Teacher-driven innovations to improve holistic education
The Aga Khan Foundation is leading Schools2030, a participatory learning improvement programme taking place in 1,000 government schools across Afghanistan, Brazil, India, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Portugal, Tajikistan, Tanzania and Uganda.
1,000
schools
50,000
teachers
500,000
learners
1,000
schools
50,000
teachers
500,000
learners
His Highness the Aga Khan
Osh, October 2002
The programme focuses on teacher agency and aims to catalyse teacher-driven education innovations by supporting teachers to design, test and showcase their ideas for improving education equity and quality in their contexts. These low-cost and scalable 'micro-innovations' will inform and transform education systems to improve learning outcomes for the most marginalised learners worldwide.
Supported by Schools2030, teachers have developed a range of contextualised holistic assessment tools that can be used to measure a range of learning domains, including non-traditional competencies like empathy and creativity. These tools are used by teachers to inform their innovation process and are then used to test the efficacy of their ideas later on.
A child visits one of the 200 library kiosks set up by AKF India.
AKF
AKF India provides almost 200 iron boxes of books in public spaces. A volunteer opens each mini community library daily for children and their parents to borrow a range of literature, nurturing both academic ability and socio-emotional development. Initially a response to the pandemic, it is particularly useful for children who are unable to attend school.
Finding that over half of six- to ten-year-old students in a girls’ school in Baghlan, Afghanistan struggled with literacy, their teacher Shafiqa designed a project-oriented class. She used game-based methods including flashcards and ‘question roulette’, before assigning students group research projects on the topics and having them present to their classmates.
A student demonstrates her measuring cylinder model.
AKF
The meteorological stars innovation at a Ugandan secondary school encourages the students to create mock weather stations and meteorological equipment, involving design, crafts, analysing data sets and presenting to classmates while better understanding the natural environment.
Finding that students often lose their enthusiasm for learning, a cluster of schools in Portugal have established ‘Our Classroom without a Roof’. This is an outdoor learning environment in which students accomplish tasks in a practical way surrounded by nature, increasing their engagement.
The innovations generated each year are being collected, stored and codified via the ‘Faved’ platform which allows teachers from across the world to access and adapt ideas from other teachers for use in their own classrooms and contexts.
Schools2030 is supported by a visionary consortium of nine philanthropic partners. They combine their collective technical expertise and financial resources to promote and scale effective innovations for improving holistic learning outcomes at scale.
Schools2030 also puts out annual calls for research, funded with support from its partner, the Jacobs Foundation. The research is designed to support Schools2030’s growing body of evidence and ensure that the work it is doing is supported by academic best practice.
The research projects cover a range of topics, including how environmental factors affect picture comprehension in early childhood in Kenya, and how different stakeholder perspectives on what is meant by ‘quality’ in education can affect learning outcomes in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Find out more.
Learn more about Schools2030 or read the 2022 report.