmer Rouge soldier, Aki Ra, who laid hundreds of mines. He defected to the Vietnamese and, after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were routed, dedicated his life to clearing mines. He has personally cleared over 50,000 mines, saving countless lives and atoning for some of those taken by the mines he laid.

The Khmer Rouge’s attitudes to education can be summed up in this quote : “The spade is your pen, the rice field your paper”.

Courtesy the attack on Iran, we then had to make our way back via China. But, it gave us the opportunity to see again the marvellous San Xing Dui Museum displaying artefacts found from a culture 3,000 years ago. No writing has been found to explain these incredibly sophisticated bronze and gold pieces - one of those rare cases of something that is a complete mystery.

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Quote of the Month

“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

Mark Carney

The Coup

February 1^st marked the fifth anniversary of the military coup in Myanmar, overthrowing the democratically elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy (NLD). Since the coup, the situation in Myanmar has deteriorated significantly.

According to the UN, at least 7,700 civilians have been killed, more than 22,000 arbitrarily detained, and at least 3.5m people have been displaced. The military junta has lost control over significant portions of the country ; rebel forces and ethnic armed groups now control about 42% of the territory.

The impact on education has been severe. The country has a school-age population of about 12 million, but in 2021 over half of the children disappeared from schools due to political polarisation and fear, with many moving to ethnic education systems or dropping out entirely. Although many children have found their way back to school, it’s estimated that as many as 3-4 million children remain without access to education. but for young adolescents it’s a greater crisis - among the 15-17 year age group nearly 60% are out of school.

That absence alone is a tragedy, but the junta is also accused of weaponising education in its fight against the rebels. To take one example, the government is informally pressuring government schools to only allow transfers from other government schools, thereby deliberately reducing mobility and curtailing pathways to higher levels of education.

Donors agencies, such as DFAT, FCDO and UNESCO have worked in Myanmar for decades and continue to work there, but not with the government. As an example, the Myanmar Education Consortium (MEC) has been working with and on behalf of donors to coordinate and deliver support for education in disadvantaged areas since 2013. Since the coup MEC has been almost exclusively coordinating donor programmes with ethnic education service providers, monastic schools and community groups, but not government schools.

This donor policy raises uncomfortable questions – don’t all children in Myanmar have the right to be supported ? The position of donor withdrawal may have been understandable in 2021 but does it still make sense ? And, as this situation continues with no apparent end in sight, will it lead to a permanent bifurcation or fragmentation of the education system ?

Recently, I talked to a number of experienced educators, from different types of education organisations and donors working in Myanmar about the current educational situation, their worries and their hopes for the future. Understandably, they need to remain anonymous, but my thanks to them for their generosity and thoughtful responses. I did not talk to anyone representing the government education system.

The Aftermath - fragmentation and politicisation

The 2021 coup dramatically accelerated the fragmentation of Myanmar’s education system, reversing a decade of attempts from 2011 to bring greater coordination among several disparate systems. Today, multiple parallel systems operate side by side : government schools, monastic schools, private institutions, schools run by ethnic armed groups or by the National Unity Government (NUG) in rebel-controlled areas.

Education has become deeply politicised, with schools and children often caught in the crossfire of broader political struggles. The Ministry of Education’s influence is especially limited in rural and conflict-affected areas, where communities frequently run their own schools with little or no government support.

This fragmentation is not particularly new. Myanmar has never had a truly unified education system; rather, a patchwork of systems has always existed, though only recently has this diversity been formally acknowledged. The coup, however, made these divisions more explicit and paused earlier efforts (such as such as the Comprehensive Education Sector Review and National Education Strategic Plan) to find common ground and convergence among the various systems.

Aside from the inequity of differential levels of provision (e.g. in Mon, Kachin, Shan and Karen states education is prioritised and relatively well-funded, in other states less so) there is an inherent inefficiency in this level of fragmentation within such a small country. It’s poor value for money which Myanmar can ill afford. But, is efficiency the most important criteria if the alternative is poor or non-existent representation of different minorities ?

Boycotters and Collaborators

The consequences of this fragmentation are everywhere visible. Many schools in conflict zones have closed, and community-run schools face daunting challenges including a lack of recognition by the current Ministry of Education, inadequate funding, and a reliance on untrained volunteer teachers.

The quality of education is also highly variable, with acute shortages of materials and qualified teachers, particularly at the secondary level. In some areas, textbooks and resources must be smuggled in due to government restrictions. Students graduating from non-government schools often find themselves unable to transfer to public schools or pursue higher education due to the absence of government-recognised certification.

Recently, the government has issued instructions forbidding overage children, or those without proper transfer certificates, to enrol in government or monastic schools, further excluding vulnerable groups and those who have dropped out or been displaced. Added to economic hardship and ongoing conflict such restrictive policies have forced many children into the labour market, the military or armed groups.

In the Higher Education sector, which was acutely affected by the anti-coup resistance, the politicisation is even more stark. It’s estimated that 55% of all university teaching staff were suspended from their posts after the coup. In school education the figure for teachers is believed to be about 30%. The introduction of the 2024 Conscription Law has likely exacerbated the situation. (See this blog for some of the nuance).

As one commentator says in a forthcoming paper : “While the students and teachers boycotting state schools have been associated with the revolution, the teachers and students that chose to remain for various reasons have often been perceived as collaborators.”

Ethnic Minority Education

Education in ethnic minority areas is especially varied. Some regions have developed strong mother tongue-based multilingual education systems, which are seen as vital for cultural and linguistic preservation. However, in areas under mixed control, government influence often limits such approaches. Funding for these systems typically comes from community contributions, but even those can be a significant barrier for many families.

Language barriers and different systems further complicate access, as children from one region may not be able to attend schools in areas where a different language is spoken or teachers may not be able to move even between ethic education systems.

Such inequalities existed before the coup, but the period between 2011 and 2021 had been one of movement towards alignment while allowing for variation like mother tongue education, even if there was still strong suspicion of the centralising tendencies of the national government.

The Role of International Donors and NGOs

International donors and NGOs play a small but crucial role in Myanmar’s education sector, exclusively in non-government-controlled areas. Donor funding is both inadequate to meet the overall needs, but essential to the continuation of the work by Ethnic Based Education Providers (EBEP).

Donors avoid direct engagement with the military government, focusing instead on non-state actors. For example, MEC working with international donors, has shifted their support almost exclusively to ethnic education and, within that, the most disadvantaged groups. They act as both a coordinator and a provider of technical assistance, trying to facilitate coherence and standardisation of approaches within the ethic education sector.

In 2024/5 they reached over 440,000 students and 4,000 schools, providing 135,000 teaching & learning materials. The Myanmar Education Sector Representative Group has also helped to channel GPE and ECW funds that will reach about 550,000 of the most disadvantaged children.

But, this response, welcome as it is, is also widely recognised as woefully inadequate. According to some funding estimates, an annual budget of nearly $700 million is needed to support education in ethnic areas, but combined donor funds, spread over the next three years, will barely reach 10% of that ($69 million). Consequently, “localisation” in Myanmar is coming about not by design but through inadequate funding.

It’s an unusual, possibly unique, situation – an education system heavily dependent on international aid but almost completely bypassing the government system. It’s “working” for now, but, is almost certainly unsustainable.

Is there a way forward ?

The current donor policy to avoid engagement with the military government was understandable as a response to the coup. Now, five years on, with no sign of significant change, does it still make sense ? And how does it square with a rights-based approach to education ? Do children in government-controlled areas not deserve support from the international community ?

In the five years since the coup, principled stands such as the ones taken by donors have been eroded by ideology and power-based politics. Unpalatable truths are the order of the day. There are other countries in conflict where donors deal with unpleasant governments for the sake of safeguarding the rights of all children, including to education. Should they do so in Myanmar ?

From a pragmatic viewpoint, setting aside the thorny issue of engagement conferring legitimacy on the government, were international donors to start engaging with the military government, it is unlikely they could offer more money as an incentive unless this were part of a larger approach ; the reality is that donor budgets are being cut. Thus, engagement would bring significant risks to donors, but few benefits.

Consequently, without any significant levers to break the impasse, donors are left trying to work for standardisation across the disparate systems, focusing their efforts on coordination and coherence within ethnic education systems in the hope that this will be a long term benefit regardless of whether the system unifies in the future or continues on the current parallel track.

Nonetheless, a continuation of the status quo seems destined to lead to a permanently divided system.

For some, that is now an inevitability, and even perhaps a better outcome. They would argue that a unified education system is now impossible, even undesirable (and perhaps never was). They point to the greater regional / community level control of education already evident in non-government-controlled areas, to the better outcomes for children from learning in their own mother tongues and to the emergence of a more inclusive and democratic style of learning.

In other words, they would flip the question and argue that a federalist approach is the only way forward in what has, de facto, developed into a pluralistic system.

Sadly, what also seems clear is that, whatever happens, children will continue to suffer. Many of those unable to access schooling, or who are forced out of education by its weaponisation, will become recruits to the armed forces on both sides – or its victims.

Useful Links

Educational Access and Learning Outcomes in Myanmar. World Bank 2026

Caught Between Covid-19, Coup and Conflict - What Future for Myanmar Higher Education Reforms? Khaing Phyu Htut, Marie Lall and Camille Kandiko Howson. Published in Education Sciences

When education defies the odds: Higher education in Myanmar amid the ongoing political unrest. Lin Wai Phyo

Five Years After Myanmar Coup “Even Hope Has Become a Risk” New York Times 9^th February 2026

Inside Myanmar’s five-year armed resistance – a photo essay | Myanmar | The Guardian 1^st February 2026

Myanmar Education Consortium website.

“Impact of Catch-Up Clubs in Conflict-Affected Myanmar: A Community-Led Remedial Learning Model” Silvia Mila Arlini, Nora Charif Chefchaouni, Jessica Chia, Mya Gordon, and Nishtha Shrestha

UNESCO unpublished report.

News

The REAL Centre and the Centre for Lebanese Studies (CLS) have published a new and timely report entitled “Palestinian Education Still Under Attack”. At the launch in Cambridge Palestinian Ambassador Husam Zomlot spoke eloquently and movingly about the continued and deliberate erasure of educational opportunity in Gaza. A short version of his remarks here - with a link to the full speech.

Luminos Fund have published a new report called “Learning for All: A Luminos White Paper on Advancing Inclusion in Low-Learning Contexts”. At its heart is the reality that “inclusion” in situations where the majority of children are not learning is …actually providing good quality education for all. As a thesis, and a practical one at that, it’s difficult to disagree with, but, I’m not sure it gets us very far and it feels very similar to the endless debate over the Learning Crisis. In other words, an analysis and a prescription that is too big to be actionable because it’s so far from where the funding is.

Cambridge Education, my old company, is doing an online Legacy Seminar Series as they prepare to close their doors this year. (Some of the) 45 years of experience distilled - click here for details and to register.

On 20^th January Baroness Chapman, Minister of State, appeared in front of the International Development Committee (IDC) answering questions on FCDO strategy and restructuring (first ten mins). She was asked about the move from grants to expertise being trailed as a key change in policy.

Her answer, using education as her primary example, showed a shocking lack of understanding of the high quality technical assistance that DFID/FCDO has provided over the last 25 years, almost all of which has been directed at strengthening host government ownership and capacity to deliver high quality education.

Here’s how she described the “new” world of expertise.

And we can get our professional teachers, we can get our education advisors, our universities working together with the country so that they can improve their own systems and deliver their own education systems for their children. And that's better in the long term than us showing up and providing education to a population where they don't have much control over it. We might be using local teaching staff, we might not. (my italics)

The expertise she describes has just been shredded by her government’s policies vid. the closure of Cambridge Education and the slow death of other contractors and NGOs with this specific type of education capacity.

Even more disappointing was the low level of political leadership and understanding among committee members. None of the members of the IDC challenged this mis-characterisation, despite the numerous visits made to countries to learn about the UK’s support for education in LMICs. They were more concerned with the lack of consultation on restructuring, and called for a pause.

Send My Friend to School celebrated their 25th Anniversary in the days before the International Day of Education on January 24th. They were supported by several parliamentarians and have engaged over 10,000 UK schools in supporting international education.

Geneva Summer Schools are offering a course in Education in Emergencies in June. Click here for details.

Development

Duncan Green, LSE Lecturer and Oxfam Adviser has appeared with Naomi Hossain , Sarah Pickard and Matthew Campbell in this interesting 9 minute piece on Gen Z protests How Gen Z Organises Decentralised Protests Without Leaders. Green has an excellent suggestion on sell-by dates for politicians !

Quite a few articles have appeared recently taking a more self-critical line on the collapse of USAID and the attacks on multilateral institutions. Tania Cernuschi, a senior health specialist with WHO, gets the balance between anger at the destruction and remorse at institutional navel-gazing about right : Trump Didn’t Break the Multilateral System. He Exposed Its Fragility - Speaking of Medicine and Health

Ken Opalo has a new piece on reimaging aid : The international development community isn’t adapting fast enough to official aid cuts. That’s a big problem. As usual he is perceptive and practical : give more agency to locals and abandon current models. But he doesn’t address the structures and imperatives of donors that drive the current models. In the early 2000s DFID tried to change their model radically with SWAPs and Budgetary Support. But, they couldn’t let go enough to make it work because of democratic accountability concerns. Can it change now when there is even greater scepticism and suspicion ?

If you are interested in serious journalism and comment about Africa you may be interested in The Continent, a weekly digital newspaper designed to be shared by WhatsApp / Signal etc. (to avoid censorship). Issue 225 has an interesting piece on sex education across Africa with Madagascar the most open minded and Morocco the least. There’s also a good review of Howard French’s new book “The Second Emancipation”.

AI Spy

“A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” IBM training manual 1979

The Good….

Brookings Report “A new direction for students in an AI world : Prosper, Prepare, Protect” warns of AI risks, but says “it’s not too late to bend the arc on AI implementation”. If your attention span is too short for that (!) try this 3 minutes video synopsis.

Get AI to fight, not spoon feed. Interesting piece on using AI in the classroom as a debating tool - with walk through slides.

Paul Atherton got very excited about creating a phonics app in 3 hours that would have taken 6 months, and a lot more resources, in the past.

…and the bad….

Educators are going to see and hear a lot more about “attachment hacking” soon. It’s not attention hacking, it’s much more serious, and like much of the turmoil in our world today, it’s all about trust. This podcast from Your Undivided Attention, Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis takes listeners carefully through the issues - and many of the examples given are from education. Strongly recommended.

Margo O’Sullivan posted an article about teachers “resisting” AI. Articles that take a historical perspective usually have some interesting angles to offer on what appears to be a new problem but is, in fact, an old one. Channel your inner Luddite – and not in the way you think ! Teach like a Luddite - Kappan Online

Voices from the front

The Grand Bargain Community of Practice is calling for stories of the impact of aid cuts - see here.

Lively Minds has been doing some interesting work in Ghana engaging parents in early years education. A blog on the GPE website summarises it nicely and a working paper has just been published reviewing the work “Parents in the classroom: strengthening government capacity to deliver early childhood education”. More on this in a future issue.

When there are so many stories worldwide of languages being lost or deliberately marginalised, this move to include the Jarai language in Cambodia’s multilingual education was a pleasant surprise.

The School Meals Coalition has announced the launch of a School Meals Accelerator with a bold mission : “To help low- and lower-middle-income countries reach an additional 100 million children by 2030, making school meals a cornerstone of human capital development and a global standard of care.” All power to them - hungry kids don’t learn.

Voices from the rear

(Gray and Published Research)

A January Economist article called “Ed Tech is Profitable : it is also mostly useless” cites research in the US (see below) linking poor performance, distraction and lack of meaningful engagement with ed tech. This joins a slew of articles that has been appearing recently linking ed tech to a decline in learning and cognitive abilities (see previous issues). The best quote comes from a parent : “Imagine if all that money had gone into teachers instead.”

The Open University Centre for the Study of Global Development (CSGD), the What Works Hub (WWH) and UKFIET have all recently published newsletters. WWH also have a conference coming on 15-16th September 2026 at the Blavatnik School in Oxford (this year being an “off” year for UKFIET). All have plenty of interest to global educators. For UKFIET, click link above, for CSGD click here. For WWH click here, scroll to the bottom of the page and sign up.

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And finally

It’s Chinese New Year this week - the Year of the Fire Horse. In one factory they sewed the mouths on upside down (deliberately ?) - now there’s a huge demand for these “crying horses”. Symbols of a worrying year to come perhaps ?

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Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

Introduction

2025 reminded me of a game of “Consequences” – remember that ? A series of simple questions written down (who ? / did what? / with what ?/ and the consequence was…?), then the paper folded over and passed to the next player to answer the next question “blind”. Cue weird or funny, depending on how well you knew the players.

So, you might get : Who ? Jimmy and Grace / Did what ? Made a Sunday roast / With what ? An electric drill and some rubber gloves/ And the consequence was ?…A small riot in Jakarta etc. etc.

Sitting here in 2026 comparing what might have been predicted for global education pre-January 20^th 2025, with what subsequently emerged, seems nothing less than the product of a bizarre global game of consequences.

Who ? Northern governments / Did what? Deliberately abandoned global education / With what ? – a woodchipper and some weapons / And the consequence was ?…a gaslighted generation.

We will be living with the consequences of 2025 for many years to come.

Trying to make sense looking backwards is hard enough, but to look forwards when things seem constantly changeable is even more demanding. So, my thanks to the 27 global educators who have offered up their predictions for global education in 2026 - which, in case this all feels a bit down, does include reasons for optimism. This is issue #27, so here’s twenty-seven for twenty-six.

