PANEL: EFFECTIVE TEACHER WORKFORCE - A hypothetical brief to a minister from a trusted policy adviser - Education Development Trust
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Global Dialogue 2021
PANEL: EFFECTIVE TEACHER WORKFORCE
A hypothetical brief to a minister from a trusted policy adviser
Dear Minister,
We recently received this letter from a highly experienced and respected teacher. We have then provided a
policy brief for you to help us to respond.
Dear Education Minister,
I have been a teacher in rural primary schools for over thirty years. I thought you would like to hear some
reflections from ‘the front line’ about the challenges we have been facing since the health emergency
began.
I have tried very hard to keep in touch with all my students and their parents. We used SMS messages and
I have learnt that this is a good way of letting parents know what is going on and how they can help. Of
course, I wasn’t able to contact everyone and I am afraid that I’ve lost track of what has happened to some
of my most vulnerable students. I worry about the poorest students and those with disabilities because
some of these young people are in danger of never coming back to school.
The ministry had ambitious plans for online learning during school closure. I admire your wish to make the
most of the latest technology but sadly many of my students could not access any online support. It was
difficult for me also. Maybe the younger teachers felt more confident, but I need more training in the use of
technology.
I am grateful to the ministry for making sure that I got paid throughout the period of closure. I have friends
who teach in private schools, and while the teachers in the high-end schools were fine, my friends who
work in budget private schools were not so lucky. The schools were not able to pay them. One person I
know is now driving a taxi and his school has been turned into residential accommodation.
I think the crisis has made many teachers feel the same as me: very stressed and isolated. I like talking
through professional issues with other teachers but during lockdown I felt cut off and could not discuss
problems with other teachers. Now I am worried about what will happen when the schools reopen. How
can we be sure the schools are safe? How can we teach at grade level when some students have learnt little
and maybe even gone backwards over the last year? How can we make sure that if there is ever a problem
like this again, we have learnt some lessons from the Covid crisis?Global Dialogue 2021
What we have learnt from the crisis
Minister, as you know, this teacher’s experience is not uncommon. Teachers have found it very difficult to keep
the most vulnerable learners engaged in learning while schools have been closed and the equity gap between
the academic performance of advantaged and disadvantaged students – which was bad before the crisis – has
increased greatly. We looked to technology to help teachers through school closure. Maybe we had unrealistic
expectations. The scale of the digital divide excluded many students from online learning. At the same
time, there have been some bright spots. ‘Low-tech’ solutions such as interactive radio instruction and SMS
texting have managed to reach many households and engaged both students and parents. Understandably,
much attention has been given recently to questions of health and safety in schools, but as we look towards
reopening, we need to focus on the right support for the teaching workforce. We need to recognise that many
education professionals are currently worried, disorientated and unsure about what they should do to make
school reopening a success.
How to go beyond ‘back to normal’
Returning school systems to where we were before the crisis will be challenging but getting ‘back to normal’
is not enough. We should not forget that many students were making disappointing progress when they
were attending school: the pre-crisis situation for many students has been described by some researchers
as ‘enrolment without learning’.1 This is a good time to think about what we need to do to help teachers so
that they can enable students to catch up, and then provide a transformed learning environment in which all
children can achieve good outcomes.
We need evidence-based policy on teaching. We know from before the crisis that the best teachers have high
levels of both skill and will – that is to say they are highly proficient in pedagogical methods, but also well-
motivated and prepared to go the extra mile as professionals. So, how can we build back better and ensure a
workforce of teachers with the right expertise and the right attitudes? The evidence suggests some key guiding
principles:
1. Teachers will need first-rate professional development to rise to the challenge of school reopening.
The best professional learning takes place when teachers undertake on-the-job training supported by
collaborative reflection with other teachers from their own and other schools. The crisis has highlighted
that many teachers need help using technology and developing digital literacy.
2. We must harness our knowledge about the components of pedagogical quality so that post-
pandemic schools are places of deep learning. Research shows that great teachers are experts
in mediating subject knowledge. They teach at the right level and skilled in systematic diagnostic
assessment.
