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Annual Impact Report 2020/21

Foreword

ILSE HOWLING | Chair of Trustees, Education Development Trust

The past year has been exceptionally challenging for education around the world, with continued disruption from the Covid-19 pandemic and sustained school closures in many countries. However, it is also a year in which teachers, leaders and students everywhere have shown extraordinary resilience – doing their utmost to keep learning going even in the most challenging of circumstances. As schools around the world have reopened, we have also seen an incredible focus on learning recovery. It has been our privilege at Education Development Trust to support teachers, leaders and students in multiple countries through these changing situations and to see the many bright spots of good practice and impact that have emerged.

Throughout this turbulent period, we have sought to focus our efforts on how best to ensure education continues and recovers. Around the world, our researchers and consultants have fed into leading global institutions to build up the evidence base on education recovery, and we have harnessed the learning from our research and our programmes to make a real difference to the lives of individuals around the world. In Rwanda, we have helped to guide successful back-to-school campaigns, while in Kenya we have helped thousands of vulnerable girls continue learning and return to school. In England, we have supported teachers as they focus on learning recovery – including those whose training was disrupted by the school closures of 2020. We have also reached 165,000 people through our world-leading employability and careers services, including through launching several initiatives across the country, supporting thousands of people into work.

Meanwhile, we launched a number of exciting new programmes – from support for early career teachers in England to teacher development in Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone – and we have worked closely with partner organisations and ministries of education to improve learning outcomes for students.

Over the past year, we’re delighted to have reached 3.55 million learners and 174,000 educators worldwide – over 1,000,000 more learners and almost 80,000 more educators than in 2019/20. In some cases, this increase has been driven by a pivot from face-to-face to virtual delivery models, which we have taken care to ensure are of the same high quality that we are known for by our partners, clients and beneficiaries. We measure the direct impact that our work has on our beneficiaries, but we believe that by investing in system change and strengthening, we are impacting upon even more people in the communities and systems we serve.

I am incredibly proud of what Education Development Trust has continued to achieve in another remarkable year. This includes within our organisation, where we have further increased our focus on inclusion and diversity. Inclusion is, as of this year, formally one of our organisational values, due to our conviction of its importance to our work, our clients and beneficiaries, and our staff. Of course, none of this would be possible without the excellent work of our people around the world, so I am delighted that our staff surveys reflect high rates of satisfaction from the people who make all this happen. I’d like to express my heartfelt thanks to them for their expertise, enthusiasm and dedication, as well as to our excellent partners and stakeholders for their support.

As the world continues to recover from the pandemic and we look to the wider challenges facing education systems today, the commitment of governments and organisations like ours to positive change will be more important than ever. At Education Development Trust, we will continue to champion our mission – improving education to transform lives around the world – and we look forward to building on the impact we have had this year as we look to the future.

Our vision

A world where everyone’s life is transformed through excellent education.

Our purpose

We strive to change education for good around the world, grounding our work in research and evidence of what works. We support leaders to raise standards, improve school performance, develop great teachers and open career pathways – transforming lives and futures.

Our values

We believe in the power of education to help individuals fulfill their potential and benefit society. Our values embody how we go about making our contribution.

EXCELLENCE in learning outcomes, our people, our solutions and our delivery.

INTEGRITY in the way we build trust in and bring purpose to our work.

ACCOUNTABILITY through rigorous and transparent assessment of our performance.

COLLABORATION by working together across teams and in partnership with clients and customers to build capacity.

INCLUSION both by encouraging diversity in our organisation and by serving those for whom education can have the most transformative impact.

How we work

We combine global research and our longstanding expertise with regional knowledge to inform education policy and practice and deliver programmes around the world. Through our work and expertise – which spans from early years education right through to post-school careers – we seek to strengthen education systems, transform teaching and learning, ensure effective transitions into work, and contribute to global responses to key education challenges.

We have been improving education around the world for over 50 years. We develop evidence-informed solutions – drawing on our continually refreshed body of research – to bring about real change, raise educational standards, and support global efforts to address learning crises and reduce inequalities of opportunity.

In order to make a difference, we work in the following way:

Our reach and impact

Middle East and Asia

Brunei

Our 200 teachers worked directly in classrooms with over 17,000 students.

We directly supported 450 Bruneian teachers to help develop their skills and practice.

Jordan

Our partnership with UNICEF Learning Bridges supported 825,000 school pupils in catch-up learning and provided professional development opportunities for 45,000 teachers.

Our Connected Learning Centre partnered with the Queen Rania Training Academy to design online professional development resources which were accessed by over 50,000 teachers.

Lebanon

Our Alexandria Schools Trust programme reached 4,300 Syrian refugee children (up from 1,500 in 2019/20) and increased its reach to the local teachers who teach these refugee children by 40%.

UK and Europe

UK

92,000 young people benefited from our careers and enrichment services in school and community settings. We also supported 2,300 educators through our careers programmes.

Across all of our programmes in the UK, we supported over 17,000 education practitioners.

Throughout the pandemic, we have developed an extensive selection of resources to assist remote and blended learning, delivered remote professional development for education practitioners, and facilitated virtual communities of practice for schools.

We have launched three new programmes in English schools in partnership with the Department for Education: Behaviour Hubs, the Early Career Professional Development Programme and the National Professional Qualifications.