Drawn from philanthropy, development agencies, research and the practitioner communities, these predictions are small “amuse-bouche”, snapshots of the thinking and collected wisdom of those who engage regularly with the struggles and dilemmas facing our sector, from the classroom to the Ministry and beyond.

Contributors include : Paul Atherton, Caitlin Baron, Mohamed Barrie, Chris Berry, Alison Buckler, Lee Crawfurd, Luis Crouch, Parthajeet Das, Akuja de Garang, Pauline Essah, Baela Jamil, Ahmed Junina, Asyia Kazmi, Lucy Lake, Javed Malik, Jane Mann, Joseph Nhan-O’Reilly, Mo Olateju, Brad Olsen, Margo O’Sullivan, Harry Patrinos, Ben Piper, Vikas Pota, Anna Roberts, Liz Robinson, Kayode Sanni and Paul Skidmore.

Unsurprisingly, given the events of 2025, almost everyone mentions shortages of funding. AI is also ubiquitous. Foundational learning and governments “doing it for themselves” (aka the Annie Lennox method) made frequent appearances.

Just as interesting as their predictions are our educators’ suggestions for reading / podcasts / films that all educators should know. The “Sold a Story” podcast is the only one to get more than one recommendation – and rightly. The Fresh Ed podcast hosted by Will Brehm also gets a double nod as does the film the First Grader. There’s a list of book and film recommendations to keep you busy through the rest of the year.

Of course, this represents just some of the collected wisdom in our sector. If YOU have ideas and want to add to the sum of predictions in our sector, leave a comment below (if there are enough I’ll publish), or add your thoughts to the LinkedIn posts which advertise this month’s newsletter.

Happy New Year to all my readers, whatever the consequences !

Andy Brock, January 2026

(A tip for those reading this on email or mobile phone – you may want to switch to a laptop / desktop to read each response more clearly).

Give YOUR 2026 Predictions

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News

Good news that 168 new doctors graduated in Gaza. Bad news that children continue to be killed even after the ceasefire. Education is not being restored (see report in Voices from the Rear).

Finally, a lot of attention is shifting to the crisis in Sudan. Susannah Birkwood has a comprehensive piece in Devex which includes this question :

“Can the U.K.’s aid system — built for large-scale delivery chains and heavy compliance — actually deliver on its localization and gender commitments in a crisis like Sudan?”

Others who are shining the spotlight include Plan International and Save the Children, the latter highlighting that 6.5m children have been displaced and 13 million children are out of school.

Is there “good news” about US government funding of international education in 2026 ? That’s the theme of an article by Gabriella Jóźwiak in Devex which, however, notes that USAID did not spend $860m of its $920m education budget in 2025 including $152m cut from GPE and ECW. Optimism comes primarily from a House of Representatives’ appropriations bill released last July setting the Basic Education Fund at $737.6 million. Mirage or reality ?

An interesting development in Geneva - the establishment of the Foundation for GPE. It’s not GPE, but founded to support GPE. Kira Boe, one of the Board members, says :

Its purpose is to mobilize new and diverse resources, build strategic partnerships with private and philanthropic actors, and champion innovative approaches so that every child can access quality education.

Development

Quite a lot has been written recently about the decline of reading caused by increasing social media use and the implications this has for our cognitive abilities and learning. For example, this article on the post-literate society by James Marriot and this one on why education can never be fun by Daisy Christodolou.

One of the best recent ones is by Ian Leslie, an excellent writer, called The Stamina Gap. It’s largely about education, and “cognitive endurance”, the powers of concentration that focused study provides – and how that is unevenly distributed, (citing several studies, some from India). He also suggests this disadvantage can be mitigated and that AI can actually help. Recommended read.

A widely read article on the travails of UK higher education (UK university degree no longer ‘passport to social mobility’, says King’s vice-chancellor | Students | The Guardian) but, with resonance for many education systems expanding university access. Not only has “diploma inflation” meant that a degree is no longer a “passport to social mobility”, but poor economic growth coupled with tuition fees has depressed private returns (though still positive, because fees would be twice as high if they’d just kept pace with inflation). For institutions, failing students, especially international ones, is not an option - their fees prop the whole system up. Lessons here – and not good ones – for everyone.

AI Spy

Maria Barron at the World Bank posts about a new book : “A Comprehensive Guide to Artificial Intelligence and Education in the Global South : A Systems Perspective”. She says :

Addressing the “web of exclusions”: The book tackles the hard questions: tackling the digital divide, gender gaps in STEM, and the risks of algorithmic bias in vulnerable contexts.

Great that it’s open source, download link in the post.

Is there a future for language learning apps with the increasing sophistication of AI ? Duolingo, the well-known app based learning method, tried to get ahead of the game and seem to have fallen at the first step (losing 25% of their customers) according to this interesting article : “The Decline of Duolingo Should Be a Warning of the Failings of AI”

Bassem Nasir and Stephen Bayley have a very readable article on the GPE website called : “Critical Thinking in the age of AI”. It’s as much about strategies to enhance critical thinking as about the interaction with AI. I liked their cheeky foot note : “*Written by humans, with AI as the intern—who works fast but still needed a lot of supervision and our critical thinking.”

Schools in Hong Kong are to get about c.£50,000 funding each to introduce AI in the classroom. To receive the money they have to : “..subscribe to AI-powered software and hardware, but must implement AI-assisted teaching in at least three subjects while developing six teaching examples or resources using the technology.”

Voices from the front

Kudos to Save the Children who have posted a warts-and-all assessment of their sub-par results in the EOF managed Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge (SLEIC). As any leader will tell you, learning from “failure” is as important as learning from “success”. An interesting comment in this post is the desire to talk to more “successful” providers e.g. Rising Academies (see my comment last month). Conversations between providers during the programme did happen - but, perhaps with cards held close to chests ? Competition has its place, but collaboration is a far more powerful learning tool. Does the OBF model lend itself to that ?

T-TEL, the Ghanaian education NGO spun out of an FCDO funded education project, has published its 5^th Annual Director’s Report very attractively presented. The range of support to the Ghana Education Service and Senior High Schools is pretty impressive.

The percentage of Senior High School (SHS) teachers nationally demonstrating adherence to the National Teachers’ Standards has risen by over 34% in just two years (3% to 37%). I was especially struck by this chart showing dramatic and sustained rises in the confidence of almost all groups surveyed. But, despite efforts to diversify, T-TEL remains, as so many NGOs do, heavily dependent on funds from one donor, in this case MasterCard Foundation.

STiR Education has published two impact reports relating to its work in Uganda and Indonesia – finding a 15% increase in literacy outcomes and attributing this to improved teacher motivation. They also calculated that, in Uganda, the return was £3.12 for every pound invested. Impressive, but replicable ?

Voices from the rear

(Gray and Published Research)

The REAL Centre and the Centre for Lebanese Studies has published a new report entitled “Palestinian Education : Still under Attack”. There is a launch in person and online on January 22nd - register here.

Brad Olsen and Molly Curtiss Wyss of the Brookings Institute have a new blog out “What do governments need to scale ed tech? Contextualization, evidence, and the middle tier.” Like many in the sector they are warning against blind adoption of Ed Tech / AI – but they see the middle tier of education governance playing a critical role – building on another report on the potential for the middle tier to enhance impact, issued last year.

OECD has published the results of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) highlighting the increasing collaboration between teachers in the countries studied ; full report here. There’s also a good podcast looking at other aspects of the results (including that 9/10 teachers are satisfied with their jobs, but more than 20% report a lot of stress) in Top Class.

A new book “Inclusive and Equitable Education for All”, edited by Richard Ingram, is just out. If you have an institutional account get it that way because the “inclusive” part does not include Open Access – yet. When Duncan Green published “How Change Happens” (new edition 2024) he wrote a very interesting blog on how Open Access gave the book a much longer “shelf life” and seemed to do pretty well for the publisher too.

Ben Piper of the Gates Foundation appeared on VoxDev, a Podcast about Development Economics, Series 7 Episode 1 to talk about the latest GEEAP report and how to solve the reading crisis. His conclusion :

The average programme, implemented well, could increase learning by the equivalent of around 6 months or 9 months of school, additional, per year.

Dave Evans highlights a very important paper from Tanzania on “Quantification and the Paradox of Measurement : Translating Children’s Rights in Tanzania”.

This is the paradox of measurement: to make something known it must be countable, but if it has not already been translated into commensurable and quantifiable terms, it is difficult to count and may remain unnoticed and uncounted.

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Give YOUR 2026 Predictions

And finally

This is too clever for me, but I loved the premise that well formulated “attack” poetry could get AI models to ignore its safety guardrails and give unsafe answers. The researchers gave AI models prompts dressed in poetic language and a significant number of times the response was “unsafe”. Here’s the link – read and be confused ! – “Hacking the Planet with Florid Verse”.

Over the holidays I watched my all-time favourite film, “My Dinner with Andre” by Louis Malle, for about the seventh time since the 1981 when it was released. It’s not about education, except in the widest possible sense, but about life and living. It’s remarkable and quite unique. If you haven’t seen it, try to. For those who have seen and loved it, you may be interested in this new podcast analysis by David Runciman and Lee Hall (writer / director of the play / film Billy Elliot).

This moving 2 min radio / video, from NZ Breeze Radio’s Jeanette Thomas, is for all those busy parents out there facing a new year. Pause and enjoy. As a parent with an elderly mother, and who has just sent my last born to university - seemingly five minutes after he became a teenager - it’s right on the money.

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Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

Rebecca Solnit

The New Underground Resistance

Introduction

“One time”, says Natalia, describing the unsettling experience of online teaching in Ukraine, “a teacher asked a student, a little bit rudely I may say, to please speak more loudly. She did not realise the student was in the occupied territories. Without speaking, the student turned on her camera and angled the screen a little so the teacher could see the Russian tank right behind her, outside her window. I’ve never been so frightened in all my life.”

This month’s focus is on the extraordinary dedication and courage of teachers, students and parents in Ukraine in continuing their education under conditions of war.

People unfamiliar with Ukraine, but following the conflict, will know some place names : Kyiv, Lviv, Mariupol, perhaps Bakhmut and Bucha – and Zaporizhzhia. The latter because of the nuclear power plant that has been at the centre of international concerns that Russian attacks on it could imperil the whole region.

A native of Zaporizhzhia, Dr. Natalia Gutaruk is an English teacher and Shakespeare specialist who works at an underground school in Zaporizhzhia city only 40km from the front line.

In November she visited the UK with Zoya Lytvyn, Founder of Osvitoria, an NGO working with the Ukrainian government providing online education to more than 2m Ukrainian students at home and in the 130 countries now housing refugees.

Osvitoria was also the founder of the Global Teacher Prize Ukraine and in 2022, just months after the invasion, Zoya gave a very powerful TED Talk (7m) on the importance of education in Ukraine.

Art meets Life

We spoke at the launch of new film, commissioned by Osvitoria, called “Timestamp” (official trailer below). It’s a quietly understated and elegiac film that, without narration, documents the “ordinariness” of learning in schools as far as 300km from the front line and as close as 18km, where air raids are a frequent occurrence.

The film stays with you long after the credits, chiefly because it challenges your expectations. Director Kateryna Gornostai deliberately framed it both as art and understated polemic (it has been nominated in five film festivals already). There are no explosions, no videos of drones or guns, only the impacts of war on students, teachers and parents. The silent tears of a daughter at her mother’s funeral (a headteacher, the only casualty of an attack), lingering shots of empty corridors and classrooms, the frustration of a teacher trying to get children into a bunker when the air raid siren has sounded.

Some of the schools in the film are representative of a new phenomenon in Ukraine - schools purpose-built underground. Natalia’s school, Sichovyi Collegium, became one such school in January 2025.

The phoney war…

Founded after Ukraine’s independence, Sichovyi Collegium was designed as a boarding school for talented students from remote rural areas. “The aim was to create equal opportunities for students from villages to enter prestigious universities,” Natalia explains. The school’s ethos, she says, was shaped by its former principal, Valentyna Yershova, who moved from western Ukraine and saw the need to bridge regional differences. “Our motto is: everything you do, you do for yourself, your family, your community, and your country. It’s a constant thread through all our activities.”

When Covid struck, the school was well-placed to adapt. “We had already been involved in international projects—eTwinning, for example—so we were familiar with online platforms like Zoom, Google Classroom, and Teams.” Within days of the lockdown announcement, lessons had moved online. “We didn’t have trouble changing to online education.”

Osvitoria too responded to the moment of Covid, understanding that more was needed than the sporadic TV programmes which had been the government’s initial response. Osvitoria’s agility was crucial, says Zoya : “Government is less agile… education is too important to leave only to the government. It has to be a public-private partnership”.

..and then the real one

When the war came, it’s suddenness upended everything, Natalia remembers : “On the first day of the invasion, all the teaching staff were at school because students lived there during the week. We had to contact parents and help students get home.” For the first two weeks, lessons stopped as families relocated, sometimes abroad.

Paradoxically, the experience of Covid made the transition to war-time teaching and learning simpler. Gradually, as communication resumed, and students settled to online learning, Natalia began using materials from the Anne Frank Institute, based on the experiences of people who faced active military actions, to help students process their experiences.

“I asked my students to write: what would you like to say to yourself in two years, in ten years, or to the world? It was therapeutic for them.” By mid-March, formal teaching resumed online, with materials designed for both synchronous and asynchronous learning.

Osvitoria’s online platform also responded quickly and has become a key lifeline for students and teachers, with the NGO becoming the government’s largest partner in education reform. Zoya describes how, at the onset of the full-scale invasion “we had half a million learners on the platform connecting from bomb shelters, from different cities. And now we have almost 2 million active users connecting Ukrainians in 130 countries in the world”.

Learning in the Shadows

But, impressive as this is, Natalia and Zoya are both sensitive to the highly precarious situation of the students and teachers in the occupied territories. Not only are schools in occupied areas required to teach the Russian curriculum, but Russia has forcibly deported and adopted over 20,000 Ukrainian children, a war crime according to the UN.

Natalia points out that : “Those in occupied areas had to be very careful, deleting everything from their phones and laptops after sessions to avoid punishment. If they joined lessons, they kept their cameras off and their voices low, like the girl with the tank behind her.”

Zoya adds “On our platform we can see that, on average, 36,000 people are learning in those territories occupied by Russia since 2022. We keep in touch with some of the teachers, some escape, with others we lost contact”. She tells the story of a teacher whose son was kidnapped by Russian forces pressuring him to return to teaching at the local school. Late that night he and his family managed to flee to safety in Ukrainian held territory.

Fear is not the only motivator. In perhaps a world-beating example of determination to be at your own graduation, Natalia recounts how : “One girl in the occupied territories graduated school with flying colours and our city council invited her to the official graduation. It took her eleven days to travel 40 km. Not eleven hours, eleven days. She and her parent had to move very slowly from one checkpoint to another. People needed to wait in huge queues at each checkpoint. Some chose to take short-cuts across the fields, but they risked being blown up by mines.”

Going Underground

The decision to build an underground school for Sichovyi Collegium came from the local authorities. “They’re risk-takers, but it was a smart move” says Natalia. “If parents feel their children are safe and learning, they can work, and the city doesn’t empty out.” The new school was completed in record time, less than a year, opening in January 2025. “At first, we had three or four lessons a day, with a flexible timetable” says Natalia. “It was challenging—online and offline lessons, only one school bus, and parents wary of public transport between home and school because of the danger of drone strikes. But, the quality of homework and interaction improved dramatically compared to online learning.”

And, while the initial motivation was partly about keeping the economy going, educational considerations were equally important. The desire to be in human contact, to be face to face with teachers and friends, is powerful. There are now 15 underground schools in the region and ten more planned.

This year Sichovyi Collegium has nearly 300 students, down from 500 before the war. “We lost many students—some are abroad, some in occupied territories. The ministry now requires students to attend school where they live, so we have more local children and no boarding facilities” says Natalia.

What did it feel like, teaching underground ? Natalia, who initially had worries about light and air quality, says “Our old building was basic, but cosy. The new space is modern, bright, and well-equipped—interactive boards, 14 rooms, everything you need. I can teach students in the classroom and online at the same time.” The atmosphere, she says, is positive. “At first, only 100 students came, but numbers grew as word spread. We agreed not to have tests in offline lessons, only to test online, to keep things fair for everyone.”

Students, Natalia noted, appreciate the human connection. “They say the only downside is too much attention—if they haven’t learned something, it’s obvious! But there are games in the corridors, and staff help students socialise again. Even shy children are drawn in.” That sense of normalcy and energy is palpable in this lively 1.5 min video, made by some of the students.

Underground - where green shoots germinate

Does the construction of more underground schools suggest an acceptance that the war will continue? Natalia shrugs : “We’re realists. We don’t have illusions it will end soon. But people are returning from abroad, despite the difficulties. There’s a demand for education here.”

Zoya agrees and emphasises Ukraine’s digital leadership: “Ukraine is super digital. According to OECD recent research, we are the absolute leaders, not out of choice, but out of necessity”. She highlights the importance of documenting crisis-response lessons and the growing interest among young people in teaching: “More young people want to be teachers because they see a great opportunity to positively influence education through working with the younger generation”.

Natalia echoes this sentiment and reflects on the psychological burden on teachers. “Teachers return because they have a feeling that a future exists. Sometimes students have no motivation, but we try to instil a strategic mindset, to get them to think ahead.”

How would they want to see education develop when the fighting stops ? Zoya pauses with a quizzical look : “That’s a strange question” she says “because I think our education has kept on developing, despite everything : we never stopped. I just think we could all maybe pause development a little bit and teachers could have a proper vacation and a chance to appraise themselves. Children could have proper holidays with plenty of uninterrupted sleep !”

