Bootcamp Reflections: Building a sustainable, equitable and scalable approach to education systems strengthening
What PEAS learned during the HEA Phase II Bootcamp
PEAS is an award-winning social enterprise with a mission to expand access to sustainably delivered quality secondary education across Africa. We are proud that evidence shows we are achieving this within our secondary schools, which enrol students from poorer backgrounds and help them make faster learning progress. PEAS is also proud of our success in establishing effective partnerships with governments to improve the education systems in which we work. However, we always believe that we can get better at the things we do best, so when we were invited to participate in HEA’s 2021 bootcamp this March, we welcomed the opportunity to get involved. The week-long bootcamp focused on the scaling journey of promising humanitarian education innovations and involved hearing from experts in the sector and other actors developing solutions to support refugee young people to access quality education.
PEAS would like to share four key learnings and reflections from the HEA bootcamp about scaling an innovation to strengthen education systems:
- Align to Government goals and co-create
For system-change to happen, PEAS believes that Government actors should play a leading role in developing or adapting an innovation so that it’s aligned to their goals. By aligning to Government goals, you can ensure you’re acting as a responsible government partner and co-developing a solution that can have a long-lasting positive impact on marginalised young people.
PEAS has been working with the Ugandan Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) to improve school-level support and supervision structures in government secondary schools since 2019. The co-created “Inspect & Improve” programme is designed to empower school leaders to drive improvements that deliver inclusive, quality education to their learners. By supporting school leaders to use high quality inspection data to develop targeted action plans and providing training to strengthen their leadership and management skills, we have already begun to see signs of progress. Initial evidence from a pilot shows that school leaders taking part in the programme improved attendance, enrolment, and several management practices, including rolling out more inclusive learning strategies. The HEA bootcamp helped us think through how we go from a successful pilot to planning for scale that can reach the most marginalised students in Uganda.
2. Keep the ‘endgame’ in mind
PEAS’ goal is to support government to adopt successful elements of our shared innovation. The HEA bootcamp encouraged us to keep this in mind throughout continued design and implementation of our stakeholder development plans and scaling strategy with government. This includes providing government partners with the evidence and information that they want to support decisions.
Government collaboration has been central to PEAS’ approach, and the HEA bootcamp supported us to do some fresh thinking about the role of government as our innovation scales. During the bootcamp, we explored the idea of the changing role of key partners as an innovation moves to scale. Although an innovation may have a number of stakeholders involved in initial stages of creation, during scaling the nature of partnerships may have an increasing focus on implementation and delivery. This thinking is crucial for PEAS as we move from collaboratively designing an innovative programme with government, to wider spread joint implementation and ultimately government adoption of successful components. Through the HEA bootcamp, PEAS mapped out stepping stones from where we are now and where we want to be in all areas to ensure we take a responsible and sustainable pathway to scale.
3. Focus on sustainability
PEAS is committed to finding sustainable solutions in everything we do, including our work outside of PEAS’ network. To ensure long-lasting impact, we aim to ensure our innovations represent value for money. We believe this must be embedded throughout all programme decisions and design, and the HEA bootcamp also reflected this. For example, a key message for PEAS from the HEA bootcamp was to continue to design a MEL programme that balances capturing key data to understand programme effectiveness with what will work in the long-term.
The Inspect & Improve programme is a core strand of PEAS’ system strengthening work, which aims to support the education systems we work in to adopt sustainable solutions that deliver inclusive, quality education to all students. PEAS’ mission is to expand access to sustainably delivered, quality secondary education across Africa. We achieve this through our own school networks and working with governments to strengthen the education systems we work in. Evidence shows that PEAS stronger school leadership, management, teacher support and child protection practices lead to improved student outcomes for marginalised students. PEAS takes what we know works from our own networks, and shares this with government and other school operators to ensure as many students as possible benefit from our evidence-based approaches. Feedback from school leaders on the Inspect & Improve programme has been positive, with one school leader sharing that “the support received has enabled us to improve on learner attendance, the quality of the SOW and lesson plans and ensure better child protection practices.”
4. Work in collaboration with others
A core PEAS value is to be ‘collaborative, not competitive’. The HEA bootcamp’s focus on the wider ecosystem that we all work within was a helpful way to think through how our solution addresses gaps and complements other approaches and systems.
For PEAS, an important idea shared through the HEA bootcamp is whether or not a partner or stakeholder is getting value from the innovation. The majority of actors working in education, humanitarian and development sectors aim for learners to get value from their activities and innovations… but what about everyone else? The HEA bootcamp encouraged us to consider about how government partners and other partners also ‘capture value’. This has been an interesting thought exercise to help us plan our approach to working with partners to ensure that we continue to work towards their goals. Ensuring our programme is aligned to government goals has been embedded in our approach from the beginning. Encouraged by the HEA bootcamp to continue to ensure this as we scale gives us even greater confidence that the Inspect & Improve programme can have wide-ranging and long-lasting benefits for all students in rural, remote and refugee communities.
The HEA bootcamp provided the space and structure for PEAS to come together and think further about how we put the plans in place now to ensure we can get to where we want to be: improved school leadership and management leading to improved quality of learning for all students, particularly those in refugee, remote and rural environments.
