Throughout our first eight years at STiR, we’ve been trying on a wide range of spectacles – all to gain a clearer vision of the future. We’re deeply proud of our achievements so far with the support of our team and board, and our government, donor and influencer partners. We’ve collectively reached 200,000 teachers and 6 million children in over 35,000 Indian and Ugandan schools. We’ve demonstrated very strong progress in our district delivery model compared to our progress pathway, which is now validated through an independent longitudinal study. And we’ve continued to build our leadership team and organisation, our influencing activities and most importantly our government partnerships.
But for most of these eight years, our vision has been blurred by a single existential question: what is STiR really here for? In recent months, we’ve become a lot clearer about our purpose. We believe that it’s a moral and economic imperative that children develop the foundations of lifelong learning, and a love of learning, to succeed in a world of ‘unknown unknowns’. These foundations include socio-emotional outcomes like engagement, safety, curiosity and critical thinking. They also include elements that contribute to academic outcomes – namely learning time and the intentionality and quality of teaching. A strong body of global evidence shows that these outcomes strongly affect life as well as academic success.
And now, with the benefit of our 20/20 vision, we’re keen to share an updated strategy with you. There should be no big surprises here, but we’ve had the courage to deeply internalise our learning and build everything we do – our theory of change, our government partnership model and our organisational culture and design – around it, to take us to our logical conclusion.
A clear theory of change: developing the foundations of lifelong learning and a love of learning, through role-modelling and relationships
What is unique in our approach is the how. Other interventions are doing great work on direct training programmes and curriculum reform, but unless we address the how – the spirit of delivery – their impact will remain limited. We believe that the most sustainable way to build these foundations is through strong role-modelling and trusting relationships at all levels of a system – between a child and their teacher, and between the teacher and the school leaders and officials who support them.
Through this theory of change, we hope to align with the core of many new national education plans, including India’s New Education Policy, Uganda’s National Teacher Policy, Indonesia’s 2045 Vision and Ethiopia’s new Education Roadmap.
And we’re also clearer about how our approach links to the issues around workforce readiness that many governments are wrangling with. A recent Confederation of Indian Industry survey found that more than 50% of young people were unemployable – and this had nothing to do with reading, focusing instead on things like interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. We believe that the foundations of lifelong learning will provide young people with a better chance to thrive and adapt in the workplace – with the potential to create huge economic benefits too.
We believe that this approach creates a really exciting learning research agenda. For the first time, with support from colleagues like JPAL Affiliate Professor Rebecca Thornton, we’ve been able to create new tools to measure these outcomes. Building on best-in-class tools like the World Bank’s TEACH and Stallings, we’ve designed these to be as behavioural and observational as possible, to make them feel tangible and replicable to our partner governments.
The first findings from our external longitudinal study in Uganda have confirmed the power of effective role-modelling. Two years into our partnership with the Ministry of Education and Sports, we’re ahead of where we expected to be at this point. District education officials are now spending most of their time away from their offices, actively visiting schools and supporting teachers to improve their practice. Teachers seem to be encouraged by this higher level of engagement from officials, and are consequently spending most of their time on task. And children are now readily participating in class activities, following their teacher’s instructions, and enjoying going to school.
A radical partnership model with governments
Perhaps our biggest learning over the past eight years is this: government ownership comes first and foremost. Poor system support will always trump a good intervention. And there is no point in doing something – no matter how impactful and good – if it can’t be sustained for a decade or more after an organisation exits a system.
We’re increasingly learning that government buy-in is critical to ensure that our approach is genuinely prioritised and ultimately sustained by our partner systems. We’ve seen that central government buy-in can help to further accelerate behaviour change among district officials at larger scale, once the approach becomes even further embedded into how a system operates. One of our learning priorities for 2020 is understanding how to strengthen the link between state-level officials and district officials through role modelling and the creation of an enabling environment.
We’ve already made significant progress in shifting more operational and financial responsibility for the approach to governments: every donor dollar now leverages $20, and our cost per child has fallen to 50 cents per year in India.