“We’ll need to cover educational gaps after the war,” reflects Natalia, “but we tell students : you are the ones who will rebuild Ukraine.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Screenings of “Timestamp” are planned in the USA as follows :
17th, 21st and 22nd December at Claremont and Encino CA ; Santa Monica ; Newhall Glendale CA and NoHo 7, North Hollywood, CA. The film will be released in Amazon Prime in the US on 19th December, timetable for other countries not yet known.

Links :

• Ukraine’s Fight to Keep Educating Its Children | Zoya Lytvyn | TED

• Education goes underground in Ukraine: ‘We have to get children back to school’

• Zaporizhzhia Builds Underground Schools to Ensure Safe Education - Oj

• Child abductions in the Russo-Ukrainian war - Wikipedia

• Osvitoria website

• Sichovyi Collegium School website

• Sichovyi Collegium School Facebook

• How Ukraine’s Football team is supporting the war effort.

News

Since October 10^th UNICEF report that, in this “ceasefire”, at least 70 children have been killed in Gaza.

Disturbingly, Francesca Albanese, special rapporteur for the UN on Palestine, has been personally sanctioned by the US for calling out Israel’s actions in Gaza. She can’t get healthcare or operate a bank account in the US and is restricted even in other countries. See this 1 min video.

Who favours the Welsh ? The award-winning film “The Voice of Hind Rajab” is due to be released on January 16^th in the UK, but if you are near Cardiff there is a screening on 18^th December ; get in quick. In the USA and Saudi it’s released on December 17^th. For everyone else, here’s the trailer. Streaming in March / April – about 6 months too late.

Good news for Nigeria. Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man and Chairman of the Dangote Group is donating $700m over ten years for education access and skills training.

After the news in my last issue that rumours were circulating that OPM were following Cambridge Education in getting out of global education, the company wrote to say that they are restructuring, and that : “We continue to deliver all our existing education programmes, and we remain actively engaged in developing new opportunities with our partners and funders.” But, they also declined to say how many of the 20 staff listed under education on their website would continue after the restructure. Draw your own conclusions.

But, I don’t want to single OPM out, they have, to their credit, responded publicly. Many others have been quietly letting education staff go. I hear that at another UK-based education provider nearly 40% of education staff have been axed. Why does this lack of publicity matter ? Because it lets the politicians who have taken these decisions avoid facing any of their consequences. If you know of education staff being let go as a result of UK cuts, let me know, all off the record.

GPE launched its 5^th replenishment fund call in London fronted by CEO Laura Frigenti. You have to admire the chutzpah in seeking the same amount, $5bn, as they sought in the 4^th replenishment – when donors had much more money and we were just coming out of Covid.

For the 4^th round Boris Johnson addressed the London launch (and then disappointed by giving only £340m ; typical). This year, in a sign of the massively reduced commitment to education, there was a video message from Minster Chapman which was strong on fulsome praise for education, while blithely ignoring the fact that her government has made the largest cuts to global education of any government in recent times. GPE’s strapline this round is “Multiply possibility” (with a rather despairing “Fund Education” subtitle) - they must be praying for a loaves and fishes kind of multiple. It’s hard not to be cynical, but I wish them good luck.

Development

Some positive news amongst all the gloom. Hetal Thukral posted on LinkedIn that the efforts of a few dedicated ex-USAID staff have saved 1,000 USAID education datasets worldwide. Hats off to them. Well done also to the University of Michigan for hosting the data and to University of Cape Town. A heart-warming antidote to the casual and destructive impulses of those latter-day philistines.

The news that Michael and Susan Dell are set to give $6.25bn to child savings accounts in the US has set off a flurry of articles about the merits of “cash transfers” around the world – e.g. see this comment from Give Directly CEO Nick Allardice. Expect more of this distraction from the real issue of the growth in wealth inequality as highlighted in Jake Ross’s post two months ago.

Ken Opalo, always interesting, has a very helpful summary of the articles devoted to development in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. If you can’t afford the £20 cover price, Ken’s summary will give you the gist.

AI Spy

The Economist has a well-written feature article on AI and childhood this month. Among the interesting points it raises was the fact that China’s recent ban on the use of after-school tutors led to a rise in AI tutors. All the big AI firms are launching AI modes that encourage learning by guiding children, not by giving answers – but you have to activate them.

AI in Education Podcast is a good source for those trying to keep up with the tools available to schools. It’s run out of Australia where one of the hosts works for Microsoft education - but it roams world-wide. They highlight Notebook LM as one of the standout education AI products this year. I’ve featured it before on it’s ability to make a podcast from a paper. It’s now added explainer videos and infographics. The AI in Education podcast put their latest podcast audio into Notebook LM and this is the graphic it spat out a few minutes later. Astonishing.

Voices from the front

Ghana has mandated the use of local languages in basic education with immediate effect. This aligns with all the evidence on making education accessible to young children. Rwanda, which in 2019 introduced a policy of transitioning to English language instruction, remains committed to this course – though without a clear timetable. Which will fare better ? It may take a generation to find out.

Education Outcomes Fund has published the results for their $18m programme in Sierra Leone (SLEIC). “Nuanced but significant” they say. Results were impressive for Maths (0.284 SD) less so for English (0.102 SD). For my overall assessment of Outcomes Based Financing (OBF) see here. Questions still remain - why is this better than grants / loans and, factoring in all costs (including EOF’s), is this more cost effective ?

Interesting that Rising Academies, part of SLEIC, posted much more significant results than the overall figures : 0.38 SD on Maths and 0.29 SD on English (so one or more groups were dragging averages down). This post from Paul Skidmore outlines what Rising Academies feels it got from the programme - was this a common view across all providers ? I trust, in the spirit of transparency, EOF will publish all the individual results and the lessons of where it didn’t work so well too - that would provide real learning.

Voices from the rear

(Gray and Published Research)

In one article a great round-up of research from CGD with several papers focused on early childhood education and education generally : What’s the Latest Research on Human Development in Economics? A Roundup from NEUDC 2025 | Center For Global Development

The UKFIET website is always rich with education blogs – and the months following the biennial Oxford Conference even more so. Which is why it would have been easy to miss this thoughtful reflection by Geneviève Greer called “The balancing act between agency and complicity” on an uncomfortable Q&A session where questioners challenged the conference committee on why they allowed Amazon Web Services to provide sponsorship “as they are accused of complicity in the genocide in Gaza”.

Greer’s reflection is measured. She says, “Most of us are neither victims nor perpetrators but implicated”, and outlines the many ways researchers, teachers, and even the victims of oppression calling for justice rely on the same systems accused of complicity in that oppression. She provides a helpful taxonomy of injustice calling for a “polyphony” of voices and stories to make people aware of the complicated personal and social issues. Well worth reading.

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Holiday reading / listening

Wishing you an enjoyable holiday season if you are having one. Here’s a few ideas for reading / listening.

Podcasts : I highly recommend the podcast “Shell Game” by journalist Evan Ratliff. The latest season takes us into the nascent world of agentic AI – coming to you soon whether you want it or not. You thought hallucinations were bad, wait ‘til you have an AI agent calling you at 2 a.m. to set up an interview !

Another great listen is “Fela Kuti : Fear No Man” a fascinating exploration of the life and music of one of Nigeria’s greatest musicians.

Books : “One Day, when it’s safe, when there is no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this”. by Omat El Akkad. Fluid, engaging prose and a wealth of stories wrapped inside a burning polemic – extremely good.

Films : “The Thinking Game” for a positive view of AI’s potential to solve world problems. On my list, but not yet seen, “Palestine 36”, also a Francesca Albanese recommendation.

And finally

You have been warned…..

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Duncan Green posted this lovely “what they say vs what they mean” table for academics – ring true anyone ? !

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These character sketches link to the theme of education, and it’s role in preventing and rehabilitating men from violence, explored in Issue #15 of Re Education. They were all written in the mid-1980s after a year spent as a worker and counsellor in a London probation hostel. All names have been changed.

The Hostel

When I arrived at St. Cecilia’s in July 1984 I knew next to nothing about Probation Hostels. I had imagined the building to be old and Victorian, full of dark corridors and musty corners, but it was clean, spacious and cubic - the smell of floor polish was the first thing you noticed.

All the lads who stayed there were aged between 17 and 25 and, after an initial month's assessment, agreed to a Condition of Residence for a year which was part of their Probation Order. On first inspection they could be quite frightening : a motley bunch of skinheads with earrings, unshaven lads with a mean glint, tall and muscular types with cruel bodies. This impression was offset though by a good number of very ordinary looking, conservatively-dressed, characters ; some quiet and withdrawn.

My first dealings with them were cautious to the point of circumspection. I was as fresh to them as the newest copper would be on his first beat on the streets and, predictably, they tried to take advantage. Borrowing money or playing me off against other staff members were the commonest tests, and it soon taught me to talk straight and act as if I knew what I was doing. It often felt like a game of blind man’s bluff where you were neither sure of what they said or what you said. But gradually, as my confidence grew, and the ground rules became familiar, the residents became less troublesome over minor matters.

Every client who came to St. Cecilia’s was treated as an individual, and yet he was also part of the resident group : a sure recipe for conflict. From the moment of their arrival they were sized up and matched to various staff members through a Keyworker system. Difficult ones would go to Bob since he enjoyed the challenge - their behaviour and his own abrasive nature suited him well to the task. Jenny took the ones who needed same mothering ; a sensitive and listening character with a hard and censorious streak - her clients got love and sympathy but if they stepped out of line they knew all about it. We were like a family in many respects, many of my clients saw me as an elder brother figure and it was often a struggle not to appear patronising.

Though this “family” structure was not explicit (despite the fact that a member of residents called the Warden “Mum") it was perhaps unconsciously the best way of smoothing the rough edges where the disciplines of Care and Control chafed. Every resident knew the rules of the hostel, and the penalties for breaking them, but the Keyworker system ironed out the damage of conflict with the hostel rules and frequently helped by providing a safety valve where such problems could be talked out. In social work circles it is fashionable to deride rules and restrictions but the role of control in St. Cecilia’s was almost as important as the part played by caring.

Many of our residents could not control themselves - that's why they got to trouble with the law. To expect them suddenly, miraculously, to exercise self-restraint was impossible - the rules of the hostel were designed to help them learn the methods and structures of building that self-control. As they stayed longer the rules were relaxed, their personal responsibility encouraged, and their self-discipline fostered.

However, the emphasis on personal responsibility that we saddled on clients could very often be a misguided imposition of one set of values and experiences on an alien and unresponsive territory. Their offending behaviour was described as their personal responsibility and they were pressured, cajoled, influenced, to admit that had only themselves to blame for getting into trouble. But, how often have I heard the phrase "easily led" of a client - few people who get into trouble at that age go it alone or plan their crimes in a premediated fashion. To my mind the emphasis on personal responsibility did not take account often enough of the context in which these young men were getting into trouble.

So many were from broken homes and disastrous backgrounds ; unemployed, bored, needing something to do. In the wrong places, at the wrong times, how could they be expected to say “no” to their friends and mates – often the only people from whom there was anything resembling love. It’s a tall order which few of us sitting on the other side of the desk could cope with.

In the environs of the hostel it wasn’t surprising then that there were always suspicions about the activities of residents outside the hostel. Very often the only way guys would go straight was by getting a steady job – the threat of losing a regular wage and the security it offered was far greater than the threat of a custodial sentence.

Andy Brock 1987

The following sketches were all written in 1985 just after I finished working at the hostel. The name of the hostel and all personal names have been changed.

Tommy

In any group there are always leaders, and amongst the fraternity of the hostel this was no less true. Fights between residents, or confrontations with staff, were variously ascribed to a particular resident’s mood or perhaps his “immaturity" in handling angst. Indeed, this could be the case, it often was, but it was just as likely to be the outward signs of a power struggle for leadership, the roots of which staff would rarely see.

Tommy was one of these group leaders, a small, lean skinhead with a pugnose face, tattoos down both arms and a nose ring. I remember an incident he fabricated at tea the day two new residents arrived. On receiving his meal at the serving hatch he declared it to be "fucking pigs muck” and with a show of disgust thrust it back through the serving hatch, swearing at the cook for good measure. No amount of remonstration by myself made any impression and Tommy stalked ostentatiously out of the dining room without waiting to be told to leave. Whatever disciplinary action was taken later was not important, the message was clear, round this patch Tommy was not to be trifled with.

Dealing with Tommy involved many such incidents in the first few months of his stay. He resented being treated as one of the group and craved individual attention for good and bad behaviour alike. Yet, there was a sweet, good-humoured and even endearing side to Tommy. As he began to feel more comfortable about his surroundings and about his position in the group, this softer side showed more often. Liking the hostel more, he started to appreciate the security it offered him and the friendships of staff and residents.

Tommy was one of these local criminals known so well to the police that he was on friendly terms with many of them. His desire to please those in authority adapted easily to the hostel staff. Unfortunately for Tommy this desire was not as strong as the urge to impress has peer group. A few months after his arrival at the hostel he was charged along with some other residents with burglary of an electrical shop. He was fortunate to be bailed, the others were remanded.

As the court date drew closer Tommy became visibly up-tight, a frown of worry continually marked his seal-pup face and he reverted, occasionally, to his old behaviour – but, now the penalties were higher. Every incident, every confrontation could affect the decision of the court – it was a veiled threat the staff used consciously to keep Tommy within certain boundaries of order. Catch-22 ; Tommy's confrontations were expression of pressure and stress, outbursts of frustration – but his returning to the hostel depended on good behaviour and a good report.

In tears one night after one of these flashpoints he confessed to being petrified of getting put away again. He'd messed up his life he said, he knew that, he’d made mistakes, plenty of them - but he wanted to change, to learn to change. He saw the effects of his behaviour and he didn’t like it, but going behind bars would make him worse. He’d done enough time, he couldn’t face more months or years locked away, he couldn’t, he just couldn't.

It was a plea that hit deep. And yet, always in the back of my mind was the thought that I couldn’t say, “It’ll be alright, Tommy" because he and I both knew it wasn’t up to me.

Many would say Tommy had been given his chances and had blown them, even Tommy’s own sense of right and wrong (operated dispassionately) might have said this - “you takes your chances, you pays your price". And yet, we humans are in the business of making mistakes and ignoring warnings. It’s in our nature to fail, to resist advice and counsel. We then, who form that part of society that judges and punishes, we then, the arbiters of morals, laws and ethics must allow passion to affect our decisions, we must permit our humanity to balance, and even overrule, our logic. The Tommies of this world need constant and repeated forgiveness, the space to make mistakes and learn from their weaknesses - for how will they ever change without the space and room to gain this their maturity, to understand their own failings ?

Would that these words should come from Tommy, but, alas, he had neither the understanding nor the capability of expressing himself adequately to those who sat in judgement on him. Instead, others (apologetically) plead for him ; a solicitor to interpret the language and customs of the court, a probation officer to explain, in the refined language of the court, why Tommy should be allowed one further chance. And all the time, Tommy in the dock with forehead furrowed, standing upright with his smartly pressed shirt and shiny shoes (which the magistrate could not see), looking intent, apologetic, prepared to say anything, anything – only let me go free.

Who knows what the magistrate saw that day – a smart skinhead who looked like trouble, or a smart skinhead who looked a bit sorry for himself ? In all probability it didn’t matter, it was what other people said about Tommy that let him walk out of court instead of down to the cells. Tommy might have had a lot of muscle and a mighty voice in the hostel – but he was spoken for.

Johnny

When he came to the hostel, for stealing a pint of milk from a shop doorstep, Johnny was 23, a tall, big-boned lad with rotten teeth and untidy red hair. His body was strangely shaped, cruel, full of violent potential and marked by the effects of a gas fire explosion. The scars this explosion left showed like melted plastic on his neck and spread, dripping like paint, across his arms and down his chest and stomach.

The effects of this accident were more than physical - to Johnny they constantly reminded him of his unhappy childhood and the continuous prejudice he had to face. A succession of jobs finished prematurely because of scapegoating and mockery. Sometimes, as a defiant gesture to the snide remarks he would stride out of the hostel shirtless, goaded by a childish impulse to shock : "Yes, I'm different, and what are you going to do about it ?”

Such defiance, however, was a transient façade, since, generally, Johnny’s self-esteem was low. Seen as a freak, he tried doubly hard to please, bending over backwards for anyone who would show him some kindness. And this was how he came to be involved with the probation service, as the willing fool who committed petty crimes for others. But, he also had a mean streak through him, a stubbornness not influenced by others. Given freer rein it was to be his downfall.

The initial assessment of Johnny, intended to isolate his difficulties and weaknesses, might easily have been summarised as “everything”. There were problems with hygiene and finances, self-discipline and drinking, relationships and stress, depression and work, maturity and responsibility. Enumeration was the task, not isolation.

During the eight months of his stay at the hostel his life was crammed with drama. On several occasions he took mild overdoses of sleeping pills and enuresis tablets (for bedwetting), he frequently cut his throat and hands with safety razors and was once rushed into hospital for a heart complaint.

He befriended strange men on the local common, dabbled in glue sniffing, and most dramatic of all changed from a sycophant to a bully. Through all of this his engaging humour made him likeable and friendly, even if the jokes were always directed at himself. On a sailing trip to Holland he was once found below decks with his head in a bucket, muttering in a muffled voice "The bells! The bells!"

This young man who had absconded from another hostel because of bullying, came to us timid, mild and desperate to find favour. When he was evicted the next year he had received two letters of warning for bullying others and owed £70 in rent arrears. Was this change or degeneration?

Johnny had come to us seeking stability and love. What he found was an environment of care and trust where he was encouraged to stand up for himself and not play the Joey for others, where he was given increasing measures of trust and responsibility and where his outbursts of anger and depression were not regarded as something abnormal and threatening but were understood and accommodated.