UK Employability and Careers: While Covid-related restrictions meant that our reach through the National Careers Service declined by nearly 20%, we still reached almost 75,000 adult learners and jobseekers.

This decline was also partially offset by a sturdy growth in our school careers services and projects supporting employers – with four new programmes launched to support employability in regions across England.

Europe

Our Connected Learning Centre offset restrictions on face-to-face delivery by offering resources, events and training opportunities online, directly engaging over 9,000 learners and 2,000 educators in the UK and European partner countries (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands).

Sub-Saharan Africa

Ethiopia

Our TARGET programme helped to upskill nearly 2,500 system leaders in data and delivery, and trained over 500 school supervisors and professional development coaches in leadership supervision.

We also delivered a professional development pilot programme to 600 school leaders in over 500 low-performing schools, with a potential to improve teaching and learning for more than 158,000 learners.

Zimbabwe

We began delivering the teacher professional development component of the TEACH programme, designed to strengthen the national education system and improve learning outcomes.

Sierra Leone

We launched a new programme designed to improve grade reading and maths by strengthening teacher training, through which we plan to reach 11,000 teachers by 2023.

Rwanda

We have been accelerating system-level reforms, upskilling almost 500 system leaders, more than 3,200 school leaders, and 34,000 teachers.

Following the success of our work in Primary grades 1 to 3, the Ministry of Education expanded the scope of our work into grades 4 and 5.

We have assisted the Ministry of Education with their Covid response strategy and Girls’ Education Policy, helping to ensure both successful back-to-school campaigns and girls’ continued access to learning.

Kenya

We helped to improve learning outcomes and transitions for 59,500 disadvantaged girls.

In response to school closures, we created an emergency plan to support the engagement of vulnerable girls with distance learning, reaching 76% of the girls in our Girls’ Education Challenge programme with tutorials and teacher feedback.

94% of girls in our programme returned to school on reopening – 10 percentage points more than the national average.

How we are improving school systems at scale

We have worked with ministries to build delivery and improvement capacity across school systems for 30 years, and we continue to offer world-class, multi-disciplinary consultancy and change management expertise. We consistently deliver for our clients and partners – including ministries of education around the world.

In Rwanda, we support the Ministry of Education to improve the quality of English and mathematics teaching at lower primary school level through our Building Learning Foundations (BLF) programme. This year, BLF has further increased its traction with the educational authorities, designing and delivering Rwanda’s Covid-19 response strategy, which focused on remote learning. As a result of the excellent achievements detailed in the figure below, BLF scored an ‘A’ in its annual review by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) for the fourth year running. We also supported the production of guidelines for the Rwanda Education Board (REB) on catch-up programmes as schools reopened.

Similarly, in Kenya, our Girls Education Challenge team was awarded an ‘A’ rating and a ‘Green’ RAG rating in the fund manager’s annual assessment. Particular strengths highlighted included the project team’s understanding of the needs of the girls in the programme, and their success in enabling girls to continue learning during school closures.

Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, through our TARGET programme, we have supported the Ministry of Education with technical aspects of its GEQIP-E programme. 17 specialist workshops were held to support the government in educational planning, programming and evaluation, including the National Consultative Workshop for Senior Education Leaders to Strengthen Education Delivery Systems for Better Performance in July 2021. This attracted almost 100 participants, including three State Ministers of General Education, Director Generals and Directors from the Ministry of Education, Education Bureau Heads and Deputy Heads of twelve regional boards, as well as representatives from FCDO and the World Bank.

In Jordan, we have provided capacity building and quality assurance support to the Ministry of Education through our Learning Bridges programme, impacting upon a million learners across the country. The programme was considered essential to enabling large numbers of students, especially disadvantaged students, to continue their learning during Covid-19-related school closures.

In addition, we continued to deliver for the Ministry of Education in Brunei, where we recruit, orientate and manage specialist English teachers. Recruitment to the programme has remained high, filling 100% of posts in the last year (against a target of 90%). Moreover, between January and June 2021, 97% of formal lesson observations achieved a rating of ‘Good’ or above. As a result, our contract with the Ministry of Education has once again been renewed, this time to 2023. The team in Brunei also helped the Ministry to build the capacity of 1,500 local educators in English language skills through a series of workshops and cascade models.

In the UK, we have continued to provide significant support to the Department for Education in England. This year, we have been awarded Lead Provider status for the Early Career Framework and National Professional Qualifications, while we have also been selected to deliver the Behaviour Hubs programme and been granted an expansion of the Early Years Professional Development Programme.

Delivering in the midst of Covid-19

In the UK, we used adaptive online models to enable continued school-to-school collaboration through our Schools Partnership Programme (SPP), reaching 1,750 schools across England, compared to 892 schools in 2019/20. This increase is due to our re-engagement with ‘alumni schools’ that have previously completed the programme to offer them additional support. We also continued to deliver our careers services remotely where necessary, reaching 73,000 jobseekers and adult learners. Although this is a decrease of approximately 20% compared with 2019/20, we believe the impact of the work remains highly significant, impacting both exceptionally vulnerable individuals and those whose lives and careers had been upended by the pandemic.