However, as we attempt to scale – from 6 million children in 2020 to 60 million by 2025/26 – we recognise that we need to operate at the extreme end of the government ownership and sustainability spectrum. The fundraising landscape is becoming increasingly specialised, and we want to continue to work with freedom to pursue our mission and theory of change. In our established geographies (Delhi and Uganda), that means working with governments to create clear sustainability plans for how our approach will be embedded and financed for the long haul in government systems.
In our more recent geographies (Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in India) and new countries (such as Indonesia and Ethiopia), we plan to pilot and test an approach known as the Central Learning Partnership. This would achieve greater government leverage, because systems would supply District Leads to manage the approach (one per district), and a team of officials would be established in the central ministry to oversee the model. STiR would then supply a team of 5 to 7 people to provide training, coaching certification, data and project management support to governments. We’re confident that a team of this size can be sufficient to achieve our objectives, because we are not trying to do it by ourselves. We’ll continue to run a small number of each demonstration districts in each geography to showcase innovation and maintain direct links with districts. But ultimately, it is the thousands of government-employed national, district and local officials, working with the nation’s teachers, that will make this change happen.
We’re proposing three other radical changes to our government partnerships in this new approach. Firstly, we’ll ask our government partners to actively fundraise with us, so that we can use their networks to drive local philanthropy. This means that our global catalytic funders can increasingly help us to establish ourselves in new geographies, while local philanthropy – in partnership with governments – helps to sustain our work over time.
Secondly, we have developed a comprehensive data platform to share data back with governments at each level of the system. But we’re not just using this to evaluate our progress – we’re using it in genuine partnership with the governments to learn, iterate and drive improvements. The data is sampled by our team and then validated by an independent longitudinal study in key geographies (Uganda, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu). We’re also aiming to build an app that will enable officials to collect this data at large scale.
Thirdly, we will be increasingly demanding of the commitments and conditions offered by governments upfront, before we begin a detailed engagement in any systems. We’ve perhaps been guilty of doing too much for governments in the past, but we’re now clear that their ownership and adoption are essential for programme sustainability. This is supported by our system diagnostic tool, which identifies whether systems have the right conditions in place to give us the best possible chance of success.
Where these commitments are insufficient, we have to be prepared to exit a geography – as we have had to do recently in Uttar Pradesh. This was an extremely difficult decision, as we had been in UP since 2014 and it was where our first government partnership in India started, but we did not have confidence of future success in either the short or medium term amidst turbulent circumstances in the system. We’re deeply saddened to lose our committed and talented team in the state, who we will be supporting to manage this transition over the next three months as well as possible. And we’ve agreed to share our learning after an honest conversation with the state government, keeping open the possibility that we may be able to return in a few years if the conditions become more favourable.
A radical organisation: lean and candid
We’ve always been guided by our core values of humility, openness, ownership and purpose. Most pertinently, our value of humility states that “we don’t have all the answers upfront”.
As a leadership team we want to build on our value of openness over the next year. We want to continue to strengthen the ways in which we demonstrate honesty to build a strong culture in the organisation that allows us to embrace change and take risks – but allow rapid feedback loops to ensure that we stay on the right track. We’ve been inspired by the concept of radical candour, which encourages challenging others directly whilst also caring for them personally.
We also want to remain lean and agile even as we scale significantly. By 2025/26, we hope to have cumulatively reached over 30 million children, but we estimate that our annual national budget will only need to be about $2.5 million USD – with our cost per child falling to less than 20 cents per year.
This will be enabled by the Central Learning Partnership model described above. But it will also be aided by being smarter about how we operate: for example, centralising our Finance and M&E functions in India so that we can serve new countries cost-effectively.
Overall, it’s been an incredible eight years as the story of STiR has unfolded – and your support has been critical along the way. We’re very grateful for your continued partnership as we embark on the three changes outlined here.
Throughout our history, the path ahead has sometimes seemed a little blurred. But our 20/20 vision has helped us to more clearly see the need for true sustainability and ownership – and we’re now even more committed to helping our government partners to get there.
