Determined to address the fundamental concerns facing education systems around the world, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings is partnering with the Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX) to undertake joint action and complementary research to develop and mobilise new evidence and practical guidance on scaling in education, with a focus on low- and middleincome countries.
Through this new project, known as Research on Scaling the Impact of Innovations in Education (ROSIE), CUE is collaborating with a subset of Kix-funded projects to contribute to building an actionable evidence base on sustainable and equitable scaling in education.
According to a statement from the organisers, ROSIE’S approach builds upon CUE’S millions learning project, which identified key drivers of scaling in education around four broad themes:
Design: Improving learning at scale requires planning for scale at the outset. Key drivers include responding to local demand; ensuring costeffective learning; maintaining flexible adaptation; and elevating teachers and leveraging community expertise.
Delivery: Delivering at scale requires a combination of political, technical, economic, social, and cultural strategies. Key drivers include building partnerships and alliances; cultivating champions and leaders at all levels; seizing windows of opportunity; utilising appropriate technologies; and using a range of data to continuously drive improvements.
Financing:
Financing should be based on accurate and transparent costing models that take into consideration quality, equity, and inclusion. How resources are allocated matters as much as absolute amounts. Key drivers include identifying flexible financing to build capacity; adopting a long-term approach that invests in core organisational capacities; and activating “middle-phase” financing.
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Enabling environment:
As critical as these three other aspects are, scaling does not happen in a vacuum. The environment in which a policy or program operates plays a critical role in facilitating or impeding the scaling process. Key drivers include a supportive policy environment and a culture of research and development.
An initial cohort of KIX projects will participate in ROSIE, bringing their vast expertise and scaling-related challenges and questions to explore. They will be joined by additional regional KIX projects in mid-2021.
One of our first steps will be to work with these KIX projects to collectively identify a set of common learning questions that ROSIE’S action research will collaboratively explore. These questions will address process-related issues, such as drivers, constraints, tradeoffs, and incentives, of scaling and systems change of direct interest to the KIX projects, and relevant to the broader education community.
This will be complemented by additional research examining how national education decision makers approach scaling, including how they identify innovations to scale, what they see as some of the key drivers and impediments to scaling education innovations, and how innovations can be designed to be integrated into and sustained within existing government systems.
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