Meanwhile, we ran remote communities of practice in Rwanda, Kenya and Lebanon to help teachers continue their professional development and support them through the disruption of school closures. We also developed remote learning materials for students in many parts of the world – from remote careers education in England, to radio lessons in Rwanda, to paper-based materials for vulnerable girls in Kenya and adaptable (high-tech to no-tech) materials in Jordan.

Driving improvements in teacher professional development

Teaching quality is the single biggest driver of student learning outcomes within a school environment – so it is hugely important to ensure that teacher professional development (PD) programmes are effective. This is a core part of our work around the world, and we believe teacher PD will be an area of increasing importance – with even greater demand – in the context of Covid-19 recovery. We have made an outstanding impact in this area, reaching almost 174,000 practitioners across our programmes. This is 80% more practitioners than we reached in 2019/20, in part due to virtual delivery methods which enabled economies of scale, and in part due to schools reopening, enabling us to resume delivery.

Rwanda: supporting teachers through school reopening with communities of practice

In Rwanda, our work has enabled over 30,000 teachers to receive orientation on remedial education and catch-up programmes, following the reopening of schools in early 2021. We also facilitated the continuation of teaching training and support throughout school closures through communities of practice (CoPs), many of which continued virtually, using videoconferencing and/or WhatsApp. These offered important opportunities for teachers to discuss the practicalities of working through the pandemic, preparing for schools reopening, and learning recovery, as well as helping teachers to develop their skills and practice in key areas. 91% of teachers involved felt these groups had enabled them to identify ways to better support learners to address lost learning. Moreover, our Teachers Learning Together study found that teaching improved for all teachers involved in CoPs, despite the school closures of 2021. ​ ​

'[The] collaboration helped me so much … It helped me to make teaching aids, preparing a lesson, and speaking English.’ – Teacher, Gisagara district, Rwanda

UK: supporting early career teachers and professionals

In the UK, our Future Teaching Scholars (FTS) continue to thrive despite the ongoing challenges. An assessment of teaching quality this year showed that by the end of their first term of teaching, Scholars were already performing in line with the performance expected of a teacher at the end of their initial teacher training – placing them approximately one or two terms ahead of their peers. 100% of the cohort who obtained qualified teacher status were offered and accepted a teaching post (against a target of 95%). This reflects the results of the programme in 2019/20, despite the disruption of the pandemic.

'It was so inspirational listening to them talk about their continued passion for teaching, how much they love FTS… and how committed they are to teaching for the long term now'. – Emily Giubertoni, Bishop Challoner Regional Training Centre Coordinator, UK

Our UK programmes team have also launched our Early Career Professional Development Programme this year, which enables early career teachers to reflect on their own practice, supported through mentoring, learning networks and tailored training opportunities – with a view to developing teachers’ feelings of self-efficacy, resilience and purpose, and thereby increasing their likelihood of staying in the profession. Since launching training in November 2020, 1,273 early career teachers and 1,107 in-school mentors have attended multiple training events and been provided with high-quality professional development materials. The training helped teachers to feel enthused and confident about classroom teaching and behaviour management.

'The course was very well run ​and the facilitators were very organised, professional and friendly'. – Participant, Early Career Professional Development Course, UK

Acknowledging this success, we were also selected to become a Lead Provider for the Department for Education’s reformed National Professional Qualifications for teachers and school leaders, in which we will combine our extensive experience of delivering teacher and leader professional development on a national scale with the best sector expertise and insights from internationally recognised experts in professional learning.

We also deployed the expertise of our careers team to provide professional development opportunities for 1,700 educators in 700 schools, helping them to develop the knowledge and insights needed to guide their students in their future careers decisions.

The Connected Learning Centre: supporting teachers in computing and technology

The Connected Learning Centre (CLC) has continued to punch above its weight with a worldwide impact, providing successful curriculum support and continuous professional development (CPD) workshops in using computing and technology to enhance learning.

'It has inspired me to create more dynamic resources and cascade today’s skills and knowledge to my colleagues'. – BlendEd course participant

Lebanon: supporting refugee teachers

Through Alexandria Schools Trust (AST), we work with local NGOs in Lebanon to improve English language proficiency of teachers working in non-formal education settings – predominantly teaching Syrian refugee children. Where possible we identify, train and deploy teachers who are themselves refugees. Despite the challenges of the pandemic and a severe economic crisis in Lebanon, this year, the programme achieved its highest ever number of attendees – 140 teachers and 36 school leaders – and the strongest teacher feedback to date. Every teacher on the course reported being either satisfied or very satisfied with the support they received.

Jordan, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe: new programmes of support for teachers

As part of our Learning Bridges programme in Jordan, launched in 2020 in partnership with UNICEF, we developed a remote learning professional development course for teachers, which has been completed by 45,000 teachers to date.

In Sierra Leone, we launched a new programme in partnership with local NGO EducAid in July 2021, designed to improve early grade reading and mathematics by strengthening teacher training. The programme contributes to the Global Partnership for Education’s support for Sierra Leone, overseen by UNICEF, and will provide professional development for over 11,000 teachers between 2021 and 2023.

We also began delivery of a major new contract in Zimbabwe in the summer of 2021 – delivering the teacher professional development component of the TEACH programme, making a vital contribution to the programme’s strengthening of the education system through nationwide teacher professional development.

Supporting leadership for learning

We have an evidence-informed model to develop highly effective educational leadership at all levels, empowering them to lead learning and drive up standards in schools and beyond.