So where did we, or he, fail ? Did he change so fast that nothing or no one could have controlled him or did we provide an environment he couldn’t handle because of the responsibility it gave him ? Or did society fail us both ? In a society demanding that individuals take responsibility for themselves, that they cope with money, food accommodation and jobs - where was this young man from an inadequate and deprived background, lacking the skills to look after himself, where was he to find his place?

Tell me how many years it takes to teach concentration ? Tell me how many years it takes to teach the self-discipline necessary to nurse a social security cheque for a month ? Tell me how many years it takes to inculcate self-respect and a sense of responsibility ? Tell me all this and I’ll give you an answer.

Johnny found the space in his time at the hostel to change, or perhaps to show us what he was really like - and it destroyed him. From a restrained, timid, young man he became assertive, aggressive, a leader of the group. This was a real part of Johnny, but not a part he could control – the discipline of freedom is far harder than the chains of constraint.

After numerous warnings, both verbal and written, Johnny was told he could no longer stay at the hostel as he was too disruptive. On the day he was evicted he begged to be allowed to stay. Trembling, and in tears, he was so shaken by the reality of the words he had been dreading to hear that he collapsed and could not stand for ten minutes. After months of asking, even demanding, to leave, the door was open and he realised the dark image of the truth than confronted him.

Do we learn from our lessons ? Does punishment prevent us from making the same mistakes again? Not for Johnny. Traumatic though the experience of eviction was, within three months it had happened again at a different hostel. From hostels to squats, from squats to park benches, relentlessly downward. Does the spiral end when you take away responsibility ? Put Johnny in prison - will he be better off ?

Here was a man for whom life was a series of disappointments, a man who had been kicked in the teeth from an early age. How can we, who know only security, know what it means to constantly fail, know what it means to measure life’s milestones in disasters, not achievements ? Who can take responsibility for that ?

Gary

Gary was one of these clients who makes you draw your breath inwardly at first sight and think “this could be trouble”. But, as the truism goes, appearances rarely tell the truth.

Gary was 18, thin not skinny, about five foot eight and had a spider tattooed on the left side of his neck, on the right side was a large black and red cobweb. The picture was completed by a gold coloured bolt through the top of his left ear and a complete absence of hair, except for his face where there was something he referred to as "my caterpillar" attempting to grow on his top lip.

Every report l read about Gary described him as “immature” or “very immature” or of "below average intelligence". Gary agreed - after I explained what immature meant.

"Yeh, l don’t act like I'm 18, do 1? " he mused candidly. "How do you get mature, man ?”

A good question I thought. Is there a formula ? If there is how do you explain it to someone who may be too immature to understand ?

Gary came from the North. He was from a large family : a sister, step-sister and two step-brothers. His natural father had left the home when he was eight, Gary was too young to understand why. One time, years later, hearing that his father was in Scarborough, Gary bought a ticket and took the train to the seaside town. When he got there he aimlessly searched the streets without even an address or a name to go by. He returned disillusioned and bitterly disappointed.

His mother couldn’t handle the kids and refused to allow her new husband any influence in decisions affecting them. Consequently, Gary got into bad company, into bad trouble and eventually into bad habits - glue sniffing.

"It's doin’ ma head in, man" he used to complain in his thick northern accent, but he couldn't get off it because what else was there to do on the dole? He'd tried to get jobs but his appearance, with his short-cropped hair and spiders, put employers off. At one site he went to for a labouring job he presented himself to the foreman who looked him up and down and said :

“Well, do you want to bugger off now, or later?"

In these circumstances he was fortunate to have a sense of humour, it was something other than the glue which kept him going.

"Oh man,” he would say “I’ve left my virginity on the bus. I went to lost property but no-one had handed it in”. It was this peculiar stoicism, a dry humour in the face of an overwhelmingly bleak future that endeared Gary to the rear of the residents. In a way that was almost characteristically Northern he expressed one lighter side of a depressing prospect that faced all the lads at the hostel.

As with so many of his companions there was a potential in Gary which was not difficult to see if only he could keep out of trouble and be given the opportunity to develop it. But, where were the opportunities? With 4 million on the dole it was a generous employer who was prepared to give an offender a chance, even one chance, because there was no room for latitude or error.

In counselling with Gary the blame for his offences was directed at him as an offender. It was his personal responsibility we emphasised time and again – if he got into trouble he only had himself to blame. No matter that he stole for money, because he’d spent his giro, next time make your giro last, we said. Though never for a moment could we dream of surviving on £9.75 a week in London.

Gary was a typical recipient of Probation Service confusion - where the desire to see people as individuals, worthy of care and attention, obscures or ignores the circumstances of their criminality.

Gary’s story was little different to that of hundreds of residents who passed through the hostel : a deprived and difficult family background, a history of truancy from school, bad company and finally trouble with the police. And yet, with each and every one the tendency was to play down the similarities and mark up the personal differences.

After a few months Gary was in trouble once more, arrested for burglary and bailed back to the hostel. A worried look agitated his expression and in supervision he confessed to being scared of going down. Why had he done it ?

“I didn’t think about it, man, I needed the money”

What could I say to that ? Get a job ? Be happy with £9.75 a week ?

It was at times like these that I felt that whatever I had to say was bound to be wrong since I could only apologise for a society that forced its poorest members to play Russian Roulette with their lives.

Jimmy Mac

Often the clients you feel most sorry for are not those who live in the hostel, but those who have left and for one reason or another are making hard going of “reality”, as it’s called in social work jargon. Jimmy Mac was one of these.

It happened to be my misfortune that I was on rota to work every Friday evening which also entailed sleeping-in until the following morning at 8 o'clock. It was my misfortune because, almost without fail I could expect the phone to ring between 12 p.m. and 2 a.m. with a distraught, depressed and generally very pissed Joe on the other end of the line.

"Can ah speak to Mrs S, please” he would mumble, slurring his words so that, had I not been able to pick up a Scots accent, he might as well have been speaking Italian. For the next few minutes we’d play ball back and forwards across the net. I would say Mrs. S. was in bed, she was tired, could he not phone in the morning ? Joe would listen while I spoke and simply repeat, after every plea on my part for the Warden’s peace, that he had to speak to Mrs. S.

“I’ve got to speak to her, I’m so depressed. She won’t let me see my bairns. The bastard won’t let me see my bairns”. This last a reference to his estranged wife.

Sometimes I could put him off, but mostly I had to put the call through. What was said then I never knew but I only had admiration for a woman who would allow her compassion to disturb a good night’s sleep.

So many of these ex-residents came back, miserable and unhappy, finding it a Herculean task to keep their heads above water when no-one had ever taught them to swim properly. The ones who did not re-offend and go down, went from place to place trying painfully to cope with money and life on the dole. They returned to the hostel every now and again looking cheerful, smiling and saying everything was “alright” ; but they the always looked thinner.

Jimmy had had a hard life as a kid in Glasgow. By his own admission had been a “little bugger” – keeping his cool was not a strong point. After 6 months he was kicked out of the hostel for assaulting another resident. But, even in that short time he’d come to identify with the staff and particularly the Warden, Mrs S. Without fail, every year afterwards he would send or bring a bunch of flowers on Mothers’ Day, and a card poignantly written.

One of the rocks in life's swirling eddies, a strong point in the confusing and rapid currents, the Warden was a figure to grasp at, a safe point to return to.

How many of these "mothers", ready to be there, ready to listen, ready to pick up the pieces – how many are there out there in Probation offices, hostels, social services, helping agencies, patching up the cracks and papering over the damage done by others ?

Uncle Jerome

Uncle Jerome was a preacher. I don’t know why I called him Uncle Jerome, it just seemed right - and it stuck.

Uncle Jerome had found God in a big way ; what sort of a God he was I could never figure out but he seemed largely fire and brimstone, full of wrath and finger-pointing judgments and not a great deal of compassion - especially for the rest of the sinners who inhabited the hostel.

Uncle J (it was a strange name especially as I was older than him and in a "position of authority”), all smiles and flashing teeth would stroll out of the hostel, lolling a little from side to side, bowing to people he passed outside the hostel. In his hand he always carried a crocodile-green leather briefcase with gold-coloured locks on the top, it made him look very business-like and quite transformed his appearance. The only item ever to have the pleasure of using this stylish convenience was Jerome’s large leather-bound and dog-eared Bible, a book which saw much use.

Jerome’s relationship with God was a very noisy one, as befits a preacher I suppose, and where other residents had to be asked to turn their radios off for fear of disturbing the neighbours, Jerome had to be requested to turn the level of praying down a few stops.

At these requests he would always grin and shrug his shoulders, swaying lightly from foot to foot and spreading his hands as if to say : “Who me ? Making noise ? !” The rather literal and traditionalist views of the “Word” that he took left him firmly of the belief that only by shouting out of windows into open space would his prayers be heard - "But Jerome", we said, “God will be deaf by now with all this shouting”.

Like many an evangelist before him he took the Bible’s exhortation to go out and convert the people as beyond interpretation. No-one escaped Jerome’s reforming zeal – “Repent ! Repent ! You are sinners and God will judge you on the last day “ – such messages were not well received in the hostel.

The mere mention of God often made other residents turn white with anger and Jerome suffered many trials, many martyrdoms, on account of his faith. Peanut butter in his bed, verbal and physical abuse – he was nor spared in the beginning, but after a few months he stopped provoking the others with his injunctions to purge themselves, and they in their turn respected him enough and left him to his own biblical ramblings and talking in tongues.

During the week he would go to different parts of London to preach usually in markets or shopping precincts where he could shout at a lot of people. As he went into his routine about the Day of Judgment, Sin, or the next coming of Christ, he would do little dances too, stamping his feet, flailing his arms and sweating profusely. More often than not he would draw the crowds as much through these antics as for what he was saying. In any case what he was saying very often did not make sense when you listened to it, but there was no telling Jerome that.

Amongst the staff there was serious concern about the state of Uncle Jerome’s mental health. And yet there were no delusions, he wasn’t claiming to be Christ or a new messiah, he was a simple servant for whom, he once told me, death would be a blessed relief since, as his body was really already dead, his spirit would then get into the ranks of the archangels. I advised him to get harp lessons as soon as possible, at which he laughed long and heartily.

Preaching was not without its perils as Uncle Jerome solemnly informed me one summer’s evening. That day, he confided, he had been preaching in Lewisham market when an egg whizzed by his ear. Undeterred, he launched into another full-blown tirade against the wages of sin and the imperative of repentance. This time he was stopped short by a potato landing full on his shiny black nose. "I loved it" he said. “It made me stronger”. I could just picture him being cabbaged to death and encouraging his assailants.

A short while later at the train station he was threatened three times with a sudden confrontation with the next train. Luckily for Jerome, or unluckily, the next train didn’t come because of a local strike. Perhaps martyrdom was Jerome’s vocation in life. And if it did nothing else except distance Uncle Jerome from reality, Christianity kept him out of criminal trouble.

Society has always had its Hyde Park speakers, its itinerant evangelists preaching the Day of Judgment – a group of people who are perhaps ever so slightly unbalanced but who don’t pose a threat to the rest of us except inasmuch that we may not want to hear what they have to say.

Uncle Jerome, with his diminutive little shuffle and cheery face, was one of the pleasantest of these latter-day performers you could hope to meet.

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Introduction

When the media is full of spy stories, trade disputes and accusations of geopolitical rivalry, it may not seem the best time to suggest that those in global education should look closely at China for inspiration.

I think it is – and here’s why.

In 2000 the Gansu Basic Education Project (GBEP) was launched in one of China’s poorest Western provinces, Gansu, in four of its poorest counties. GBEP was a pilot project addressing poverty by testing and scaling new ways of tackling long-standing issues of low access, gender inequity and poor quality in rural education. At the time China accounted for 40% of the world’s poor (that figure is close to zero today).

Aside from being the first UK project to support basic education in China, what was also unique about GBEP was that it was one of the first education system strengthening projects – addressing reform in multiple areas at the same time - and one of the first projects in China to allocate more than a quarter of its funding to training and a quarter to technical support.

The impact of the project during its six-year life was substantial – 14,000 scholarships were given to poor children (70% to girls) ; 6,200 teachers were trained ; a new inspection system was developed ; locally relevant supplementary materials were produced etc. etc.

Results were significant : by the end of the project the four counties demonstrated a dramatic rise in net enrolment rates, from 79% to 91% overall. For minority girls in one county, it rose from 54% to 80%. In another the dropout rate at Grade 1 decreased from 17% to 1.4% and in Grade 3 from 11% to 2%.

But, impressive as those results were, arguably the more interesting story of GBEP is what happened during the project – and continues to this day – in three areas that every education reform project tries to impact : localisation & capacity building, sustainability and scaling. GBEP offers twenty-five years of insights in these areas, and it’s why educators should study it even now.

To give just a few of many examples : even now there is an active Wechat group with over 40 teachers, officials and consultants still discussing, reflecting, celebrating and disseminating GBEP ideas and practices ; in 2021 there was a large-scale reunion, smaller ones happen yearly ; a course on rural education at Beijing University ran in 2021/2 focused heavily on GBEP ; and the project has featured in many articles about rural education in China, including a chapter of a book published only this year.

Nationally, a number of local project experts have worked more widely in Gansu and in other provinces on education reform, expanding and scaling GBEP experience. Internationally, GBEP has had a direct influence on the design of a number of education systems strengthening projects in Nigeria, Tanzania and Pakistan.

A short summary is given here. A fuller, more detailed article can be accessed by clicking the button below.

Andy Brock, November 2025

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好好学习，天天向上

“Study hard and improve every day”. Ubiquitous slogan found in Chinese schools. (Literally - good, good study : day, day up).

Sour, sweet, bitter and spicy : the GBEP story

Background

First, a disclaimer : I was the international Team Leader on GBEP, so I write from experience. Accordingly, take what follows with your critical faculties engaged, but do engage.

GBEP focused on four of the poorest counties in Gansu, each with significant Muslim minority populations : Dongxiang, Hezheng, Kangle and Jishishan. There were 125,000 children and 6,200 teachers in the 700+ primary schools, many of these were remote single classroom rural schools called teaching points. There were 15 initiatives in GBEP - see sample below.

Until GBEP many teachers had not been trained for years, some even decades, and any training they did receive was in the form of lectures. Few headteachers had been trained and community engagement with schools was almost non-existent. Buildings were dilapidated ; inspection was focused on compliance and looking after the poorest most disadvantaged children was not a priority.

So, while the project focused on reforming the system, what was it that led to this long-lasting influence ? What can other countries who are still struggling with some of these issues learn from this experience ?

This summary focuses on three important answers to that question : localisation & capacity building, sustainability and scaling.

Localisation & Capacity Building

The key manifestation of localisation in GBEP was the way in which local educators, from teachers to officials, quickly took on responsibility. They volunteered to be trainers, they helped to write materials and most took their participation as a learning opportunity which would be beneficial personally and might be helpful to their careers.

As a project team we promoted this – we sought out champions and encouraged them, we pushed them forward to take a lead while we supported, rather than vice-versa. Training and consultancy support was front-loaded : in the final year of the project all activities were implemented by local actors with external support being very light touch.

Some strategies happened by lucky accident – for example, local officials had to be co-opted into county training teams for teacher development and school development planning because there weren’t enough resources for external trainers. But, we found that by engaging these “middle tier” officials as trainers some of those traditionally considered gatekeepers of change were turned into poachers !

One official said :

When I review the last six years’ experience in school development planning, there is a mixture of sour, sweet, bitter and spicy. I feel deeply that the process was more important than the result. The process of these six years is the development of ourselves, as well as of schools.

Ten years after the project ended a rare post-project review was undertaken looking at the impact of the project long after completion, examining how many of the changes intended were still observable. One of the issues it highlighted was the continuing influence of the project through those educators who had been involved and had been changed by that involvement.

See also : The making of a champion : Obituary of Wang Guocai

Sustainability

The provincial teacher training authorities were shocked when the international experts said they estimated it would take about nine months to develop new teacher training materials for child-centred learning. “Why would it take so long ?” they said, “We can give it to a professor at Northwest Normal University and have it finished in two months.

A core mantra of GBEP, in fact, what became the unofficial motto, was “the process is as important as the results.” The project prioritised doing things right, not just achieving targets.

The project put together teams of local teachers, university professors, and officials. These teams, guided by experts, developed, then tested, draft materials in real classrooms with real children, and revised them based on feedback. This inclusive, iterative process produced materials that were relevant and effective. Most importantly, the process built long term capacity in those educators to do it again without external support.

In 2017 when the project was reviewed, much of that capacity was still evident. However, some of the initiatives had been changed substantially from what had been designed in the project. For example, the inspection system was quite reduced, and had adopted a numerical scoring which had been strongly resisted by specialists. In some counties participatory teaching approaches had also slipped back to chalk-and-talk.

The lesson drawn from this is that sustainability will happen on local terms no matter what external advisers or funders plan. What external support can do is create the enabling conditions for sustainability by developing systems and processes, and building networks of open-minded individuals. After the end of GBEP, despite much reduced funding for training, many of those individuals found ways to incorporate the new practices into existing systems and budgets.

See also : How Does a Teacher’s Transformation Occur? One teacher’s fascinating reflection on the painful journey of changing practice.

However, although I accepted participatory teaching in theory, my understanding was still superficial, lacking real experience. When I actually used it, I simply copied activity designs from textbooks, which felt like prosthetics that didn’t work well for me.

Scaling

The project had been designed with expansion in mind. A significant part of the project budget was allocated to reflection and dissemination activities which allowed the project to host conferences and working groups, send Gansu personnel to conferences, and visit non-Gansu counties considering educational change.