Bold,T.etal.(2017).“EnrollmentwithoutLearning:TeacherEffort,Knowledge,andSkillinPrimarySchoolsinAfrica.”JournalofEconomicPerspectives,31(4):185-204
1
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3. Effective teachers do not operate in isolation; they are members of high-functioning learning teams.
Ensuring that each school is staffed by a first-rate professional team requires clarity about different staff
roles, a sense of shared endeavour and excellent, purposeful school leadership.
4. Accountability matters: professionals need to be provided with both support and challenge.
As we plan for school re-opening, we need good accountability mechanisms as well as excellent
professional learning opportunities. If done poorly, accountability can be demotivating, but smart
accountability incentivises high performance and identifies best practice.
Some lessons from the period of school closure
The experience of the last year has confirmed the relevance of these evidence-based guiding principles. There
has been some promising practice in this time that can be built upon, to help us understand how to move
forwards:
y In Uganda, the National Teachers’ Colleges (NTC) have been working to increase the digital competence
of teachers during the period of school closure.
y Teachers benefitted from a high level of role specificity during closures in guidance issued by the
governments of the Amazon Region (Brazil), Chile and Costa Rica.
y In Peru, 86% of students engaged with the home learning programme, Aprendo en Casa. The
government was able to track engagement at the level of individual teachers and students, creating an
element of professional accountability.
y In Rwanda, some of the most effective headteachers have been designated as ‘leaders of learning’ and
freed up to support the work of other school leaders. They were able to mobilise other headteachers to
ensure effective local back-to-school campaigns.
y The government of the UAE recognised the need for educators to be both supported and held
accountable for their actions during school closure. A quality assurance framework was developed to
assess remote learning provision.
y The Comunidad Atenea, supported by the Varkey Foundation, has enabled an internet-based community
of practice for teachers in Argentina and throughout Latin America. During school closures, thousands
of teachers have been ‘crowdsourcing’ good teaching ideas.
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Policy suggestions for our Ministry to consider:
1. The design of catch-up programmes that model best practice in teaching and learning.
We need to ensure programmes of accelerated learning, particularly for students who have fallen far behind, are
based on evidence of what works in effective teaching and learning. Catch-up programmes can
be used to model effective pedagogy and the use of systematic diagnostic assessment, particularly in core
subjects.
2. Investment in forms of job-based teacher professional development which promote
teacher collaboration and enable sharing of good practice. Training programmes for teachers
are often ineffective. Helping teachers to build back better will require high impact professional learning based on
what we know about ‘what works’ in adult learning.
3. Systematic support for school leaders as key actors in the building back better process.
Effective catch-up and transformed teaching at school level will not happen unless school principals promote
good practices and see themselves as ‘instructional leaders’. The good school is a learning team with clearly
defined roles and a skilful leader.
4. Establishing a good balance of support and challenge. All professionals need the right sort of
accountability. Appropriate accountability mechanisms, such as quality assurance frameworks and well-designed
school inspection systems, can incentivise action for schools to build back better and can identify and
celebrate promising practice.
Note: The stakeholder letters included in this series of Global Dialogue ‘provocations’ are fictional but based on our
analysis of global research into the experience of stakeholders during the current health emergency.
www.educationdevelopmenttrust.com/GLOBALDIALOGUEGlobal Dialogue 2021
PANEL: LEVERAGING THE WIDER COMMUNITY IN
SUPPORT OF LEARNING
A hypothetical brief to a minister from a trusted policy adviser
Dear Minister,
We have received the following letter from a community leader and parent to students. We have then provided
a policy brief for you to help us to respond.
Dear Education Minister,
I am a member of the school management committee of my children’s school, which is in a disadvantaged
area of my city. The children here have been out of school since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Despite the best efforts of the school staff to provide remote learning opportunities, many children have
struggled to engage with their education while schools have been closed.
I am sure you are aware that home learning has been a real challenge for all. I know from experience how
challenging it has been as a parent, juggling my children’s schooling with my work and responsibilities as a
community leader. One of my daughters has done well with remote learning, and we are lucky enough to
have a tablet she can use, but my other daughter has additional needs and has found it much more difficult
without a teacher to help explain things. More widely, in our community, many students have tried their
best to continue their studies, but they do not have access to the necessary devices or can’t afford to pay
the data fees. Others have no help as their parents are working, and while the school has tried to engage
parents, this has not always been easy. For example, teachers have tried contacting parents to check on
pupils, but many are very busy or are sharing phones between family members.