Ethiopia: school leadership training for equitable school improvement

Our TARGET team has rolled out a pilot of its National School Leadership Training (NSLT) and School Leaders Continuous Professional Development (SLCPD) programmes, using our distinctive evidence-based training model to improve the skills of school leaders in community engagement, inclusion, teaching and learning, and school improvement. The NSLT training programme has so far reached 80 principals and vice principals in secondary schools while the SLCPD programme has trained almost 500 school leaders in Ethiopia’s emerging regions. This early engagement is helping to improve teaching quality among 8,500 teachers and consequently the learning experiences of 158,000 children – most of whom are disadvantaged and vulnerable learners, such as girls in pastoralist communities.

'I have changed my attitude, began to love my career, and decided to continue in my position. This is really the result of the new training which is not only supports me to like my job, but also saved my career'. – School Leader, Sidama region

ll schools in the pilot have also hosted professional learning communities for school leaders from different schools, who have commented on how these communities have helped them to collaboratively find solutions to problems, see new practices in action which they can replicate in their own schools, and identify the performance level of their own school and ways to improve it – as well as boosting morale. The training model is based on evidence of what works in educator professional development, which clearly demonstrates the advantages of collaborative learning.

As a learning organisation, we are investing in researching the impact of the pilot with the 80 school leaders, tracking impact on instructional leadership skills and on school professionals. The results of the pilot are being used to plan for the programme’s scale up.

Rwanda: promoting leadership for learning

The Building Learning Foundations programme supports leaders of learning: high-performing headteachers who are given a role to run professional learning communities (PLCs) and coach peer headteachers in school improvement. As a result of the programme, 98% of headteachers met the benchmark for key school leadership standards that promote learning – up from 66% in March 2020, and compared to a target of 65%.

Leaders of learning have been pivotal in organising Rwanda’s response to the Covid-19 crisis at school level, including the government’s flagship back-to-school campaign in January 2021. The PLCs provided a flexible structure to convene headteachers in problem-solving sessions to discuss how to get children back to school. For example, in the PLCs, all headteachers were requested to identify vulnerable children, discuss the hardest-to-reach cases, and to start engaging parents through SMS and visits where possible. The leaders of learning also made use of social media, mobile technology and online platforms to connect headteachers. Despite the crisis, 100% of the headteachers we work with attended at least one PLC in the 2020/21 academic year, exceeding the target of 90%, and 95% attended at least five sessions. This marks an increase from 94% attendance in 2020 and just 49% in 2018 and testifies to the effectiveness of these groups in helping school leaders to develop their skills, their confidence, and their schools.

'It is what we learn, discuss and share in PLCs which guides us in our school to lead learning'. – David, Headteacher

UK: supporting leaders through school-to-school collaboration

Our Schools Partnership Programme (SPP) has continued to provide coaching and support to senior and middle leaders within clusters of schools, helping them to engage in a continuous cycle of self- and peer-review and school-to-school support and improvement. Despite the disruptions of the pandemic, SPP still managed to deliver to 70% of schools in its Education Endowment Fund cohort in the Autumn term of 2020, and to run well-received and well-attended sessions for its National Partnerships schools. It also developed new resources, including virtual peer reviews and focused enquiry frameworks to enable schools to continue their SPP engagement through new modalities and platforms.

'The schools in the Berkshire Alliance of Special Schools partnership that have been involved in SPP have had a much more honest and open approach to discussing risk assessment, sharing documents and making decisions during this time and this is down to the culture developed through'. – SPP – Headteacher, Berkshire

The collaborative approach of the SPP proved vital in continuing to build schools’ resilience to the difficult circumstances surrounding the pandemic. As a result, the SPP Affiliate Alumni programme launched for schools to continue SPP when they have completed the core programme to further its impact and support, and the SPP model has been expanded to multi-academy trusts (MATs) to support even more education leaders.

'This sort of collaboration, in a space can that often be competitive, has been transformative for our trusts, our schools, our staff and our own development. If every MAT leader had this kind of opportunity, there’s no telling how much the system could gain. As we look to rebuild from Covid, valuing collaboration over competition is surely an area of policy worth exploring'. – Helen Rowland and Andy Yarrow, Schools Week

Leading thinking on the role of the middle tier in education leadership

We are conducting a programme of research, in partnership with IIEP-UNESCO, into the potential of instructional leaders at the so-called ‘middle tier’ of education systems: the layer between schools and state-level institutions. In January 2021, we published our first report from this programme, in collaboration with IIEP-UNESCO and the Education Commission: a review of the international evidence on the potential of the middle tier to support education system reform, while the final report, featuring five in-depth global case studies, is set to publish in 2022.

Using accountability for school and system improvement

Accountability, quality assurance and school inspections have long been at the centre of our work in the Middle East, although there has been significant disruption to our work in this area as a result of school closures throughout the pandemic. While such closures have enabled us to innovate – for example, designing remote inspection services to ensure quality teaching during periods of closure – much of our usual work has been put on hold due to lack of access to the schools we work with. However, as the world moves towards recovery from the pandemic, we plan to adapt and scale our recent innovations for the post-Covid context, making effective use of technology to support efficient accountability processes across education settings and supporting education leaders – both local and national – in accessing data and insights to inform their decision-making.