Within five years of completion GBEP’s key approaches, School Development Planning (SDP) and Participatory Approaches to teaching, were scaled up to a further 36 counties in Gansu, then expanded to 27 more counties in Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi Provinces in the UK-funded Southwest Basic Education Project (SBEP), covering 2.4 million students and 77,000 teachers.

In SBEP only SDP, Participatory Approaches to teaching and Inspection were adopted. Everything else was discarded. This made sense because the resources to support the new initiatives were much reduced and these were the interventions which had gained the most traction among educators. A SBEP Student Achievement Survey found a significant learning outcomes impact resulting from SDP - especially on more disadvantaged schools.

But, the scaling and dissemination did not stop with the end of British aid, nor was it confined to Gansu or western China. Many initiatives took place outside the project or long after it finished. In Gansu, for example, without any project resources GBEP teacher training materials were picked up, adapted and used for all trainee teachers.

Between 2010 and 2012 a Gansu expert led an NGO funded project promoting School Development Planning in eight provinces and hundreds of schools across China. And, one of GBEPs national teacher training advisers designed interactive online teacher training courses for the Ministry of Education’s countrywide National Training Programme, drawing on GBEP’s participatory methods.

Internationally, GBEP’s influence extended through international consultants involved in the project. Some of those led or designed major education projects in Nigeria, Ghana, and Pakistan, applying lessons from Gansu to new contexts, incorporating School Development Planning and participatory teaching.

These and many other unintended consequences, mostly driven by individuals, led to greater scaling of project practices across a much wider and more diverse scale than ever originally envisaged .

See also : The Ripple Effect : a warts-and-all review 10 years after project closure

Conclusion

In the years that followed the end of GBEP the Chinese government embarked on a major drive to improve rural education – with substantial additional funding targeted at rural areas. Gansu found itself in an excellent position to take advantage of this increased support, with significant numbers of teachers and officials who were well trained and prepared to improve rural education.

One of the lessons GBEP surfaces is that the cost-benefit analyses, undertaken as part of project design, tend to underestimate the catalyst effect of effective capacity building. Not only were thousands of children and teachers benefitted through GBEP support (14,000 scholarships, thousands of teachers trained etc.) but, the impact of training and support on officials, master trainers, university professors, consultants, etc. has been positive, profound, long-lasting, but little recorded.

For those designing education interventions in the global south in these times of straitened budgets, the most important lessons GBEP provides are these : if your aim is to effect lasting change, invest widely and repeatedly in training and support. If your aim is to change the education system, co-opt the administrative power of the system (the middle tier) and provide them with continuous support and training. And, if you want to scale your successes to other places, focus on what is really transferable at the cost those places can afford, while investing heavily in materials and dissemination so successes can be shared.

Ultimately, education system reform is built on the changed behaviour of people : teachers, heads, administrators, officials etc. It is only by changing the beliefs, practices and motivations of these groups of people that you can hope to reform institutions and thereby the education system itself.

Well directed and long-term investment in continuous change is almost always worthwhile and holds the additional promise, as GBEP shows, that the benefits may continue to ripple onwards and onwards, outwards and outwards, for decades.

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Select Sources : for full list click button above

Films

1. Equity in Education (2004) Interim overview of GBEP after 4 years. (16 mins)

2. Reaching the Unreached (2006). The end of project overview of GBEP (19 mins)

Films from 2017 Review

1. Escaping Poverty (2017). A film that follows the progress and setbacks of Ma Haimei and Ma Zhengqing (see films above) in 2004, 2010 and 2017. (10 mins)

2. Gansu Revisited (2017). Documentary film about the project review in 2017 with the lows and highs : no sugar coating. (15 mins)

Reports and Books

1. Lessons Learned from the Gansu Basic Education Project (2006) The lessons of GBEP, complete with failures, distilled into 85 pages. Relevant to project designers today.

2. The Ripple Effect (2017) A warts-and-all review of GBEP undertaken ten years after the project ended.

Other reading about education in China

1. Book Review of “Other Rivers” (2024) Peter Hessler. A very readable, funny and sympathetic portrait of education in China today by the author of “River Town”.

News

Breaking News : A rumour is circulating, unconfirmed but from multiple sources, that Oxford Policy Management (OPM) is following Cambridge Education in closing their education business. Education, once one of the leading sectors in DFID / FCDO, with expertise recognised around the world, is being decimated.

Save the Children Advisory Board has written a letter to the PM, Foreign Secretary and Development Minister urging them to protect support for the education of young people globally. Add your name here.

Euan Wilmshurst has produced a Global Education Events Guide 2026. This is the second year he has done it and it’s fast becoming an indispensable resource. Check it out to see what’s happening in the global education world in 2026. It’s open source so add to it if your event is not listed.

António Guterres, UN Secretary-General has made some trenchant comments on the need to support and fund education. All good stuff, nothing a global educator would disagree with. Are these kinds of statements helpful, do they move any needles anywhere ? What do you think ?

COP30 is almost upon us. This blog on the UKFIET website summarises a session, focusing on education, held between the REAL Centre and Cambridge Partnerships for Education. Education and climate justice: Advancing a shared agenda for COP30 and beyond.

Good to see UNICEF, with support from Edt, ramping up education assistance in Gaza. But, see also this cry for help from Ahmed Issa of Scholarships for Ghazza. Please help if you can, amplify if you can’t.

Development

The Association for Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) held a conference in Accra at the end of last month. Here’s a good summary from the Hempel Foundation and another from Ben Piper.

Duncan Green has a good article called “Aid risks being increasingly confined to countries where it doesn’t work – what to do?” He argues that as aid diminishes it will increasingly be focused on the poorest and most complex countries, places where it’s difficult to get results because government itself is dysfunctional. Embedded within the article is a session with Claire Short, Kevin Watkins and Deborah Doane. Worth checking out.

AI Spy

A new sub-section as there is so much on AI and education now.

Apparently, Nigerians and Ghanaians are amongst the most enthusiastic users of AI.

Nelson Uzenabor posts about the cultural bias of Chat GPT (you guessed : (Western Europe).

Anurag Shukla raises an eye-brow at Michael Bloomberg, of all people, urging “Wait ; AI Should Stay out of Schools”. Shukla cites the State of Kerala and Sal Khan of Khan Academy as examples of those joining an increasingly vocal group.

“Now, AI can help you improve the candle. It will be the brightest ever, burn the longest, be very cheap and amazing looking, but it will never develop to the lightbulb,” he says. “To get from the candle to a lightbulb you need a human who is good at critical thinking, someone who might take a chaotic, unstructured, unpredictable approach to problem solving”. (Michael Gerlich quoted in Sophie McBain’s article in The Guardian : Are we living in a golden age of stupidity ?)

Amahra Spence, summoning her inner Freire, has this nicely written summary of AI / social media content.

The classroom is no longer bounded by school walls. It is in the endless scroll of TikTok, the algorithmically curated newsfeed, the AI-generated content that reproduces bias while claiming objectivity at an accelerated speed. Misinformation circulates faster than fact; outrage travels further than care. Political opportunists exploit these dynamics, normalising fascist rhetoric under the guise of “common sense”, pragmatism or patriotism. In such a landscape, education must be more than instruction: it must be training in discernment, in critical consciousness, in the courage to confront what is hidden.

Voices from the front

A recent news article has this intriguing quote about education in Laos, but no detail. Mobilising the army to advance education, do we need more of this attitude ? !

To address teacher shortages and reduce dropout rates in remote areas, the government will deploy volunteer soldier-teachers to underserved regions.

On October 19, President Peter Mutharika announced that starting in January 2026, both primary and secondary school education in Malawi will be free. Malawi is already struggling with the quality of education - let’s hope this is not simply more children in school not learning.

Nirmal Patel reports on how an AI assessment software was used to evaluate 10,000 handwritten exams in Rajasthan.

Great little video interviewing three girls in the Manahel Programme, Syria, one year apart. Inspiring.

Voices from the rear

(Gray and Published Research)

Noam Angrist, Claire Cullen and Janica Magat have published a paper using A/B testing to determine the best technology-based tutoring at scale for numeracy programmes. Even if you’re short of time the introduction alone should get you thinking, or calculating.

A new paper shedding light on how researchers of inclusion in education demonstrate inclusion in their own research. Who inspects the inspectors ? (Imperfectly) inclusive ways of knowing: Principles and practices for researching inclusively in the field of international education and development – An exploratory scoping review. Authors : Buckler, Ebubedike and Agbaire.

Lisandro Martin and Luis Benveniste in World Bank Blogs have a nod to Milan Kundera : “The unbearable lightness of promises”. It’s another outcomes matter / data matters / politics matters piece - but concisely and nicely written.

Good challenge from Kevin Brown on the imbalance of global philanthropy (echoes of last month’s Issue on the extreme inequality of global wealth). His post has a shocking statistic - there are 86,000 philanthropic organisations in Europe / N America and just 47 in Africa.

Children struggle to read because of outdated teaching, study says. Andrew Jack in the FT on the GEEAP study launched at ADEA in Ghana advocating for improved methods of foundational literacy.

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And finally

In this month of Remembrance for those who have died in WWI and WWII the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of African and Asian soldiers and labourers is often overlooked or underplayed.

Casualty data is sketchy for military personnel and even more so for labourers. Many Chinese labourers in Europe most likely died of Spanish flu shortly after the end of the First World War - probably including Gao Lao Niu, the labourer whose headstone appears below. His grave is one of 36 Chinese in this cemetery.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them

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Introduction

In 2000 the Gansu Basic Education Project (GBEP) was launched in one of China’s poorest Western provinces, Gansu, in four of its poorest counties. GBEP was a pilot project addressing poverty by testing and scaling new ways of tackling long-standing issues of low access, gender inequity and poor quality in rural education. At the time China accounted for 40% of the world’s poor (that figure is close to zero today).

Aside from being the first UK project to support basic education in China, what was also unique about GBEP was that it was one of the first education system strengthening projects – addressing reform in multiple areas at the same time - and one of the first projects in China to allocate more than a quarter of its funding to training and the same to technical support. A third of the funds were spent on constructing and rehabilitating schools.

The project focused on four of the poorest counties : Dongxiang, Hezheng, Kangle and Jishishan. Each had significant Muslim minority populations and catered to 125,000 children and 6,200 teachers in the 700+ primary schools, many of which were single classroom rural schools called teaching points.

Fifteen new initiatives were introduced including :

Prior to GBEP many teachers had not been trained for years, some even decades, and any training they did receive was in the form of lectures. Few headteachers had been trained in leadership, and community engagement with schools was almost non-existent.

I remember asking one headteacher what defined a good school ? He answered “You hear chanting as you approach”.

After six years of project support the four counties demonstrated a dramatic rise in net enrolment rates, from 79% to 91% overall. For minority girls in one county, it rose from 54% to 80%. In another the dropout rate at Grade 1 decreased from 17% to 1.4% and in Grade 3 from 11% to 2%.

But, impressive as those results were, arguably the more interesting story of GBEP is the impact it had on the pupils, teachers, officials and consultants who took part in project – how this project transformed many lives and careers, and continues to impact to this day.

To give just a few of many examples : even now there is an active Wechat group with over 40 teachers, officials and consultants still discussing, reflecting, celebrating and disseminating GBEP ideas and practices ; in 2021 there was a large-scale reunion, smaller ones happen yearly ; a course on rural education at Beijing University ran in 2021/2 focused heavily on GBEP ; the project has featured in many articles about rural education in China, including a chapter of a book published only this year.

As teachers and officials have risen in seniority - in both officialdom and academia - they have carried their experiences of this influential project with them. A number of local project experts have worked in other provinces on education reform, several are now professors. Junior officials have risen to posts of seniority and one, a former Professor at Northwest Normal University, is now a Vice-Minister of Education at national Ministry. National consultants who worked on GBEP have advised the MoE on education reform, have implemented projects in other provinces and have contributed to research on rural education.

Now, many of those who worked on the project are also retiring, and the extent to which GBEP initiatives have become institutionalised, without depending on personalities, introduces an interesting aspect to the discussion about sustainability of the changes seen in the project counties.

This article looks at four key aspects of GBEP that were influential in creating long lasting personal and systemic change :

• localisation and capacity building;

• the processes of change ;

• sustainability through change ;

• learning and scaling

Before diving into an assessment of these aspects, it’s worth acknowledging an unanswered, and maybe unanswerable, question : what happened to the 125,000 children impacted by the project?

Project impact analyses rarely look at the longer-term impacts that all education work really should be measured in i.e. cohorts, school cycles and generations. These are the true measures of impact, not simply learning outcomes measured by a snapshot of tests in the final year of a project.

But, this is also where GBEP has, to a small extent, been groundbreaking. There was a major review 11 years after the end of the project with a report called “The Ripple Effect” and several films that followed some of the children over a 15 year period. The reflections that follow draw on that later material as well as the project records (a full list with links is given at the end).

Localisation and Capacity Building

“Go fast, go alone. Go far, go together”

In China in 2000 most government policy in education was delivered from the top down. Authority and wisdom was held to be higher up the hierarchy. Deference to this idea was common ; many argued this was the best and most natural way in Chinese culture – aligning with what people expected.

But, GBEP wasn’t designed to do what people expected : it was very deliberately a pilot project and its purpose was to challenge the status quo, to try out new methods and to see whether what was successful on a small scale could be expanded.

For example, in the stakeholder workshop to help design the project, the administration only wanted to invite other officials and some headteachers. Instead, villagers, teachers, headteachers, county officials and prefecture officials were asked to join and purposely mixed together.

Rather than traditional speeches from important cadres there were a series of tasks (“games” to the people who didn’t like them) such as creating “problem trees” where educational problems were traced to causes. The opinions of villagers were accorded as much weight in the outcomes of these tasks as the provincial officials, something deeply uncomfortable for all (even the villagers). Nonetheless, gradually, those whose voices were least often heard became emboldened and the officials found themselves having to persuade rather than tell.

When the project itself began, workshops rather than meetings were a standard GBEP working method and 50% of the participants were requested to be women ; which in male-dominated rural Muslim areas caused great difficulty. To their credit the county officials made great progress in meeting this requirement.

This new approach to equity was not just about voices and representation – the biggest disagreement came over scholarships for girls. GBEP’s commitment to equity meant that we proposed to give 70% of scholarships to girls. This created heated arguments and attempts to game the system by putting girls’ names down for boys.

But, after a year of piloting, when it came discussing the allocations for the following year, the counties, on their own volition, proposed that 100% of the scholarships should be given to girls. They had seen the impact and realised that, to address historical imbalances, sometimes you have to take radical approaches.

Perhaps the most successful aspect of more inclusive approach was the engagement of parents, communities, teachers and headteachers in School Development Planning (SDP). In rural areas in Gansu, schools were seen as belonging to the government and little to do with parents. GBEP aimed to change that relationship by engaging parents in the planning of the school’s development. Community meetings were held, teachers visited parents of those not enrolled, meetings were held with parents to discuss children’s academic progress, the school shared problems about financing and resources – seeking community support.

The result was improved enrolment, greater morale and a clear and transparent plan that could be communicated widely. SDP became the cornerstone of a reformed inspection system, also piloted by the project. Using the SDP to judge how the school saw itself and its ambitions allowed inspectors to engage in a much richer and more useful conversation about the academic progress of children.

This was all new. Some took to it, champions who were energised by the opportunity to really make changes. Others resisted, often scared by the changes, and many suspicious of the involvement of foreign experts. But, as the old saying goes, we were feeling the stones on our way across the river : “摸着石头过河Mōzhe shítou guòhé” .

We were doing it together, but for many (including some experts) it was confusing. We were trusting that if our goals were clear, the path to get there would be found together. And that’s why the emphasis on the process of creating that path became so important.

The Process of Change

“Do the right thing by doing things right”

By the end of GBEP, in 2006, a mantra had become so ingrained and so often said that it had become the unofficial motto of the project : “the process is as important as the results”. Understanding why is another key insight into GBEP’s lasting influence.

On one level the phrase was banal – and simply reminded all who worked on the project that there are many ways of achieving results – but, also warned that not all ways have equal value. But, at a more profound level, it highlighted a key aspect of the GBEP approach – that we cared about doing things right, not only doing the right thing. Yes, results were important but so too was the path taken to achieve them. As the old saying goes : “If you don’t know where you are going, any path will take you there”.

A good example of this is the development of teacher training materials to train primary school teachers. At the beginning of the project the provincial teacher training authorities were shocked when the international experts said they estimated it would take about nine months to develop the new materials. “Why would it take so long ?” they said, “We can give it to a professor at Northwest Normal University and have it finished in two months”.

The reason it took nine months, was that materials were developed by teams that included local teachers, university professors, officials and experts. Some of these also visited other countries to be exposed to different systems. Materials were also tested as they were developed – with children. The draft materials were trialled in real lessons by the writers, with real teachers giving feedback, then revised before finally being published. This all took time, but the result was much better-quality teaching materials reflecting real classroom realities and pitched at the right levels for primary school teachers.

In another example, the project tested out a school feeding programme and trialled a textbook revolving fund. Each of these initiatives was carefully developed with local input, trialled and evaluated. In both cases the results were not positive enough to expand the pilot – saving time and expense in the long run.

The emphasis placed on undertaking slower, more inclusive processes to achieve results, created an environment of experimentation where failure was permitted. It also recognised that creating capacity through collaborative working took longer but was a valuable exercise in its own right. The thinking was not dissimilar to tech start-ups today who see learning from failure as part of the road to their success. But, not all agreed, and for some local counterparts it was frustrating and too slow.