We are now finally in a position to begin to reopen our schools, but in addition to my concerns about
children catching up, I am worried about many of our students’ wellbeing. School closures have been
hard for many children as they have faced issues like loneliness and financial strains, while others have
found themselves in trouble. I am also concerned that following such a prolonged period of closure, some
students may not come back to school at all. What is more, I know that schools in other countries have
faced repeated closures as Covid infections have resurged, and I worry that the same could happen here,
further impacting education.Global Dialogue 2021
I would therefore like to ask: what are the best avenues of support for schools in communities like mine?
How can we best engage with pupils and families – there have been many challenges, but also some
parents have been very involved, how can we make the best of this to ensure we can improve our pupils’
learning when they return? Please do let us know what the Ministry is doing and how this will help schools
and communities like ours.
Policy Brief reponse
Amid the disruption of Covid-19, the impact and importance of local community networks has become all the more
evident. There have been many positive developments, as communities have rallied to promote education continuity
and a safe return to school. That said, socioeconomic status makes a huge difference to children’s outcomes and
wellbeing, and the pandemic has served as a stark reminder that the most marginalised and disadvantaged are most at
risk of being left behind. The digital divide is one of the clearest examples of this, but it is just one illustration of wider
inequities. To improve the situation – not just today, but for the long term – we need to systematically close the gap
and level the playing field, and community networks may be a strong force for making such changes.
‘Building back better’ presents a real opportunity for our country to bring about improvements for the long
term, but – contrary to what has been widely assumed – this is not necessarily about transformational
technology. Rather, it will be more effective to work with existing resources to create better environments
for learning, with stronger links between schools and wider communities. Where schools are closed, where
they are reopening, and where we wish to effect sustainable change moving forwards, we need to leverage
community resources beyond schools to best ensure good outcomes for children and young people. This will
require effective partnerships between schools, parents, community leaders and other sectors, building on
existing relationships to redefine these roles.
Looking ahead, our ministry face a range of challenges:
y Some students may have disengaged from learning as a result of prolonged school closures and a lack
of direct contact with teachers – especially where limited by a lack of communications technology.
y High-tech remote education solutions, while incredibly helpful, are too often inaccessible.
According to UNICEF data, at least 31% of schoolchildren worldwide cannot be reached by digital and
broadcast remote learning programmes.1 Many of these children have fallen behind.
y Students may face competing demands and responsibilities at the household level (such as domestic
chores, caring for siblings, or income generation), leaving them with little time to study.
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y Parents need guidance on how to best support their children’s education. Even where parents are
keen for their children to continue their schooling remotely, many will not know how to effectively
support them, and some households may have no literate adult to supervise learning. Guidance for
parents or caregivers is needed. In the longer term, this may also apply to blended learning models and
even homework.
y Many pupils will need additional support to help them catch up when they have fallen behind.
This is especially likely to be the case where there has been no literate adult to help them study at home.
There seem to be some promising examples from other countries:
y Contact between the school and household can be facilitated through smart cross-sectoral working.
For example, in Kenya, Community Health Volunteers (CHVs) have delivered paper-based tutorials and
teacher feedback to vulnerable girls in the Girls Education Challenge programme, alongside their health
and wellbeing roles.
y Low-tech alternatives – or a ‘no-tech safety net’ – will often be more suitable for learning at home
or in communities. High-tech solutions can be extremely valuable for students who can access
them, but where access to devices and connectivity is not possible, alternatives are necessary to
prevent widening inequities. In Jordan, the Learning Bridges programme (which has reached over a
million students) uses predominantly online learning, but also features a low-tech option (television
course content) and a ‘no-tech safety net’, using hard-copy learning materials. There may also be long-
term applications: in Sierra Leone, all vocational courses have converted to distance learning during the
crisis, but will stay that way to ensure long-term accessibility.
y Where household resources do not enable access to ed-tech, community resources may be
effectively leveraged - especially for low-tech or no-tech solutions. In Kenya, solar radios have been
distributed by CHVs to widen access to broadcast lessons.
y Technology and data can also be leveraged for communicating effectively about the return to
school, for example, we know in Rwanda, community radio has been used for back-to-school
messaging. Meanwhile, the Rising Academy Network of schools in Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone
prioritised data to identify vulnerable children and their families and establish communication with them
to minimise the risk of dropout.
y In many countries, parental buy-in and support has been successfully generated through effective
communication and guidance. This has come not only from individual schools but also from and other
actors, including health workers and MoEs, and has used a variety of media to ensure effective reach.
