Our sixth annual Partner Strategy Group meeting took place between 23-25 November 2020. These meetings provide a hugely important opportunity for us to engage with government officials, donors and NGO partners to discuss our strategy for the year ahead, and we were incredibly grateful that so many of our partners were able to join us for these sessions. Please find a short video featuring some of the highlights of the event below. You can also find links to all of the sessions at the bottom of this article.
As 2020 draws to a close, we wanted to share back some of the key themes that we’ll take forward into 2021.
Deepening human relationships
If the closure of schools and efforts to maintain learning have taught us anything, it’s that people are the most important parts of education systems. In our approach, we focus on building stronger relationships between officials, teachers and children, which is critical to realise deep behaviour change.
As part of the PSG meeting, we shared insights from our ongoing longitudinal studies in India and Uganda. These illustrated that we’re seeing teachers and officials tangibly changing their behaviours at large scale. But despite these promising signs, there’s significant room to deepen behaviour change over the coming years. Based on our learning and in line with our theory of change, we think that the best way to do this is by deepening how officials and teachers work together – from a focus on praising what’s going well towards a focus on continuous improvement.
During the meeting, we asked for input on the following questions:
How can we deepen relationships between officials at all levels and teachers to stimulate further behaviour change?
How could technology (if at all) support to deepen rather than replace relationships between officials and teachers?
How can we ensure equity as we continue to deepen relationships post Covid-19?
Based on your feedback, we identified the below themes that we will take forward into 2021:
- Build strong offline relationships and ensure that technology helps to strengthen, not replace these.
It’s critical to build trust and a sense of professional identity into all human relationships. In particular, it’s important to ensure that central ministry officials have a positive view of teachers and see them as crucial front-line workers to be supported. Technology can then be used to celebrate teacher and officials, which can be highly motivating, particularly in a post-Covid-19 world where they are expected to face significant pressure.
- Be smart about the design of technology, and focus on equity.
When designing for behaviour change, we need to be laser-focused on which behaviours we aim to shift and how. Covid-19 has excluded many who face technological and connectivity challenges – we need to design our technology inclusively so that all teachers and officials are able to access support. We also need to think smartly about how we can use technology to help teachers to return to school.
- Support the wider ecosystem.
We need to ensure that we deepen relationships between people by leveraging the expertise of our partners, and ensuring that technology clearly links different platforms to each other. We need to deeply embed our support in national education plans so that deep, improvement-focused relationships become core to how the wider system operates. We will consider the role of parents, community leaders and other stakeholders in deepening relationships with officials and teachers, and explore whether technology can play a supportive role in engaging them.
- Ensure sustainability through ownership and continued incentive.
Government partners need to be deeply engaged in the design of our technological support and clear about how they can sustain it once we exit. We should be careful to ensure that any support continues to help people to improve, rather than becoming repetitive. We will showcase ‘quick wins’ in terms of deeper relationships with local governments, and help them to celebrate progress to drive further improvement.
Realising true sustainability
The pandemic will have had a significant impact on all education interventions – and it will show governments and NGOs how sustainable their interventions really are. We expect to see many governments changing their priorities, while many organisations have changed the way that they work in order to better respond to the current needs.
As part of the PSG meeting, we shared our emerging thinking on how we could evolve our work with governments to ensure that it is more sustainable, by embedding our approach into existing structures not only in districts but also at the national level. We know that there are few global success stories in this area, so we want to think differently about how sustainability might be achieved.
During the meeting, we asked for input on the following questions:
How can we realise true sustainability so the approach lasts beyond STiR, and what are the opportunities and risks?
How can we support central officials to role-model lifelong learning in a way that lasts?
How can we ensure that local leadership and agency continue to be supported at the district level?
Based on your feedback, we identified the below themes that we will take forward into 2021:
- Frame our approach around government priorities.
Any approach that we take to embedding the programme must be framed clearly around the priorities of each government. In this way, our approach can be seen not as STiR trying to achieve sustainability, but rather as part of a support package specifically targeted at existing priorities. This should be mirrored in any evidence that we develop around our approach.
- Focus on culture.
Our current approach is in many ways already focused on sustainability, because it is fundamentally about changing culture. We need to ensure that we continue to prioritise changing how stakeholders think about education, and avoid the trap of focusing only on structural change. With this in mind, and as above, we should look to identify other stakeholder groups from the wider ecosystem, and consider how their advocacy can influence governments.
- Break down change.
It takes many years to genuinely build an approach into government systems, so we need to break this down into manageable, discrete stages. We can do this by focusing on ‘quick wins’ and celebrating the progress that has been made already (such as dedicated budget lines at district level for our activities). We also need to clarify requirements from our governments on issues such as financial implications, and provide concrete suggestions for how these can be met – making sure that these are as simple as possible.
Session links
Please find the recordings for each session at the links below. We note that due to the significant use of breakout rooms during the final session (Day Three), we do not have a recording of this session. We are also sorry that due to a technical failure, we were unable to record the virtual field visit in Karnataka.
- Day One: https://youtu.be/CGHsa0_yAHA
- Virtual field visit (Delhi): https://youtu.be/TrLgZcmj18g
- Virtual field visit (Tamil Nadu): https://youtu.be/nudSvwvZMtI
- Virtual field visit (Uganda): https://youtu.be/5Gh50xECN7c
Next steps
We look forward to engaging with many of you as we start to take these themes forward. Over the next few weeks, we will be setting our objectives for the year ahead, and we plan to share these with our partners at the end of January. We’re also planning to develop a range of co-authored think pieces and webinars on an ongoing basis, building a strong learning base that will hopefully be useful to the wider sector.
Your expertise and experience will be immensely valuable as we build on the excellent work that is already happening from our teams. If you have any further thoughts on any of the key questions raised at the Partner Strategy Group, or if you would like to collaborate on a future think piece or webinar, we’d love to hear from you – please contact any member of our Global Leadership Team.
Thank you again for your support of the Partner Strategy Group.