Another advantage of this method was that in the process of debate, creation and testing, whether of materials or methods, open and hidden resistance was revealed. Some was good resistance (highlighting poor appreciation of local realities) and some was bad resistance (laziness or self-interest). Development teams had to either address this resistance head on and overcome it, or bend to it and change. But, there could be no real progress without differences resolved.

One area of potential resistance that the project avoided - by chance - was the gatekeeping attitudes of local officials (the middle tier). Early on, the project co-opted local officials at the county and prefecture level as trainers in SDP and Inspection.

This came about almost accidentally because there were insufficient funds for external trainers. By co-opting them as trainers, these officials had to really engage deeply with the project in order to understand the change the project was trying to achieve - they had to become the vanguard of that change.

The benefit was that by making them champions of change they were prevented from exercising their administrative power unthinkingly and those who were keen to see change (younger officials) were emboldened to embrace it. It also created a critical mass of officials at the county level who, as they became more deeply involved in delivering the project, had to become advocates for equity and inclusion since these were foundational principles. many reflected on the personal change this created in their attitude to exercising authority.

When I review the last six years’ experience in school development planning, there is a mixture of sour, sweet, bitter and spicy. I feel deeply that the process was more important than the result. The process of these six years is the development of ourselves, as well as of schools. (Wang Guo Cai, County Official)

GBEP’s impact was also greater because it aimed to reform the whole education system. Many education projects focus on one or two areas only : teacher education or EMIS for example. Because GBEP focused on multiple change initiatives simultaneously, the attempt to impact the education system became catalytic and reinforcing : change in teacher training was complemented by change in inspections, which was complemented by change in school development planning etc. etc.

But, processes have to be implemented by people and to be consistent over time. The relationships between local, national and international educators were the bedrock of making that change happen.

Sustainability through Change

“Unfreeze-change-refreeze”

GBEP set out to change and improve educational practices. To change practices you need to change behaviour ; to change behaviour you need to change beliefs ; to change beliefs you need to find a reason why – a motivation.

This is similar to what the organisational philosopher, Kurt Lewin, proposed as a three stage “unfreeze-change-refreeze” model of change that tries to explain the process that those who change practices need to go through and suggested that for external support to be effective it should be interventionist, not diagnostic.

All of this change takes place in the minds of individuals and institutions are largely groups of individuals, following processes, united by common beliefs. To adopt a new belief people need to break or discard an old one, have a motivation for doing so, and see a reason why a new belief is better for them.

In a school, teachers have to see that something is not working or could be better (requires reflection), have to see an alternative (requires demonstration) and then have to have an incentive to change practices that they may have used for years (requires carrots and / or sticks).

This kind of change is profound, unsettling, iterative and needs constant support and reinforcement (see Zeng Tao’s reflection below). GBEP was designed to provide this – and it is why so much of the resource was allocated to the support of experts and training. Like individuals, it often takes people unconnected to us (not friends / family / co-workers) to show us where we could be doing better.

However, although I accepted participatory teaching in theory, my understanding was still superficial, lacking real experience. When I actually used it, I simply copied activity designs from textbooks, which felt like prosthetics that didn’t work well for me. (Teacher Zeng Tao on her 3-year struggle to accept participatory teaching methods).

GBEP was the first education project in China to engage so many national and international experts – accounting for over a quarter of the budget. Another quarter was spent on training and only a third was spent on rehabilitation and construction of schools.

In contrast, a typical World Bank education project in China might spend 70% on construction, 20% on training and 5% on experts. As a pilot project the costs were necessarily higher – on subsequent projects, like the expansion to 36 more counties in Gansu, and on SBEP, the technical assistance costs were much lower (c. 10-15%) as there did not need to be such intensive support for piloting.

The emphasis on expert support was a key characteristic of the long-term sustainability of GBEP practices and ideas. In each of the project technical areas there was a tripartite relationship between an international expert, a national expert and a provincial, prefecture or county level counterpart.

To many this looked like overkill – why so many people ? And certainly, if the project had been funded by the Chinese government alone the international layer could have been cut out (along with international experience).

What gave these partnerships strength was that the international experts brought knowledge and practical experience of other rural education systems in the world, and successful approaches to address common issues such as access, equity and quality. The national experts brought an exposure to international education and an understanding of China’s national policy and practice. Local counterparts brought knowledge of practical realities on the ground. It was the combination of this experience that made the quality of what GBEP did so strong : informed by international best practice, designed to align with national government policy and adjusted to reflect local realities.

Of these three, the national experts were the most important : the real glue that held the tripartite relationship together, and the people who created trust between international experts and local implementers. Their role was unique in several ways. They gave confidence to the local counterpart – they spoke the same language, shared the same culture, understood the same national political realities.

Most of the national consultants were well known academics from Beijing University, Tsinghua University and Beijing Normal University. The national experts also gave confidence to the international experts – they generally spoke English, shared similar technical understandings, but stood independently of both local and international political pressures.

In the initial stages of the project national experts were indispensable in helping translate unfamiliar concepts such as participatory teaching or school development planning in ways that could be understood and accepted. This is not only a matter of language – an interpreter could have done that. It is a matter of helping, by example and persuasion, to understand concepts, work out how to introduce those concepts into educational practice and ultimately help embed those concepts so they become part of local practice.

The international experts had decades of experience in working in poor rural schools to implement this kind of change, but they didn’t know China well. National experts knew that China at this time was moving in this direction, so the project aligned with national policy. But, even they were not familiar with the practicalities of making these changes in resource poor areas.

How do demonstrate how participatory approaches actually work ? How do you reassure teachers about the impact on pupils ? Typically, piloting education changes in China would involve starting with the best schools in the best areas first, not some of the worst !

Thus, international experts took the lead in the early stages, then national experts took on greater responsibility, until finally the balance shifted to local counterparts leading the whole process with national consultants supporting, and international consultants barely involved. In this way, over the 6-year life of the project, the approaches to participatory teaching become embedded and contextualised and a wide cadre of local expertise was developed.

The GBEP approach may appear costly, but that is because the real benefits have been underrepresented by only looking at the benefits in the project period. Taking an intensive coaching / training approach over several years not only yields better results but also has a ripple effect that, as this reflection shows, is rarely captured, but has an impact on people and institutions that can be profound and long-lasting.

Learning and Scaling

“The ripple effect”

The main reason we are still talking about GBEP today is due to the positive influence the project experience had on the wide range of educators engaged in the project. That influence was largely on individuals and reflected the multiple approaches to engagement, the many opportunities for training, the collaborative and inclusive working methods used and the relationship with external influences through experts.

There were also many opportunities for reflection within the project – both in terms of the lessons learned from piloting and from reflecting on how relationships helping bring about change. Many of those individuals have gone on in their own careers to influence institutions, in Gansu and other Chinese provinces, and at a national and international level.

For example, Professor Sun Dongmei, who was a local teacher expert during GBEP, became the education director and general consultant of the Mingde Foundation in mainland China which widely promoted SDP using the approach from GBEP, with added school self-diagnosis and evaluation. This was implemented in hundreds of schools across eight provinces.

Professor Chen Xiangming of Beijing University designed online teacher training courses for the Ministry of Education that were interactive and participatory, drawing on her experience with GBEP. The positive response to these courses was part of the impetus for the Ministry of Education to start the National Training Program. The influence of participatory methods from GBEP is seen in the increasing requirement for participation in teaching and research in subsequent National Training Programs.

During the project life, and for many years after, hundreds of educators visited GBEP schools to learn about the different initiatives. In one school alone, in Hezheng County, He Long, the headteacher received over 400 visits in one year ! International visitors also came from South Africa, Pakistan, Vietnam and Bangladesh.

Nationally, DFID funded a second project called the Southwest Basic Education Project, covering 27 counties in Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi. The project took SDP, Participatory Approaches and Inspection, and the lessons learned from each, and scaled up across these four provinces covering 2.4m pupils, 8,000 schools and 88,000 teachers. The SBEP Student Achievement Survey found a significant learning outcomes impact resulting from SDP - especially on more disadvantaged schools.

Internationally, GBEP has also had an influence not widely recognised and little known within China. Cambridge Education, the organisation that engaged the international and national experts is one of the largest specialist education consultancies in the UK. Between 2008 and 2021 the company won a number of high-profile projects whose design was influenced and shaped by the experiences of GBEP.

For example, in Nigeria in 2008, Cambridge Education won an 8-year education project to improve access and quality in 6 Nigerian States. Key components of this project including School Development Planning and Participatory Approaches to teaching drew directly, but not exclusively, on the experience of Gansu. The bid designer and lead on teacher training for this project was John Martin, also the lead international Teacher Training expert in Gansu.

In Ghana in 2014 Cambridge Education started implementing a project focused on enhancing the practical element of initial teacher training, called T-Tel. The design of the intervention drew heavily on the experience of working closely with Northwest Normal University to pilot a new teacher training curriculum for trainee teachers, including greater time spent in the classroom learning hands-on skills. Again, John Martin was the project designer.

A third example was in Pakistan, Cambridge Education won a World Bank project to support reform of primary education in the Punjab. Hu Wenbin, one of two Deputy Team Leaders of GBEP took on the role of Team Leader. In his personal reflection Wenbin spoke candidly about how he used the experiences in Gansu to shape the approach taken to education reform and project management in the Punjab.

These are just a few examples of what is estimated to be at least half a dozen major education projects implemented by Cambridge Education that can trace influences back to GBEP. Separately, many of the 20 or so international experts on the project took their learning into other countries and other work.

GBEP is an example of something rarely captured in the literature of education development projects : a project with “ripple effect”. The initial project inputs over only a six-year period have had such deep impact on those engaged that, like a stone thrown into a pond, the impact keeps rippling outwards like waves, making wider and wider circles. It gives a clear example of how the right investments, made in the right ways with the right people, can have multiplier effects far beyond those originally intended.

Conclusion

In the years that followed the end of GBEP the Chinese government embarked on a major drive to improve rural education – with substantial additional funding targeted at rural areas. Over the first decade of this century education expenditure as a % of GDP rose from 2.9%-4.3%, a significant change (see chart below).

Gansu found itself in an excellent position to take advantage of this increased support, with significant numbers of teachers and officials who were well trained and prepared to improve rural education using the new funds.

Nonetheless, there were and are sceptics in China. Some saw GBEP as a “foreign project” with “foreign” ideas, difficult to replicate due to the outsize investment. Over the years those objections have diminished somewhat due to the numerous examples of Chinese provinces and counties implementing GBEP inspired initiatives with their own resources.

Others think the claims of influence made for GBEP are too large and underestimate the fact that what mattered most to rural Chinese education was not the example of GBEP but rather the massive injection of financial support to rural education that happened after 2008.

So many years after the project this may not be the most important discussion : trying to capture the essence of a project like this, and its influences, will always be more of an art than a science, and the threads more tentative the more time passes.

Nevertheless, there are some areas where it is easier to draw firmer conclusions. One of those is that cost-benefit analyses, undertaken as part of project design, tend to underestimate the catalyst effect of effective capacity building. Not only were thousands of children and teachers benefitted through GBEP support (14,000 scholarships, thousands of teachers trained etc.) but, the impact of training and support on officials, master trainers, university professors, consultants, etc. has been positive, profound, long-lasting – but, little recorded and even less quantified.

The duration of that impact was certainly helped by the involvement of experts and officials who were in the middle of their careers and ideally placed to carry on implementing these successful experiences in other roles and institutions. Additionally, the very wide range of both training and dissemination materials generated by the project meant that it was easy to share new ideas and practices.

Perhaps the most important lessons GBEP provides are these : if your aim is to effect lasting change, invest widely and repeatedly in training and support. If your aim is to change the education system co-opt the administrative power of the system (the middle tier) and provide them with continuous support and training. And, if you want to scale your successes to other places focus on what is really transferable at the cost those places can afford. Finally, invest heavily in materials and dissemination so there are funds to share success.

Ultimately, education system reform is the result of the changed behaviour of people : teachers, heads, administrators, officials etc. It is only by changing the beliefs, practices and motivations of these groups of people that you can hope to reform institutions and thereby the education system itself. Those practices lie at the core of what a good education system should be – a continuous learning process.

Well directed, long-term investment in helping people to explore and adopt continuous change is almost always worthwhile, and holds the additional promise, as GBEP amply demonstrates, that the benefits may continue to ripple onwards and onwards, outwards and outwards, for decades.

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Resources :

All these films plus two shorter ones can be found at youtube / mottmacdonald

Films

1. Equity in Education (2004) Interim overview of GBEP after 4 years. (16 mins)

2. Reaching the Unreached (2006). The end of project overview of GBEP (19 mins)

3. The Story of Ma Haimei (2004) The uphill struggle, against her own mother, faced by a young girl receiving a project scholarship. (5 mins)

4. The Story of Ma Zhenqing (2004) A boy who had polio as an infant, has an opportunity to go to school as GBEP initiates support to children with disabilities (4 mins)

5. Ten Years, Ten Voices (2010). A celebration of DFID’s ten years of support to education in China (8 mins)

Films from 2017 Review

1. Escaping Poverty (2017). A film that follows the progress and setbacks of Ma Haimei and Ma Zhengqing (see films above) in 2004, 2010 and 2017. (10 mins)

2. Educating a Generation (2017). The stories of four girls who received scholarships through GBEP – and met Tony Blair - showing the impact it had on their lives. (9 mins)

3. Gansu Revisited (2017). Documentary film about the project review in 2017 with the lows and highs : no sugar coating. (15 mins)

Reports and Books

1. Lessons Learned from the Gansu Basic Education Project (2006) The lessons of GBEP, complete with failures, distilled into 85 pages. Relevant to project designers today.

2. The Ripple Effect (2017) A review of GBEP undertaken ten years after the project ended.

3. The Making of a Champion : Obituary Wang Guocai – how a champion stepped forward

4. How Does a Teacher’s Transformation Occur? Really insightful reflection by a Gansu teacher on the long and painful process of changing teaching practices. Zeng Tao, Chen Xiangming

5. SBEP Student Achievement Survey. (2012)

6. Moving Mountains Stone by Stone. (2009) DAA Brock. International Journal of Education Development. Article about GBEP

Other reading about education in China

1. Book Review of “Other Rivers” (2024) Peter Hessler. A very readable, funny and sympathetic portrait of education in China today by the author of “River Town”.

2. “New Pathways of Rural Education in China” (2024) Jialing Han. Chapter 6 on Gansu.

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Introduction (by Chen Xiangming):

In mid-December 2003, as a consultant expert for the Gansu Basic Education Project’s teacher training, I organized and participated in a summary conference reviewing three years of teacher training work. At the meeting, a teacher from Lanzhou Secondary Normal School shared a heartfelt account of her own transformation, vividly illustrating the gradual change a teacher undergoes during an educational reform.

The subsequent discussion among participants about the factors that triggered her change prompted me to reflect further: What internal motivation and external conditions are needed for teachers to change their beliefs and behaviours? How should these two forces work together to create synergy for teacher transformation? What is the relationship between individual teacher change and their environment (even the national education context)? How does an externally initiated education reform become implemented in each teacher’s specific actions? And how can changes in individual teacher behaviour, in turn, influence and shape the design, implementation, and promotion of the reform?

Below is Teacher Zeng Tao’s self-narrative and my brief commentary. The purpose of presenting this case is to introduce a form of teacher professional development in a vivid and concrete way, to explore the factors influencing teacher change and their interrelationships, and to examine the dialectical relationship of mutual restriction and promotion between these factors and teacher change.

Self-Narrative by Zeng Tao

I am an ordinary teacher at a secondary normal school with over ten years of teaching experience. In July 2001, I began to encounter participatory teaching, and it has been more than two years since then. During this process, both my internal thinking and external behaviour have undergone significant changes. This transformation can be divided into three stages:

1. Rejection-Complaint Stage

In July 2001, I participated in the Sino-British project’s teacher training for the first time, which was also my first exposure to participatory teaching. Initially, I found this approach novel and quite different from my previous teaching methods, and the learning felt relaxed and enjoyable. However, as the training progressed, the novelty wore off and was replaced by boredom. I felt that the “activity—discussion—activity—discussion” format was not very meaningful.

In August, I became a trainer myself, using participatory methods to train teachers from other normal schools. My role shifted from participant to trainer. At this point, I completely rejected participatory teaching. The main reason was that this method was very different from my previous teaching style. Over ten years of teaching had ingrained a fixed mindset and teaching habits. I was used to planning lessons, choosing methods, and designing models from the teacher’s perspective, and to lecturing extensively in class. Now, being asked to change my habits and start anew was psychologically difficult to accept.

Additionally, I hadn’t truly experienced or understood the philosophy of participatory teaching during the training, only grasping its external form. As a result, when organizing activities, I merely imitated my own trainers superficially, lacking genuine connection between myself, the activities, and the participants. I noticed that many participants seemed to be discussing, but their discussions were unrelated to the lesson content. I was aware of this but felt powerless. I found it hard to integrate into the classroom and communicate effectively with participants. Every class felt tedious and slow.

At this stage, I was extremely resistant to participatory teaching. I often complained to a college classmate who was a member of the project team and a strong advocate of participatory teaching. She initially responded with silence, but eventually said, “How much do you really know about participatory teaching? Have you ever taken the time to understand and study it? Why are so many experts and teachers researching it? Don’t be quick to deny what you don’t understand.” Although I didn’t agree with her at the time, her words did make me think.

2. Acceptance—Dependence Stage

The principal of my school was also a member of the project team and a strong proponent of participatory teaching. He frequently introduced participatory teaching at school meetings, shared his experiences, and required teachers to try it in their classes. He believed this method aligned with the current curriculum reform in China; normal schools are the main institutions for pre-service teacher training and should meet the needs of primary and secondary education reform. If normal school teachers don’t change their educational concepts and teaching behaviours, they will struggle to survive in the competitive environment.