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» In Kenya, the GEC programme offered guidance to parents on supporting learning through posters,
audio messages, social media, WhatsApp, CHVs and community radio.
» 50 countries, including Nepal, Somalia and Togo, reported that parents and caregivers
had received regular telephone follow-up from either teachers or headteachers.
» In England, one school explained remote learning and reopening plans on Instagram and Facebook
livestreams, allowing parents to ask questions in a public forum.
y Training for school leaders may help them to engage communities and families. In Ethiopia, the TARGET
programme has added community and family engagement to leadership training to aid learning recovering.
y Additional support may be sourced within the community for students who have fallen behind or do not
have adequate support at home. England established the National Tutoring Programme to reach 250,000
disadvantaged pupils, to provide extra support following school closures. In Kenya, CHVs were able to match
girls with no literate family member with older girls in community to provide learning support, and facilitated
community-based reading groups to strengthen provision.
Policy suggestions for our Ministry to consider:
1. Cross-sectoral collaboration: coordination (as opposed to competition) between sectors such as education,
health, and social services to ensure that all children are reached at household level.
2. A flexible approach to technology: prioritising the use of context-appropriate, accessible learning
solutions at home and in the community – with low-tech options and no-tech safety nets – to avoid further
entrenching inequalities.
3. Targeted communications to secure parental buy-in and support: for remote learning, return to
school, and effective schooling in future. These should use a targeted variety of media to ensure the most
extensive context-appropriate reach.
4. Guidance for headteachers: on community engagement and maximising the impact of school-community
partnerships.
5. Catch-up initiatives and community-supported learning: consider the role of non-school community
actors in supporting those without adequate household-level support (e.g., tutoring, reading groups).
6. Data: collect disaggregated data to analyse effectiveness of interventions and inform future implementation –
both in times of crisis and in addressing equity gaps.
Note: The stakeholder letters included in this series of Global Dialogue ‘provocations’ are fictional but based on our
analysis of global research into the experience of stakeholders during the current health emergency.
www.educationdevelopmenttrust.com/GLOBALDIALOGUEGlobal Dialogue 2021
PANEL: SUPPORTING THE MARGINALISED (INCLUDING
GIRLS) AND INCLUSION
A hypothetical brief to a minister from a trusted policy adviser
Dear Minister,
We recently received this letter from a girl from one of our rural districts. We have then provided a policy brief
for you to help us to respond.
Dear Education Minister
I’m a 14 year old girl, and I’ve not been to school since March. I miss school, as I enjoyed learning, and
really liked maths. I want to be an accountant. I also felt safe and enjoyed seeing my friends.
Since this Covid-19 started, I did my best to carry on learning. We heard there were lessons I could use on a
phone and something on the radio. But my mum has only one phone which she needs to take with her to
help run her market stall. I tried listening to the radio but one of my elder brothers keeps using it, and I keep
missing lesson times as I have to do chores at home and sometimes help my mum with the stall. With the
lockdown, she has had to find another job to help with money, so needs me to look after it.
I am worried I am falling behind. My exams are in only 2 years. I’m also worried as some of my friends have
become pregnant, and I’m not sure they’ll return to school when they open. My younger brother finds it
harder to learn than other kids his age, and he has not been able to understand, even when he could hear
the teacher on the radio, so I think he has given up. My mum said maybe I should just carry on working on
the stall. Some of the boys in my village said they would look after me. Also school is far away and now my
friends might not be there. I would need money for more books and the classes are crowded, so how will I
catch up?