More broadly, we also ensure that accountability – as one of our key organisational values – is embedded in all our programmes. For example, in Ethiopia, our TARGET team has been working closely with the School Improvement Programme Directorate to conduct inspections of 150 low-performing schools.

We also strive to ensure accountability through rigorous and transparent assessment of our own performance, and we are continuing to invest in monitoring and evaluation to ensure that we deliver the best possible outcomes for our clients and beneficiaries.

Supporting girls’ education in challenging contexts

We know that girls’ education is one of the key challenges of our times. We are working to both strengthen systems to enable more girls to learn the skills they need to thrive though completing a full course of quality education, and making important contributions to the global evidence base on girls’ education. This year, this has included a number of key reports for clients such as FCDO and the EdTech Hub.

Rwanda: supporting girls’ return to school and developing strategies to improve gender equity

The BLF programme’s multi-level approach to improving Rwanda’s education system includes its strategies to improve gender equity. As well as finding ways to increase numbers of female school leaders, the programme equips them to increase both girls’ access to schooling and their performance at school. With this in mind, this year, BLF provided technical assistance to the Ministry of Education on the revision of its Girls’ Education Policy, highlighting the following strategic priorities:

  • Embedding gender-responsive culture and practices throughout its own programme implementation and governance
  • Strengthening the education system to respond to gender and safeguarding issues
  • Supporting girls’ access to useful information, education and communication materials
  • Advocating for gender-equitable and inclusive processes at school and institutional levels.

In addition, the BLF team has worked with the Ministry of Education to ensure support for girls returning to school after the Covid-related closures – especially where girls have faced early marriage or pregnancy. BLF is supporting PLCs for headteachers, many of whom are facing such issues. One headteacher described how he encouraged a pregnant student’s family to send her back to school, and supported her at school so that she did not miss out on learning. The sharing of this story in the PLCs motivated other school leaders to follow up on similar cases in their own schools.

Kenya: supporting girls’ education amid Covid-19

Our Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) programme in Kenya supports the transitions of girls from primary education to secondary education or vocational pathways. It continues to demonstrate success, with consistently higher rates of transition among girls in the programme (88%) than the national average (80%), but these gains were threatened by prolonged school closures amid the pandemic.

The team therefore created an emergency plan, featuring girls’ reading camps, provision of paper-based resources and an enhanced role for community health volunteers (CHVs) to support the engagement of vulnerable girls with remote learning. As a result, the programme still reached 76% of the girls participating through tutorials and feedback, and continued tracking 90% of participants. A study in January 2021 found that:

Girls in the programme had an excellent return rate following school closures (94%), ten percentage points higher than the average return rate of vulnerable adolescent girls (84%) in urban and rural areas in Kenya.

Girls had an 88% attendance rate – up from 86% prior to the closure period – and the study also found that girls in the programme displayed no overall learning loss despite school closures. (Education Development Trust (2021), ‘Rapid assessment of learning levels after prolonged school closure due to Covid-19’. Please note that this was a separate study to that cited in a GEC blog in September 2021. Although there was some overlap in these samples (both samples included GEC intervention schools, although not necessarily the same schools), the independent research reported in the blog also included control schools which did not receive support from the WWW programme)

As a learning organisation committed to ongoing research and development, we invested in capturing key innovations developed by our GEC team during the pandemic. This included research on the enhanced role of the CHVs. The innovative model and key learnings from the team were published in a research report in autumn 2020, and we have been active in sharing and disseminating insights from this innovation with the wider global community, including a webinar with the Education Commission. They also made a major contribution to a series of ‘lessons learned’ workshops on the Covid-19 response, run by the GEC management team.

Community-assisted learning: mobilising reading camps and community health volunteers

In Kenya, our team organised reading camps as part of the measures to engage with learning during school closures. The camps were facilitated by teachers, coaches and mentors and were accessed by 35% of girls – more than any other mode of out-of-school learning in rural (arid and semi-arid) areas. The team also created and provided paper-based resources to support home learning without access to technology (accessed by 31%). Both reading camps and paper-based resources seem to have had an effect on mitigating learning loss. The average test scores of girls accessing reading camps and using paper-based learning were 8% higher for SeGRA (language skills) and 18% higher for SeGMA (mathematics), compared to girls who accessed neither.

Meanwhile, we also continued to mobilise 500 CHVs to connect girls with education during school closures, visiting 11,543 households, directly reaching 16,076 learners and indirectly reaching 31,384 girls (e.g. through calls and texts). CHVs were also trained in monitoring and addressing gender-based violence. Their role in supporting education has now been absorbed into their regular work as community volunteers.

Expanding the evidence base for policy and practice

Our research and consultancy teams have continued to provide high-quality usable outputs for a range of key clients, including UNICEF, FCDO, Norad, the Queen Rania Foundation, and the EdTech Hub. We continue to innovate and adapt in our work to ensure the best results for our clients and beneficiaries: this year, in 70% of cases, our consultants were able to go beyond established methods or take innovative approaches, while in 100% of projects, clients felt that we were able to adapt methods and outputs in response to new data, insights or priorities. All of our clients said they were likely to use our consultancy or research services again.