Under the school’s advocacy, some teachers began to act. Participatory teaching appeared in open classes and graduation demonstration lessons. Under this pressure, I felt I had to change. I started to reflect on what my classmate and principal had said and slowly tried using this method in my own teaching.

However, although I accepted participatory teaching in theory, my understanding was still superficial, lacking real experience. When I actually used it, I simply copied activity designs from textbooks, which felt like prosthetics that didn’t work well for me. I couldn’t use them flexibly and often felt powerless and incompetent, even doubting my own abilities.

After one class, I called my classmate and said, “I feel so stupid, like I don’t have the ability to use participatory teaching.” She asked why I felt that way, listened to my experience, and said, “You’re a living person, why always copy others? You can integrate your own ideas into the textbook content and adapt it to your teaching reality. Your sense of failure means you’re aware of your shortcomings and starting to improve.” She encouraged me to be patient, persistent, and reflective, and offered advice for my doubts. Gradually, I started to find my footing.

3. Integration—Innovation Stage

When one’s mindset changes, wisdom sparks. In July 2003, I participated as a trainer in the project’s teacher training for the third time. I was now enthusiastic about participatory teaching, reflecting on my previous work and trying to design my own activities. Initially, I focused on making activities fun and engaging, neglecting their fundamental purpose. After a lively class, I wondered, “Did I achieve the teaching goals? Was the activity design reasonable? What did the participants actually learn?”

With these questions, I called my classmate again. She listened to my activity design and process, helped me analyze the reasons for my doubts, and suggested I record my feelings after each class as valuable resources for improvement. With her help, I paid more attention to the connections between myself, the participants, the activities, and the teaching goals. Over time, my understanding and experience deepened. I began to think from multiple perspectives when designing activities and to listen more during the process. I felt I had entered a new teaching realm, and the old “routine” mindset was replaced by a passion for creativity and innovation. My sense of success and confidence returned.

In November 2003, I taught the “Children’s Learning Strategies” course for three women’s classes in the project. I rearranged some content and activity designs based on my and the students’ actual situations and the teaching goals. Each class, through interaction, we explored each other’s potential. I tried to record my feelings and insights from the students, using them as a basis for improvement. At this point, I truly felt integrated into participatory teaching. Although my classes still had shortcomings, I now enjoyed using this method. It allowed me to experience the beauty of creativity in teaching and the joy of teacher growth, enabling both myself and my students to grow and progress together.

Commentary (by Chen Xiangming):

A teacher’s transformation is a long and difficult process, not something that happens overnight. Teacher Zeng’s change took three years, going through three stages: rejection—complaint, acceptance—dependence, integration—innovation. Initially, she found participatory teaching very different and difficult, leading to resistance. When there is mental resistance, it’s easy to blame external factors rather than oneself. Later, although she accepted the concept, she hadn’t truly grasped its essence and merely copied the form, resulting in a strong sense of powerlessness. Through repeated attempts and reflection, she finally understood the purpose and meaning of participation, dared to innovate, and experienced the joy of creation and teacher growth. At this point, she had reached a state of professional development where she could flexibly adjust her beliefs and behaviours beyond textbook authority and external forms.

So, how did Teacher Zeng’s transformation occur? Clearly, it required not only her own qualities and efforts but also peer support, a favourable professional development environment, and positive interaction between the environment and the teacher.

First, regarding Teacher Zeng’s own qualities, she is ambitious, thoughtful, quick to react, creative, and reflective. Although she complained at first, this showed she was thinking and had her own views, not passively accepting. When she depended too much on textbooks and trainers, she could sense her discomfort and tried to overcome it. She designed her own activities, adjusted them to learners’ needs, and regularly wrote reflective notes.

Her transformation was also aided by peer support. Her college classmate, a project team member and advocate of participatory methods, listened patiently to her complaints, provided understanding and support, and offered technical guidance. Having a safe space to express dissatisfaction and incompetence gave Teacher Zeng room to explore the reasons for her resistance and unfamiliarity. This peer acted as a mirror, helping her see herself more clearly.

Besides personal reflection and peer support, the school’s overall reform environment played a role. The principal, a key project member, had unique insights and linked new ideas to the school’s development, persuading and mobilizing teachers. Under strong advocacy, many teachers took action, creating a reform atmosphere that pressured Teacher Zeng to change.

Pressure came not only from colleagues and leaders but also from national education reform trends—curriculum reform required teachers to focus on student needs and participation, and normal school reform threatened the survival of teachers. Teacher Zeng hinted that without reform, survival would be difficult, referring to institutional restructuring and market competition. If teachers don’t adapt, they risk being eliminated—an external motivation for change.

On a more abstract level, teacher change is also influenced by academic authority. When her classmate reminded her that many experts and scholars study participatory teaching, the implication was clear: experts are trustworthy, and their knowledge and positions are authoritative. Our society values professional authority, and the project’s experts came from renowned domestic and international institutions. Teachers’ discomfort and scepticism toward unfamiliar methods were partially alleviated by academic authority.

Although expert authority is not unquestionable, reform does need professional guidance. Reform rarely happens automatically within schools, especially when rigid structures and routines exist. An externally initiated reform, if well-designed and supported, can impact school reform and teacher development, shaking up existing mindsets and interacting with internal reform desires and potential. If external reform doesn’t integrate with internal motivation and conditions, it’s hard to implement effectively. The Sino-British project emphasized participation and provided necessary institutional and material support, giving teachers ample opportunity to understand their needs and potential for change.

Teacher Zeng’s transformation was influenced by various factors (personal and external), but it’s not a dualistic process. As an active “actor,” she is part of the educational “reality.” When reform arrives, the obstacles she faces are also institutional sedimentation from long-standing teaching norms. Teachers’ habitual “transmission” methods are not just personal behaviors but reproduce norms and construct their own “reality.” Resistance to unfamiliar methods is not just personal; it’s rooted in the security provided by routine. Reform shakes this security, causing anxiety and doubt, which can reinforce old norms and hinder reform. When teachers reconstruct educational reality, they are also constrained by existing norms—forming a dynamic interaction between individual and institution, micro and macro, structure and agency, subjective and objective.

Because of this interaction, teachers’ responses to reform are complexly influenced by institutional factors and can also promote reform. Individual changes can aggregate into group behaviour, providing reflective monitoring for reform design and implementation. For example, when many teachers resisted participatory teaching, the project organized workshops to analyse mindset changes; when teachers used participatory methods mechanically, the project arranged video analysis; when teachers designed activities more freely, the project held experience-sharing sessions. Teacher Zeng’s case was used as a discussion material because her transformation made project leaders realize that individual agency can effectively drive the project’s overall operation.

From this analysis, teacher professional development depends on the positive interaction between personal motivation, interests, beliefs, and macro-level systems, social environment, and historical accumulation. At the same time, teacher development is not just passively controlled by external conditions. Teachers’ reflection on their own consciousness and behaviour is itself a positive response to the environment, participating in the active reconstruction of institutional reform. Therefore, analysing teacher change requires understanding both their “discursive consciousness” (what they can articulate and perceive personally) and their “practical consciousness” (what is manifested in their actions and intertwined with educational systems, historical development, and socio-economic context). These factors provide generative meaning for individual change and broad temporal and historical perspectives for teacher development research.

The greatest prize for those working in international development is sustainable behaviour change and the most important way to secure that prize is to find effective local champions. In the world of development education Wang Guo Cai was one of the most effective and influential local champions – most likely without his even knowing it.

He was a tall man with an open, friendly face and chubby cheeks. He always seemed a little shy, but smiled often. It was his eyes that told you that he was engaged, he was listening – and often that he was bursting to speak. And when he spoke he commanded attention. Not in an authoritative, way – in fact, his voice was a little nasal and lightly pitched – but, he spoke passionately and often with an urgency which made people take notice.

For a rural Chinese official he could also be unusually critical of local practices, a courageous habit given the unforeseen risks.

Wang Guo Cai became involved in the Gansu Basic Education Project (GBEP) in 2000 as we began to pilot a number of initiatives to improve the access and quality of basic education in four very poor rural counties in this Western province in a predominantly Muslim area (though he himself was Han). One of those initiatives was School Development Planning – where the aim was to bring the school and community closer together to focus on solving the problem of low enrolment by girls and disadvantaged children and poor standards of achievement.

Our design meant that we needed trainers to train over 700 primary and junior middle school headteachers, senior teachers and their local community representatives. The sheer numbers meant that we had no option but to train some of the local officials to become trainers. That had not been the original design, which envisaged using professional trainers or consultants to undertake the training. But, the numbers to be reached in a short time frame together with the remote nature of the counties being supported meant we had to adapt our design to use officials as trainers.

And so, what started out as a pragmatic solution to a logistical problem became, accidentally, the bedrock of our sustainable change strategy – one we went on to incorporate, deliberately, in the design of many other systems strengthening projects around the world.

Because, by using officials as trainers we turned the traditional gatekeepers of the system into the most powerful advocates for change. As local officials they had power, influence and resources in their small fiefdoms. When they saw the need for change and realised they could use external funding and expertise to help bring that about, they became the agents of change themselves.

But, first they had to be persuaded.

Wang Guo Cai was the first and most enthusiastic of these local officials to really understand the type of change GBEP was driving at and to throw his whole weight behind it. He attended a training session on School Development Planning that we held in Jishishan where he was a county official - and made an instant impression on us and the direction of the programme.

We had been prepared for a slow start to the training, with lots of resistance and questioning – why was this needed, wasn’t it foreign and not suited to the local context etc ? And those attitudes certainly came out, but they were also countered by the enthusiasm for change that Wang Guo Cai, and one or two other bolder officials, expressed. A lively and sometimes heated discussion about the need for change, and its shape, took place among these officials.

The impact of this was to create a momentum for change, a readiness to discuss it and a readiness to accept it. That debate and its positive outcome influenced similar debates in other project initiatives – gender, teacher training, disability, early years, stipends etc. It was the start of the snowball : a lot of other snow had to gather to increase that momentum – but it needed a Wang Guo Cai, a local champion, to initiate it, believe in it, advocate for it.

At the end of the project Wang Guo Cai, reflecting on the GBEP experience, wrote :

“When I review the last six years’ experience in school development planning, there is a mixture of sour, sweet, bitter and spicy. I feel deeply that the process was more important than the result. The process of these six years is the development of ourselves, as well as of schools.”

Wang Guo Cai went on to become engaged in many different aspects of the work we piloted including reform of the inspection system from a tick-box compliance model to one which focused on learning and supported schools. In each of those areas he showed the same enthusiasm, the same curiosity and inquisitive nature, the same passion and humour that made him so likeable and supportive.

Quite quickly other champions emerged – other county and prefecture officials, some influential headteachers, some local teachers who became effective trainers. Behaviour change needs a critical mass to take root. People have to see that change is possible, but, someone needs to take the first step. Without those initial champions nothing takes hold.

I doubt whether Wang Guo Cai ever appreciated the influence he had, not just on the reform process in Gansu, but much further afield. His enthusiasm for change and influence in helping stimulate that first debate led to a ripple effect of enthusiasm within the project. That ultimately led to success in the project overall….which in turn stimulated interest and support for an expanded project in 36 more counties in Gansu…which in turn led to a project across four more Provinces under the South West Basic Education Project (SBEP)….which has led to even more examples of influence across China…and even further afield, internationally (see The Ripple Effect, a report about the influence of GBEP).

In fact, the methodology of using local officials as trainers in education projects has been a key feature of the system strengthening approach Cambridge Education has developed ever since that time, in major projects in Nigeria, Tanzania, Pakistan, South Sudan, Uganda, etc. That approach was born from the success we found in Gansu, and, although it was not unique, the way we, as a company, adopted it as a systematic and deliberate approach to local change made it a defining characteristic of our approach to making change happen in education systems.

None of this is to say that Wang Guo Cai was solely responsible for this success and influence. But, as the saying goes : “a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”. Wang Guo Cai could easily be credited as that single step.

By the end of the project in 2006 GBEP had provided scholarships to 14,000 children, 70% to girls ; 6,200 teachers had received multiple training, 700 headteachers had been trained and 180 schools had been renovated or built. Among the key outcomes were that net enrolment rose by 12% overall and 26% for minority girls – in just six years.

Eleven years after the end of the project, I and two colleagues revisited Gansu to see whether what we had piloted through GBEP in those six years had been sustainable, to see what remained (GBEP revisited film). We were excited to meet Wang Guo Cai again in Jishishan, still in the county education bureau, but now in charge of the Inspection Department. He enthusiastically confirmed that the learning-focused inspection system that we had piloted (inspectors had to spend at least 50% of their time in classes observing lessons) not only continued but had influenced the design of the inspection system at the province level for all of Gansu’s 84 counties.

In a visit which revealed a mixed picture – mostly positive – of sustainable change from GBEP, Wang Guo Cai stood out as an example of a development champion, one of many champions still there, still influencing change. We interviewed him for a film about the visit and he was typically forthright in his analysis of what had happened to the SDP process in a number of schools after the project finished. He wanted SDP to succeed but he was direct in identifying where the barriers lay :

“After the project finished and with no external expert support, some schools became lazy. Because SDP requires the participation of the community and involves interviews and discussion, it’s very complicated. So, some headteachers choose the easy route and don’t do it. Frankly, the reason it cannot be expanded is due to our decision makers in our education departments.” (8:40 in film link above)

Wang Guo Cai personally influenced me. When we talk of how to make change happen, I always think of him and his example. I think of his directness, his boldness, his willingness to say the unpopular thing. I think of how GBEP gave him an opportunity to realise the change that he could see was needed but which, until then, was not a mainstream view.

Every successful project needs at least one Wang Guo Cai.

But, I also think of what it cost him – and all those champions of change in similar circumstances. By aligning himself so closely with a project that was foreign funded and had many consultants involved, he was often teased and, worse, suspected – particularly by those who resisted change by framing GBEP as a foreign intervention. The outspokenness which international and national consultants valued in him, was not valued by all in a conservative, rural administration.

For many days since I heard of his early death at the age of 58 I have thought of him – largely happy, grateful and appreciative thoughts. But, also many sad thoughts of a loss much too soon.

I have thought of the many times I have sat with him in the depths of a cold winter, overcoats on, warming our hands round the single stove in the Jishishan education bureau office, eating the delicious walnuts native to that area, and sipping cup after cup of steaming-hot green tea. I have thought of the many meetings I have been in with him where he has cut through obfuscation and hyperbole to make a direct, critical point ; of the many training sessions where his humour and straight talking has had everyone laughing.

Wang Guo Cai was valued and respected by so many colleagues, Chinese and international, and his influence extended far, far beyond his native area. Of him you could truly say that he personified the old adage :

“Be the change you want to see”

Andy Brock

Team Leader of the Gansu Basic Education Project Consultant Team, 1999-2006

January 2021

Book Review – Other Rivers – Peter Hessler

Peter Hessler made his name with a book called River Town, about a small, third tier city in Sichuan called Fuling where he was posted by the US Peace Corps as an English writing teacher in the late 1990s.

That book became deservedly well-known for its sensitive and textured depiction of place and people : a town undergoing rapid change and a generation of students experiencing some of the freedoms, and restrictions, of university life, as China accelerated through the fastest economic and cultural developmental journey in human history.

Hessler has a calm and understated observational style. His prose flows like the Yangtze river through Fuling – soothingly steady, swelling at times, and most interesting in the little eddies and digressions it explores.

Over 20 years later, in 2019, Hessler and his Chinese wife Leslie and twin daughters Natasha and Ariel, returned to Sichuan – this time to Chengdu and Sichuan University - to teach journalism and non-fiction writing.

As with River Town the book explores the changing cultural, political and economic landscape of China through excerpts from the essays of his students. Hessler sets them writing assignments and receives writing proposals from them. Their suggestions are sometimes surprising and bold : research into a gay bathroom in the city ; an investigation of bar culture ; an expose of irresponsible doctors ; how religion works in China. It is these authentic voices – snapshots of local journalism - that mark out both of Hessler’s books from the more traditional personal first-person memoirs or travelogues.

But, in “Other Rivers” he has the support of an additional viewpoint : from his twin girls as they navigate the Chinese public school system for the first time. And, perhaps most interestingly, his two-year stint starts just before and ends just after one of the most tumultuous social events both in China and the world : the outbreak, management and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hessler’s skill lies in painting the big picture of the pandemic - its outbreak, the severity of the government response and the numbing bureaucracy of the authorities - by picking out small details and framing personal stories that serve as emblems of the larger frame.

He recounts, for example, how the neighbourhood committee needed to record every foreigner in every compound : check their temperature ; contacts with others ; places visited, etc. Two men arrived, dutifully asked questions and when finished asked to take a photo with Hessler. Then, Hessler writes :

“After taking the picture, the man removed his jacket and asked if I would pose again in slightly different part of the living room.

“Do you know why I’m doing this? He asked with a grin.

Leslie said “Because you’re supposed to come here twice ?” “Right on!” I asked if he wanted me to change my shirt…and for good measure, I also loaned him a jacket.”

After interviewing almost all his contacts, and making a visit to Wuhan himself, Hessler concludes that the government response to COVID amplified many of the strengths and weaknesses of Chinese bureaucracy. From the initial attempted cover-up, to a second phase of a coherent and effective national strategy that reduced the severity of the impact, to a final, chaotic, phase where indecision and rigidity dictated by just one man kept restrictions for far too long.

