Education Scalability Checklist

If we want to achieve widespread educational effectiveness, we need to prevent every school and every teacher to “reinvent the wheel”. Locally effective education innovations already exist, the more pressing challenge is that of scaling them up to different contexts, all the while sustaining the shifts in practice, policy and structures these improvements require.

There are some hurdles on the path to scaling that are inherent to the education sector:

• Effective learning is a highly personal issue. There are many individual and contextual factors that impact learning for schools and teachers to reckon with in adapting effective practices from elsewhere to their own setting.
• A change in school or district leadership, in Ministry staff or a Minister of Education, can be enough to sweep away carefully tested solutions. Sustaining and institutionalising innovations in education is difficult.

And yet, there are plenty examples of large-scale progress in terms of getting children to school and learning. This suggests that some obstacles originate either with the innovation itself or with the roll-out process of the innovation. Policymakers, practitioners and funders who are interested in improving learning at scale should be able to detect these types of hurdles and, of course, remedy them. In an effort to support governments, funders and education organisations to scale up effective education initiatives, VVOB joined forces with Brookings Center for Universal Education, Educate!, Management Systems International (MSI), Pratham, and STiR Education to create the ‘Education Scalability Checklist’ (ESC). The accompanying explainer video (see below) and User Guide support the application of the checklist as productively as possible. Ideally, the ESC will be used first to guide the initial design of new education initiatives and then to persistently drive forward the scaling process.