Our consultancy project reach:

897,000 learners

45,000 educators

3,300 system leaders

123 policymakers

20 education organisations

Beyond our consultancy work, in 2020/21, we published 11 research pieces and evaluations of our own programmes. Five of these share findings and best practice around recovering from the pandemic (such as assessing learning loss and supporting students to catch up), while others share insights into the role of evidence in the improvement of school systems, teacher management in refugee settings, and new evidence on effective school leadership.

'Only Education Development Trust do research in this way… They are a good partner for doing research and giving best practice to others'. – Rwanda Basic Education Board.

FCDO continues to be a key partner and this year, we have produced research on issues including girls’ education, climate change, budget cuts and lessons learned from Covid-19.

'Excellent quality of work. Great insights. Well written'. – The EdTech Hub

Our Learning Bridges Global Knowledge Report, which consolidated global best practices in education responses to the pandemic, was presented at three UNICEF-hosted workshops attended by over 40 UN agencies, donor groups and staff from every UNICEF Ministry of Education office in the Middle East and North Africa region.

Providing high-quality employability and careers information

Our employability and careers portfolio continues to grow, with three new programmes launching in the 2020/21 period.

New programmes to support employability

We launched the Making a Difference employability programme in the south of England in October 2020, which helped 231 economically inactive people into work in the reporting period, despite the pandemic context. 96% of programme participants reported being very satisfied and would recommend the programme to a friend. The programme has since been expanded to cover the north of England, with a view to helping thousands more economically inactive individuals to move into work. The team has also established an engaging and helpful online presence to help reach as many potential clients as possible, resulting in a 50% increase in self-referrals to the programme.

'Having [my advisor] to chat to was a real boost, she was really knowledgeable and very sympathetic to my situation. Our conversations allowed me a safe space to discuss how I felt and share my fears. Being on the Making a Difference programme has really helped me, and I would recommend it to other people'. – Participant, Making a Difference programme

Our North East Ambition programme also launched this year, to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) based in the North East of England, ensuring that local businesses are taking advantage of the opportunities available to them to develop and upskill their workforce. Since launching in April 2021, it has engaged 82 SMEs, 59% of which are micro-enterprises which stand to benefit the most from direct support.

We have also been selected to deliver a new employability programme in the South West of England, Reskilling Cornwall, to support those who have been affected by the economic impacts of the pandemic. All of our new contracts link directly to tackling economic inequality and helping communities bounce back from the effects of Covid-19.

Continued excellent service in our careers programming

The fantastic achievements of the employability and careers team have once again been recognised, this time through being granted the status of licenced awarding body for the Quality in Careers Standard across the UK. With this license, we are now one of just 12 providers able to award schools and colleges who have demonstrated that they have a robust programme of careers and employability education.

The pandemic context and requirements for social distancing meant that our careers programmes needed to adapt to new modes of delivery. This has led to a significant drop in customer numbers for the 2020/21 period for the National Careers Service and a number of our local partnerships (e.g. with Job Centres) being put on hold as we delivered services remotely. Nevertheless, we still reached 71,970 individuals with high-quality impartial careers information, advice and guidance that provided them with relevant information and clear steps to advance personal career planning and development, and we are continuing to reassess our strategic partnerships following the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions.

Despite the decline in customer numbers, we continue to generate excellent satisfaction rates among our customers. The National Careers Service (North) garnered a 99% customer satisfaction rate, and 98% would recommend the service to a friend.

Our Careers Clusters programme is being delivered to 23 schools and colleges in London and reached almost 1,800 young people and over 130 teachers in 2020/21. Though the pandemic context has made work placements for young people more challenging to procure, the Careers Clusters team have continued to engage employers through virtual placements where necessary – resulting in nearly 750 virtual placements. This service has a 100% satisfaction rate from beneficiaries, as well as strong endorsement from employers: 89% reported that the activities had successfully raised awareness among students of their specific industries.

Meanwhile, we worked directly with 91 schools and colleges this year in our school-traded careers services – our largest reach to date – and 41 schools and colleges through our tracking services – the largest number of educational establishments ever reached by our careers team. Student feedback has been very strong, with 98% rating the services as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’, and 93% reporting that they have more clarity on the actions needed for them to achieve their career aspirations.

Finally, our Apprenticeship Support and Knowledge (ASK) programme for schools also reached almost 60,000 students (up from 44,530 last year), despite incredibly challenging and rapidly changing circumstances. This included a variety of innovative virtual apprenticeships. The programme also exceeded its targets for reaching parents (6,482 against a target of 5,250) and teachers (902 against a target of 750), and 93% of customers said they would recommend the service.

CASE STUDY: Helping young people back into education and training

One student we worked with through our tracking services contract in Hammersmith had been out of education and employment since completing Year 11 at school, and was suffering from poor mental health due to his situation and family circumstances. Our adviser regularly followed up with him, and noticed his interest in music, so connected him to a course being run by a local theatre, which he successfully applied for – and was subsequently offered a place at a specialist film college.

Putting our knowledge into practice: our independent schools

In addition to our varied and impactful work in the state school sector, detailed throughout this report, we put our knowledge of what makes excellent education into practice in our ownership and management of our independent schools – Danesfield Manor School, Oakfield Preparatory School and St Andrew’s School in the UK and the International School of Cape Town in South Africa.