The Hesslers’ daughters started school as the only Americans in the third grade of the Chengdu Experimental Primary School. His dry humour suffuses his descriptions of Chinese “helicopter parenting” (terrifying), the complex maths problems standard in the curriculum, the comical attitudes to risk and the pressures felt by parents and student alike to constantly compete.

For example, in Morality and Rules class a story of a little boy who plays with his father’s cigarette lighter in a field ends :

“But, he suffered extensive burns all over his body, resulting in permanent disability. Blind curiosity and careless experimentation have brought great misfortune to Mo Mo, his family and society”.

Hessler is equally good at showing how children adapt, how high standards expected become high standards met and how parents are expected to be co-authors in their children’s development. His daughters end school having become fluent in Chinese, popular with classmates and teachers, but without losing critical and questioning mindsets, rather, becoming masters at sublimating them.

In moving backwards and forward between the 1990s and 2020s Hessler also closely observes the differences between the generations. His former students, the Reform Generation, now working, married, divorced, with and without children see themselves as lucky. Their parents knew incredible hardships – the terrible famine of 1955-57, grinding poverty and the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. They were the ones who experienced the opening up, the widening of horizons and the optimism created by a roaring economy.

The COVID generation of the 2020s has known some of this, but, has also felt the constricting hand of widespread censorship and surveillance, the trauma of the COVID years and an economy deflating like an old party balloon. When Hessler surveyed his students on their desires to have children 18 out of 24 women who responded said they didn’t. One woman said :

“We are already a confused generation, and children’s upbringing requires long periods of companionship and observation and guidance, which is difficult to ensure in the face of intense social pressure.”

China’s population is falling steadily and large numbers of schools are closing every year – the pressure that is already felt across the education system can only continue to rise.

Throughout this book there is an ever-present thread of love of China and Chinese people. The students, teachers and friends Hessler reveals are complex personalities, humorous, often clear thinking and with a considerably more sophisticated understanding of western countries than their counterparts in American or Europe. They are frequently self-aware, well attuned to self-censorship, and masters of cognitive dissonance.

Hessler’s own relationship with them – the fact that even 20 years later he still corresponds regularly with most of his Fuling cohort, and now with his Chengdu cohort - is testament to his genuine affection for them (warmly reciprocated) and the source of many of the most enlightening stories in this engaging and highly readable book ; a book which allows you a glimpse beyond the curtain of current superficial stereotypes to the messy and contradictory reality of China itself.

Andy Brock, October 2025

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Introduction

This month’s guest blog is from Jake Ross, formerly of Cambridge Education, now an independent consultant. Jake presented a version of this paper in a session at the UKFIET Oxford Conference in September. Jake’s article focuses on a very large elephant of a problem, one hiding in plain sight, a problem central to the issues of education financing but rarely discussed.

The blog is Socratic in style – it’s approached best if you treat it as a Q&A in which you see how well you know the issues by answering a series of five questions. It’s most effective if you read it in the app (click Read in App above right).

Confused ? Enlightenment awaits, read on.

Andy Brock, October 2025

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The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have little. Franklin D Roosevelt

The Elephant Hiding in Plain Sight

Have you noticed ?

Something big has changed. And I don’t think we’ve got our heads around it yet. In fact, many of us haven’t even noticed that it has happened. I’m not talking about the vandalism wreaked upon the global education and development architecture in 2024/2025. I’ll come back to that.

This is much bigger.

It’s something that has happened under our noses in the global economy, gathering pace since the turn of the century. It has material consequences for development financing, as well as for the prospects of widespread well-being, harmony and justice among the populaces of high, middle and low income countries alike.

And by extension, it has real implications for education: for stopping the inter-generational transmission of poverty; for tackling and reversing the climate crisis; and for ending global inequality.

It underpins, perhaps more accurately, undermines, the economic-growth-at-all-costs agenda that western governments are clinging to, in an ever-decreasing spiral of desperate faith and doom-laden foreboding. Is it a coincidence that it is happening alongside the systematic dismantling of universal rights, trust in scientific truth and evidence, and global solidarity?

Can you guess what I’m talking about yet?

Time for a Pop Quiz

As an educator and a fan of the Socratic method, let’s see if we can tease this out through a spot of Q&A. Click on what you believe is the correct answer to Question 1 below.

The answer is 1.5%. Yep, 3.2 billion people hold just 1.5% of global wealth. Which means the other 98.5% is held by the top 60% of people (see chart below).

You’ll also be thinking the wealth distribution is quite skewed, and you’d be right. So let’s focus on the world’s millionaires.

Just 120m people in the world own USD 1m or more. That sounds like quite a lot, and it is: approximately the population of Japan, but a tiny fraction of world population.

Question 2 : so, how much of the world’s dollar wealth do those millionaires control?

The answer is 48% as shown above.

Just think about that for a second. Less than 2% of the global population owns nearly half of all global wealth. That matters: not just from an envy or theoretical Marxist perspective, but from a global justice and sustainability angle, as we shall see.

But, first, let’s drill down a bit further. Here’s the next question - select an answer.

And how many do you think there are now in 2025 ?

In the year 2000 there were fewer than 500 dollar billionaires. By 2019 that number had quadrupled to over 2,000, and just six years later there are already 3,000+. While the world has suffered anaemic growth since 2008, there’s been no shortage of growth in billionaires !

And lastly, Question 5: how much wealth do you think those billionaires own?

This one’s tricky because (unless you’re one of them) we’re simply not equipped to conceive of numbers this big. We have no frame of reference that comes close. This is an important point though: it allows billionaires to hide behind a veil of incomprehension.

Here’s a way of thinking about it which I found helpful; perhaps you will too. Imagine spending a thousand dollars today. Not on one expensive item, but spending USD1,000 on your shopping, your transport, your clothes, your meals and drinks. That’s a pretty lavish day, right?

Do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next: every day for three years. USD1,000 every day for about 1,000 days and bingo! You’ve spent one million dollars.

Now, imagine doing that one thousand times. That’s right – those three years a thousand times. We’re talking about going back 3,000 years. 1,000 years before our ‘common era’ began. That was the start of the Iron Age; the Phoenician alphabet was being formulated; and rice first began to be cultivated in Japan. Spend USD1,000 every single day from then until now, and that’s your one billion dollars.

Back in the year 2000, the world’s 470 billionaires had about USD900 billion between them. In the one generation since then, the total wealth of today’s 3,000 billionaires is over USD16 trillion. That’s nearly 20 times more than 25 years ago, and about half the current value of the whole US economy.

As the development economist Jeffrey Sachs observed:

…we have 2,775 billionaires on the current list [in 2021]. Their combined net worth is $13.1 trillion. Now I have it on good authority you don’t need more than $1 billion to be comfortable, but they have an excess of $11 trillion over ‘just’ the $1 billion. So we should be taxing that and having a civilized world.

“So what?”

The numbers are startling, but what’s this got to do with education?

Firstly, it upends the narrative that there are insufficient funds to address the shortfalls in education funding – the money is out there, but in the wrong places and the wrong hands (this is true for all development sectors of course).

Secondly, it begs the question : how have we got to a situation where our societies allow these inconceivably vast reserves of wealth to lie untouched while a quarter of a billion children remain unschooled worldwide, and nine out of ten children in sub-Saharan Africa remain in ‘learning poverty’ unable to comprehend a basic passage of writing after completing primary education?

Thirdly, it should make us question why, since the destruction of USAID and the cutting of education budgets by many northern bilateral donors, the narrative has focused so squarely on the idea that global south governments need to step up? It seems like a classic distraction technique. Yes, governments need to do more, but to pretend they have the fiscal resources to substitute for the cuts, or to address these systemic issues, is to misunderstand why aid for education was ever needed in the first place. And it conveniently shifts the focus from where excess wealth is hiding.

The pivot : of elephants and mice

UNICEF estimates the education funding gap to be around USD 97bn per annum. Just one percent of the $11trn Jeffrey Sachs mentions would solve this. Of course, there is a difference between cash and wealth (the latter includes fixed assets) – but, this is a red herring ; a false path away from the discussion of inequality.

Nevertheless, an alternative future will only have a chance if there is collective action globally to dismantle the ‘wealth defence industry’, build consensus around how those huge surpluses of individuals’ wealth extracted from the non-billionaire global population’s labour and capital assets should be reduced and invested, and re-configure the power relations between global ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.

There are progressive voices within many corporate social responsibility funds, the global agencies for solidarity in education finance, the philanthropies, and the bi- and multi-lateral donors. But these voices need to be louder, smarter, broader-based, and driven by leadership from the Global South.

We mice need to find our voices, and call out the elephant in the room.

The first step is to stop accepting the narrative that “there isn’t any money” – and take every opportunity to point out where the money is, who holds it, and why this is not only morally wrong but bad for all humanity (including the middle class), bad for global development (including people worried about migration pressures), and bad for future generations (including all lifeforms and ecosystems on our fragile planet).

The second step is to learn about and advocate for tax reform and debt relief. The UN Convention on Tax Reform, under negotiation now, is an important but fragile start. Implementing progressive taxation regimes, and forgiving or reducing debt to LICs and LMICs, would give significant headroom to supporting education development.

So, as we survey the wreckage left by the vandalism meted out to the global education sector, despair should give way to outrage. I believe there is a need for change, an appetite for change, and an opportunity for change. I hope you do too.

Jake Ross

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Suggested reading :

• Ingrid Robeyns, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth — argues that curbing excess wealth is essential to building a fairer, more just and sustainable future for all.

• David Archer and Faiza Hassan : Tax Justice and Education Financing Reform – a well argued case specific to education.

• Many blogs and resources on the Global Alliance for Tax Justice website here.

• Global Wealth Inequality (inequality.org)

News

What a joy to see children smiling and dancing in the streets of Gaza - hope, actively hope, that it lasts.

Gaza children rejoice after ceasefire agreement - YouTube

The Luminos Fund has published a book called “The Luminos Method : The Secret to Unlocking the Light of Learning in Every Child”. It’s based on their accelerated learning programme which has been shown to have significant results in a very short time e.g. in Liberia. I reviewed that programme in Issue #8 “Praying for Scale” for those interested to explore further.

Sophie Edwards of Devex has a must-read article : “‘Moonshot’ education finance facility aims to turn $1 into $7 in LMICs” about the newly launched IFFEd – Gordon Brown’s brainchild. Her article balances the positive view of IFFED as an essential funding instrument to encourage governments to fund education with the criticism that this is just going to add to the debt burden facing poor countries.

IFFED CEO, Karthik Krishnan says governments undervalue the necessity of investing in education : “Education is taking a back seat because it’s a silent crisis; it takes 20 years before it explodes in your face”. David Archer of ActionAid is sceptical : “IFFED is a distraction that gives power to bankers rather than national governments”. Wherever educators find themselves on this spectrum, they need to engage with and be informed about this new initiative.

Is this the first domino in a chain ? The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) has announced it will no longer partner with US NGOs, citing a lack of confidence in the US policy environment for foreign funders.

A majority of Brits surveyed in a recent poll (55%), from the Send My Friend to School campaign, want to see UK aid spent on education overseas. This despite the relentless stream of negative stories about overseas aid and narratives about spending aid money on the military.

Mamadou Ly, Executive Director, Associates in Research and Education for Development (ARED), based in Senegal, has won the prestigious Yidan Prize 2025. The judges cited groundbreaking work in accelerated learning using bilingual instruction.

The Education Outcomes Fund (EOF) has announced a $14m partnership with the government of Rwanda for early childhood care and education. See here for my analysis of Outcomes Based Funding.

Are you a researcher / teacher with time to help ? Scholarships for Ghazza is looking for academic mentors – see here.

For UK readers especially (but has much wider significance) Sam Freedman recently published an excellent piece on the charging of VAT to English private schools “The Great VAT Panic”. This government policy, which started in 2025, was greeted with dire warnings of disaster, including predictions of up to a 50% fall in student numbers in private schools. The actual number, now we have data from the first year, is….1.85%. It’s a salutary lesson in scaremongering by the rich against any diminution of their wealth – and the price inelasticity of private schooling.

The Association for Development Education in Africa (ADEA) is hosting its Triennale from 29-31^st October in Accra, Ghana. ADEA 2025 Triennale. It’s a shame that this year both ADEA and UKFIET have held education conferences in successive months, since the themes and content are very similar. But, as Triennales and Biennales respectively they will now move into different orbits – at least until 2031. Maybe then they should coordinate.

The REAL Centre has launched it’s autumn programme.

The Open University will host its annual Global Development Lecture on November 20th. Eradicating poverty without growth: can it be done? will be delivered by Olivier De Schutter, United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Join in person or online. Details here.

Development

Print reading is in decline. We are, says James Marriott, in a blog that has gone viral, in “The dawn of the post-literate society”. Marriot writes for The Times and has a Substack called Cultural Capital. His blog, about the implications for society and democracy of the decline of reading and the connected ability to reason, is provocative, persuasive, prescient – and has been ❤️ liked 11,000+ times. But, is reading really in decline or is it print books ? You decide. An essential read for educators (ironically of course, on your smartphone / laptop). For the persistent, try wading through the 800+ comments !

Is ChatGPT now the world’s most influential teacher ? A substack called “Dr Phil newsletter” has a very insightful piece on how AI is being used for learning (10% of all ChatGPT messages now are defined as “tutoring / teaching”). The article makes an interesting distinction between asking and doing i.e. how much ChatGPT use is for information and how much for tasks that are developmental.

Another good source on AI in education is the Connected Learning substack – lots of practical approaches as well as sceptical analysis. Against this we also need to set the harm that AI / edtech is potentially doing to the environment and to children in the global south e.g. see this piece on the impact of ChatGPT on children in DRC cobalt mines.

I find the podcast series “Your Undivided Attention” one of the best sources for really understanding how AI is being, and might be, used, for good and bad. Hosted by the Centre for Humane Technology (CHT) they provide a pretty balanced view. So, this episode, which deals with the suicide of US teenager Adam Raine, abetted by ChatGPT, was all the more shocking for the almost palpable anger of the host, Aza Barcay, at how very simple model safeguards were ignored in favour of engagement. Essential listening for any educator interested in student well-being in any country.

The Goal4 Podcast series hosted by Richard Ingram recently interviewed Andreas Schleicher, Director of Education and Skills at OECD. He has some valuable insights into PISA and its usefulness as an international educational comparison. He’s particularly interesting on the newly launched PISA Happy Life Dashboard which, inspired by Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index, tries to measure none elements of well-being. “It’s actually harder to teach trigonometry than to teach a growth mindset” he says. Well worth a listen. Via Spotify, Apple podcasts or here. (And for a critique, see The PISA Happy Life Dashboard: New Direction or Old Problem?)

Voices from the front

The Taliban closed down the internet in Afghanistan for two days from 29-30th September. Read Moska Afghan’s piece on what this felt like for a young girl already deprived of education and work opportunities. Her article ends :

These days, people will often say that life may be difficult but at least there is no war and no killing. “There is no war in a graveyard,” they hear a quick reply.

In related news, Charmagazh, the charity founded by Freshta Karim which brought mobile libraries to 40,000 children a month in Kabul and further afield (over 50% girls), has announced a cessation of their activities. Even such relatively small-scale efforts to provide learning and joy to children have, it seems to me, become the target of a regime obsessed with policing women and girls back into the shadows.

The charity will now take stock and try to focus on where they can continue to help Afghan women and girls the most. In such circumstances, funders with deep pockets, broad commitments and great patience are needed (see here for fundraising drive). No RCT’s, no evidence, no measurable targets, no payments by results – just a belief in the principle that the education of women and girls deserves to be supported.

The debate about smartphones continues. The Guardian recently reported that Sweden intends to ban mobile phones in classrooms for children aged 7 to 16 from autumn next year. Denmark and Norway are set to follow suit. To understand why this might be a smart move read this provocatively titled essay “Why Education Can never be Fun” by Daisy Christodolou – it’s an entertaining read 😊

Oxford Policy Management (OPM) has started a newsletter on LinkedIn. The second issue has a helpful article on “How to scale ECD in refugee settings”. You can find all issues here.

Can’t Wait to Learn also has a useful LinkedIn newsletter. The latest issue has a reflection on implementing a reading game based on phonics – and the lessons, missteps and learning plateaus that were observed from experiments in Sudan, Jordan and Lebanon that led to a better design in Uganda.

Voices from the rear

(Gray and Published Research)

September saw the biennial Oxford Conference hosted by the United Kingdom Forum for International Education and Training (UKFIET). With the demise of USAID, the Oxford conference has assumed even more importance as one of the key global networking opportunities for educators. This year it was attended by more than 700 educators – the most since it began in the 1990s - and with the largest number of bursaries ever awarded.

The conference opened with a moving address from Professor Ahmed Kamal Junina on a video link from Gaza City as Israeli forces were starting to move in.

As with all conferences, there were inspiring presentations and yawn-inducing ones. Generally, the quality felt high this year - so the theme convenors clearly took their role seriously. Post conference there have been a large number of blogs - see here. A series of thematic follow-up seminars has also already started, but with several still to go. Register here : Follow-up Seminars

Right to Play has published a policy brief called “Accelerating Foundational Learning Through Play”.

It was World Teachers Day on October 5^th. Lots of homages to teachers were written, but I liked this little nugget from Peps Mccrea on why teaching is way harder than brain surgery, yet its difficulty is constantly underestimated.

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And finally

Sir Ken Robinson, everyone’s favourite educator, is always good value. Here he is on divergent thinking. Double click the image.

The relief at a ceasefire should not stop us remembering the 18,000+ children cruelly killed. If you haven’t see it, this Michael Rosen poem is worth a 90 seconds of your time. Double click below.

On the theme of the post-literate society, here’s something not often seen. It’s a brilliant idea to highlight a point - a book reading flash mob on the Copenhagen underground !

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