Then my friend told me on the TV she heard schools might open soon, and also heard someone say
they are trying to make schools better after Covid-19. What does that mean? Will it help me restart my
education? Minister, I think you must be dealing with a lot, but can you tell me what you are going to do to
help girls like me?Global Dialogue 2021
What the evidence tells us
As you know, we have been collecting research evidence of the impact of the Covid-19 disruption on children
like the girl who wrote to us. This research tells us that across a range of low-middle income countries, the
most vulnerable children have been disproportionately impacted by Covid-19. They will therefore need more
help than other children just to catch up to where they were before the pandemic. For example, the Malala Fund
estimates that 20 million girls may never return to the classroom, and the intersection of marginalisation factors
is of particular concern (e.g., a child living in a rural area, from a poor single-parent household and who has a
disability faces multiple barriers to successful re-entry).
This is particularly disappointing, because before Covid-19 hit, we were making progress. As you know, our
FCDO-funded Girls Education Challenge was improving the attendance and learning of girls in school. This
pandemic threatens to undo progress for our most marginalised.
Building back better is our aspiration, but…
Minister, we know many are pushing us to ‘build back better’, which we know you are committed to. However,
our research suggests that lots of countries are struggling to understand how to do this generally, but
particularly for the most vulnerable. The reality is that:
y Many counties have very little data to really understand the scale of problem – for example, how many
girls might not come back to school, and where learning loss is worst.
y Lots of countries had policy ideas (e.g. working with local communities, back-to-school campaigns,
targeted device distribution) but so far there is little evidence on what works best, and linking up
interventions and data systematically is a significant challenge.
y We are concerned some ideas to positively ‘transform’ education could actually make differential
impact worse. For example, technology: this has been least well accessed by the most vulnerable (and for
some girls, physically being in school offers a ‘safe space’), so without careful thought this could increase
inequalities.
y There are some pragmatic ideas which have received little discussion - for example, transferring cash to
vulnerable groups - perhaps becuase they are not seen as popular ideas.
y We’re also concerned as our budget forecast (with less domestic tax revenue and predicted donor
reductions) suggests we will have less funding to target the most vulnerable.
The Ministry is still in ‘crisis management’ as we try to reopen schools, but decisions on how to ensure we
actually manage re-building more effectively are needed very soon.
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There seem to be some promising examples from other countries:
y There are some countries, like Sierra Leone, which have been very proactive with school re-entry for
girls: they have changed their policy on pregnant girls and young mothers, and have a defined ‘school
re-entry’ programme, successfully learning from evidence from the Ebola crisis.
y In certain places, such as Pakistan, there are projects training teachers to provide psycho-social support
to girls who have been isolated or experienced other trauma during school closure.
y Some countries, such as Kenya, have used partnerships with the health system to help maintain learning
continuity for girls out of school – with impressive results.
y Some projects have worked with community mentors or guides to support girls and reinforced
community structures to assist engagement and re-entry.
Policy suggestions for our Ministry to consider:
1. School re-entry: we have already made it legal for pregnant girls and young mothers to return to school, but we
propose the policy should require districts to ensure such girls are in school and supported.
2. Communities: to build on places where community partnerships created Covid resilience, we should create a
structured Ministry-backed model of community mentoring.
3. Data: when pupils return, we need to help schools understand who has the biggest gaps in learning, with specific
‘catch-up’ groups to help those who need more support.
4. Structured distance learning: building on the opportunity of technology, - both high- and low-tech - to
create a targeted programme to support vulnerable groups who will not return to school to either acquire vocational
skills, or catch-up for school re-entry, with targeted device and a ‘low-tech’ safety net distribution (including
continued use of radio and print).
5. Incentivisation: some pupils (e.g. girls), will not return to school due to the economic impact of Covid-19. We
could consider incentivising a return (e.g. cash-transfers linked to school attendance), and include support for
schools distributing essentials such as sanitary pads.
6. Funding: with our limited funding we should consider a ‘protected premium’, where a percentage of funding
for any policy is ringfenced to support marginalised groups.
Note: The stakeholder letters included in this series of Global Dialogue ‘provocations’ are fictional but based on our
analysis of global research into the experience of stakeholders during the current health emergency.
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