Our schools continue to demonstrate excellent achievements. This year, St Andrew’s came 44th in the Sunday Times Parent Power Top 100 Independent Prep Schools list, based on its Key Stage 2 SATs results. At Oakfield, 98% of Reception pupils achieved a ‘Good’ level of development in the Early Years Profile, while Year 6 pupils received a total of 87 offers and 17 scholarships in their 11+ assessments for independent and state secondary schools. Outside of statistical performance, the schools continue to demonstrate a range of other factors which make them stand out – from excellent pastoral care and inspirational teaching to facilities designed to nurture pupils and their interests. Oakfield, for example, has furthered the development of art and STEM subjects among its pupils with newly refurbished specialist teaching rooms, while pupils at Danesfield have benefitted from access to its Forest School site to help look after their mental wellbeing.

The impacts of UK national lockdowns and school closures were inevitably felt by our schools, but all rose to the challenges of remote delivery. 90% of parents at St Andrew’s, 92% of parents at Danesfield and 96% of parents at Oakfield felt positively about the remote teaching their children received. On reopening, Danesfield was visited by the National Health Service, who produced a report on how well the school managed Covid-related safety measures, stating it is: ‘very well maintained to an exceptional high standard throughout. They have gone above and beyond in their protocols, procedures and risk assessments – the detail in all the planning is absolutely incredible.’

Furthering our impact: events and engagement

Throughout 2020/21, we worked hard to extend the reach of our work, sharing our research, insights and commentary with our partners, a wide range of like-minded organisations, whose readers and members have therefore had much greater exposure to our work. This has helped our ideas to go further and have greater influence upon decision-makers. It has also been a step-change year in engagement via events. Whilst in 2019/20, we took part in a number of conferences with high volumes of guests, the effects of Covid-19 taking us to purely virtual events have allowed us to more directly engage with policymakers, donors, and others in the global education community in 2020/21. Not only has this enabled us to reach a wider audience geographically, but we have also reached over 670 participants directly – an increase in direct engagements despite the lack of physical conferences.

We have also achieved greater coverage in the press, particularly in the UK, with commentary published on careers, employability, early years provision and school-to-school collaboration. We have increased our social media audience by 17%, reaching 1,400 more followers on Twitter and 13,000 more on LinkedIn than in 2019/20. We have also increased visits to our website by 48%, with 146,500 visits, compared to 98,800 in the previous year.

Collaboration and content sharing

We have been proud to collaborate with a range of organisations, including INEE, UKFIET, BETT, the Education Commission, IIEP-UNESCO, the EdTech Hub, the British Council, the Institute of Development Studies and the Global Schools Forum, helping to reach more individuals with our knowledge and expertise. We have leveraged these partnerships in a variety of ways, creating multiple engagement points to raise the profile of our work: from events and webinars, to blogs, commentaries and published research.

Conference participation

We have presented our work at several high-profile conferences and events in the global education sphere, including the UNESCO World Teachers’ Day event 2020 and the RISE conference. What is more, we organised and hosted a side event for the Global Education Summit, ‘High-impact domestic financing: evidence, equity, efficiency’, in partnership with the British Council and FCDO.

Global Dialogue

Our own Global Dialogue event in February 2021 brought together leading experts from across the world to consider key promising practices for a post-pandemic renewal of learning. Panellists included the Ministers of Education for Rwanda, Kenya and Ethiopia, as well as senior representatives from the EdTech Hub, Dubai Cares, FCDO, the World Bank, USAID, the Varkey Foundation, the Global Partnership for Education, UNESCO and the Luminos Fund. More than 90 organisations were represented in the audience.

Our commitment to inclusion and diversity

Inclusion is a now a key value for our organisation, and we are keenly aware of the importance of inclusion and diversity in all the work that we do. We believe that our programmes and interventions are the most powerful, though not the only, tool that we have to make a difference to the lives of those in disadvantaged groups.

This year, the BLF programme in Rwanda has continued to make steps towards greater inclusion by equipping teachers and parents to carry out – and hold schools accountable for – inclusive practices. By the end of March, 481 teachers had been trained to become Inclusion Education Focal Teachers (IEFTs), equipped to support children with special needs after school reopening. We are now in discussions with the World Bank on the wider rollout of this initiative.

Inclusion features heavily in many of our other programmes. In Ethiopia, inclusion is a key pillar of our TARGET programme, and our school leader training specifically highlights issues of inclusion and diversity. Meanwhile, our careers team organised employer activities in UK SEND schools, and CLC’s TechPathways programme developed an Unconscious Bias Toolkit. This was designed to enable teachers to identify and challenge unconscious bias and help reduce the barriers preventing underrepresented groups from pursuing careers in the digital sector, and embedded in all its events and courses.

Within our organisation, our Inclusion and Diversity task force, formed in 2020, launched a three-year Inclusion and Diversity Strategy, with the full backing of the leadership team and Board of Trustees. This was formed based on analysis of diversity data and a dedicated inclusion and diversity survey for all staff. It focuses on four strategic themes: voice and inclusivity, recruitment and promotion, global teams, and positive influencing of clients and programmes. Progress has already been made against its ambitious targets and all staff have undertaken compulsory unconscious bias training. We have also added ‘inclusion’ as an organisational value to ensure its prominence in our corporate strategy.

