How can 1,000 actionable school-led solutions be codified, validated, and showcased through an online portal to help the world’s teachers and education policy-makers improve quality learning for all?

Education gaps for marginalized learners are increasing in the COVID-19 context, with experts predicting that if traditional reform efforts continue on their current trajectory, by 2030 an estimated 825 million children from low- and middle-income countries will fail to achieve basic learning proficiencies to thrive in work and life. On the one hand, teachers and school leaders consistently lack evidence-based, actionable, and contextually relevant strategies to improve learning outcomes, relying too often on external solutions and platforms that lack applicability to real-world classrooms in low-resource settings. On the other hand, innovations that already exist in real-world classrooms are seldomly codified and shared by teachers to inform local, national or global education decision-makers. 

Schools2030 proposes an alternative approach to improving the quality of lifelong learning that places school leaders, teachers, and students at the heart of education innovation. For the next ten years, Schools2030 will collaborate with 1,000 public schools across ten target countries to generate 1,000 solutions each year about how to improve quality education for all. Schools2030 is now seeking new innovators to help them design its inaugural online portal to best codify, validate and showcase the first set of 1,000 school-led solutions by the end of this year. Schools2030 hopes the new portal will:

• Inspire teachers to see themselves as education change-agents, policy entrepreneurs and the key contributor to improving quality education, worldwide;

• Empower teachers with an easy-to-use portal that invites them to learn, collaborate, and leverage solutions from one another in order to apply these solutions to their own classrooms;

• Overcome common shortcomings of “best practice” educational repositories that often lack contextual relevance, practicality, affordability, and evidence of effectiveness;

• Translate solutions into multiple languages, as most existing ‘best practices’ are only in English.

• Connect solutions with existing ‘best practice’ repositories through potential codification and/or standardization of solution archetypes to help foster a stronger global ecosystem of innovations;

• Strengthen the rigor and quality of evidence for these solutions by linking with local, national and global research partners to independently evaluate and/or validate these ‘best practices.’  

Schools2030 seeks to launch its inaugural portal of 1,000 school-led solutions at the RewirED global education summit in December 2021.  We hope that the portal, initially used by Schools2030, will then help foster a new global schools system of innovation and knowledge exchange for teachers and schools; one that that facilitates effective generation and dissemination of actionable and evidence-based school-led solutions about ‘what really works’ for the world’s teachers to collectively help to achieve inclusive and equitable quality education for all by 2030.  

About Schools2030 

Schools2030 is a ten-year participatory action research and learning improvement programme based in 1000 government schools across ten countries. Using the principles of human-centred design and focusing on the key transition years of learners aged 5, 10 and 15, Schools2030 seeks to catalyse locally-rooted education solutions that can inform systems-level approaches for improving holistic learning outcomes. 

The overall aim of the Schools2030 programme is to increase the levels of agency of educators and school-level stakeholders to reclaim the discourse about ‘what works’ to improve quality learning outcomes from the bottom-up, rather than the top-down. At the heart of the Schools2030 approach is the recognition that schools should be the centre of social change, not the target of change. Schools2030 is supported by a consortium of the following nine founding donors: Aga Khan Foundation, Dubai Cares, IKEA Foundation, Itau Social Foundation, Jacobs Foundation,  LEGO Foundation, Oak Foundation, Porticus, and the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund and operates across 10 countries.