Safeguarding: Protecting those we work with

Safeguarding remains a central priority at Education Development Trust. It is our legal and moral duty to ensure the protection of all those who come into contact with us through the course of our work. Our robust safeguarding policies encompass our work worldwide and we are committed to ensuring that all our beneficiaries receive the same level of protection and care by our vigilant and dedicated people.

Throughout 2020/21, we carried out a cycle of online training for all business areas, reinforcing the eLearning that was developed and implemented in 2019/20. The training enabled an increasingly vigilant approach to safeguarding throughout the organisation, demonstrated by prompt reporting of concerns and positive feedback by staff that they felt safe and confident about how to raise concerns.

The Global Safeguarding Community of Practice also met bi-monthly, enabling all designated safeguarding leads and programme safeguarding officers across the organisation to share knowledge and best practice. The forum is also an opportunity for participants to reflect on the training they receive from the organisation and contribute to policy reviews, ensuring that the safeguarding policies are effective in practice and appropriately adapted for the different contexts we operate in.

Each business area has implemented a continuous improvement plan and undertaken activities to strengthen safeguarding in their respective business areas and contexts ensuring compliance with the Global Safeguarding Policy and reporting procedures. Safeguarding provisions have been strengthened and embedded in associated policies to ensure that a consistent approach is applied to maintaining the safety of staff and beneficiaries.

Safeguarding has been aligned with both the inclusion and diversity and staff wellbeing strategies, establishing a unified approach to these interrelated issues.

Looking after our people: Staff morale and wellbeing

None of the work that we do around the world would be possible without the hard work and commitment of our staff – and supporting them remains a key priority for us.

Steps taken during the pandemic to support our employees’ wellbeing – including provision of wellbeing-focused guidance for staff and line managers, the development of wellbeing and mental health resources on our Learning Hub, signposting to key providers of support and advice and regular wellbeing bulletin emails – received an unanimously positive response.

Our staff survey, conducted in March 2021, showed that 85% of respondents felt ‘very satisfied’ or ‘satisfied’ with Education Development Trust as a place to work, giving the organisation an overall satisfaction score of +82 – a two-point improvement on December 2020 and a 17-point improvement on August 2019.

Regular employee ‘pulse’ surveys have also provided insights into our people’s perception of Education Development Trust as a place to work. The latest survey, conducted in the summer of 2021, showed improvements in scores for safeguarding, colleagues’ commitment to equality, inclusion and diversity, pay, whether staff feel comfortable offering their opinions, and critically – whether our people enjoy their jobs. This is highly encouraging, but staff wellbeing remains a strategic priority for the organisation, forming a key part of our corporate strategy for 2021-24.

Reflections from the Education Impact Committee

Dr ANGELA McFARLANE | Chair, Education Impact Committee

Our purpose as an organisation is to change education for good around the world, grounding our work in research and evidence of what works. The Board of Trustees has oversight of the delivery of that purpose through the Education Impact Committee. We work with our colleagues around the world to ensure that all the excellent work of Education Development Trust contributes to this mission.

Building on over five decades of experience in global settings we continue to develop and refine a unique impact framework and transformation model which informs the design, implementation and evaluation of all our projects. It is a testament to the robustness of our model that we have been able to have such a positive impact in projects as diverse as improving girls’ outcomes in Kenya to offering careers and employability advice in England. This past year has also tested the flexibility and power of our model to achieve robust outcomes. We have been able to move a high proportion of our delivery from face-to-face to online settings, at pace and with no loss of impact. Indeed, this move has had a very positive outcome on the number of learners we have been able to reach.

We are delighted that our work, informed by experience gained through international partnership, continues to have such a remarkable impact amid the challenges that the past two years have brought. The creativity, resilience and dedication of our colleagues has once again been clearly demonstrated throughout the 2020/21 period and all our teams should be very proud of the meaningful impact their work continues to have over time.

Education Development Trust is a learning organisation. Building on our experience we have a refreshed corporate strategy and an updated transformation model in place. We look forward to the next strategic period and the difference the work of Education Development Trust will doubtless continue to make to teachers, learners and leaders around the world.

Looking ahead

Dr PATRICK BRAZIER | Chief Executive, Education Development Trust

We can be very proud of everything we have achieved in 2020/21 – not least the ways in which we have reached over a million more learners than last year. This excellent achievement – along with the many others detailed in this report – provides us with an ever-stronger foundation to make even more impact in the future.

In the years to come, and as the world recovers from the ongoing impact of the pandemic, we will continue to raise standards across education systems, improve school performance and so transform lives through our work. We will also continue to invest in our public research portfolio – a key part of our charitable purpose – which has an essential role to play in furthering the global evidence base to help solve critical issues in education. As we say in our corporate strategy for the next three years, we will take the best of what we have learned in these uncertain times, and apply it in our ways of working, our programmes, our consultancy and our research, so that we can continue to build more resilient, effective and equitable education systems around the world. I have no doubt that our brilliant, dedicated teams, and those who will join us in the coming year, will be equal to this important task.

As we move forward towards these goals, the importance of collaboration cannot be overstated. We remain deeply committed to our learning partnerships with governments, research organisations, delivery partners and others to further our respective learning and the impact that this can have on learners and educators around the world.

We look forward to another year in which we can make a real difference to the lives of people around the world, as we continue to work towards our vision of a world in which all lives are transformed by education.

www.EducationDevelopmentTrust.com

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