#4 The Learning Crisis is Dead.

Long live Foundational Learning.

2014 was a big year for global education, for two reasons. First, and most importantly, we founded Rising Academies. OK, admittedly this made less of a splash than another big news event that year: the publication of Teaching and Learning: Achieving Quality for All by UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report. The report was the first to coin the phrase “global learning crisis” to summarise the dismal learning outcomes being achieved by schools systems in many parts of the world:

The extreme inequalities in achieving the most basic learning requirements, both between and within countries, add up to a global learning crisis that needs urgent action.

Looking back, the report marks the beginning of an interregnum, a creative and conflictual period sandwiched between two periods of broad consensus. Since Rising is very much a product of this interregnum, I think it’s interesting to reflect on what we were arguing about then, what we’re arguing about now, and what’s changed in between.

The end of the MDG consensus

In the 20 years preceding GEMR 2014, many countries successfully expanded access to primary school. While never quite living up to the “universal” tag, universal primary education united a broad coalition of domestic and international actors. The specific policy moves behind these ambitious efforts — cutting fees, building schools and classrooms, training and hiring more teachers — were politically popular with teachers, parents and voters. And achieving universal primary education was enshrined as one of the eight Millennium Development Goals around which global development efforts were meant to be targeted ahead of the 2015 deadline.

As 2015 approached, it was clear that despite this progress, barriers to access remained, with more than 50 million school-age children still out of school. But it was also clear that unless the ‘productivity’ of the schools system improved — the quality of teaching and learning that children experienced once they were in school — the promised outcomes for students would not materialise. This was the ‘learning crisis’, a term coined by the GEMR and later popularised by the World Bank’s education-themed 2018 World Development Report (WDR), Learning To Realize Education’s Promise.

There was much to celebrate about the ‘pivot to learning’, and it resonated very strongly with what had inspired us to found Rising. Education is a promise: a promise that if young people go to school and work hard today it will pay dividends for them, their family and their wider community in future. If they are going to school and not learning anything, we are breaking that promise.

For us, one story in particular came to embody that sense of broken promises. In 2014, when we were first getting to know the community in the hills overlooking Freetown in Sierra Leone where our first school was to be located, we conducted some simple reading assessments using an assessment called the British Abilities Scales. The test works a bit like an optician’s eye test: there are a bunch of easier words at the top, and they get harder and harder as you go down. The further you get, the higher your estimated reading age.

British Abiities Scales Word Reading Card

One day, we were completing the assessment with a 12 year old boy named Mohammed as his father looked on. Straight away, Mohammed got stuck. He was struggling even with the words at the very top of the page. His father had never been to school and couldn’t read himself, but he could see Mohammed struggling and was encouraging him to keep trying. But in the end we had to call time, and Mohammed’s father was heartbroken. “I’ve paid all this money for school” he said, “but his head is empty.”

The 2018 WDR described the learning crisis as a moral crisis; stories like Mohammed’s showed why.

False dichotomies

Politically, what made the MDG consensus so attractive was that it created winners: more children got to go to school, more teachers got hired, more construction contracts for school-building got awarded, and ministers and their development partners got to celebrate a clear, measurable win.

The learning crisis was different. A crisis must have a cause, and however much it might be cloaked in the passive voice, the root causes of this crisis were clear and politically uncomfortable: too many unskilled and unmotivated teachers and school leaders, misdirected investment, and weak incentives and accountability at school, local or national level to make things better. Tackling these issues was politically much riskier and more treacherous.

So while the MDG consensus had unraveled by 2014, it wasn’t clear what might replace it. Instead, for much of the first half of Rising’s existence — basically up until COVID — it felt like much of the debate was being dominated by four false dichotomies:

• Access or quality. Should governments focus on getting children into school or ensuring they learn something when they get there? Must one logically precede the other?
• Rights or fairness. Closely related to the first false dichotomy, should the normative goal of education policy be to expand children’s entitlement to a certain number of years of schooling (as championed by Malala Yousafzai, whose campaign for “12 years of free education” was ultimately enshrined in the Sustainable Development Goals which replaced the MDGs), or does an equitable approach require more consideration of where and on who scarce resources are actually being spent?
• Money or reform. Can we expect education systems to improve if we don’t fund them properly? Can we expect funding to flow if we can’t show that the money will make any difference?
• Public or private. Does private provision undermine the health of the overall education system, worsening inequality by skimming off the best teachers and weakening middle class commitment to public schools? Or is the choice to set up and attend private schools both a recognised right and a potential alternative for families of almost any means who felt let down by a broken state system?

The problem is that in every case the answer wasn’t either/or, it was both/and:

• When millions of children are still out of school, we can’t pretend the access problem is fixed. But nor can we assume that the strategies that got us from 50% to 80% will get us from 80% to 100%, or that there is no relationship between the quality of schooling children receive and their propensity to drop-out.
• Fees are an important barrier to accessing secondary education, and their removal through free education policies typically increases completion rates by 5–15%. But when the most disadvantaged are the least likely to be able to access secondary schooling (a social gradient that removing fees can bend but not flatten), increasing spending on secondary tends to be regressive from a distributional fairness point of view, especially since secondary schooling is also comparatively expensive to deliver.
• Education systems that spend more per student do tend to have better outcomes. It is difficult to see how an education system spending $50 per student per year, nearly all of which is taken up just meeting the payroll cost of an official teacher workforce that is already too small for the population it is meant to serve, can possibly invest in the quality-enhancing curriculum, training, data or other systems needed to raise quality. On the other hand, this is about levels, not change. Estimates of the “spending elasticity of education outcomes” — how much each extra dollar of spending increases the amount of quality schooling children receive — make gloomy reading. One study found that, on average, a doubling of government spending per child led to only half a year extra of good quality schooling.
• Across most countries in Africa (and LMICs elsewhere) the correct position on private schools is that they matter but they just don’t matter as much as either their fiercest critics or strongest advocates suggest. The vast majority of children continue to be educated in the government system. That is not going to change any time soon. But private schools represent a significant and growing minority of enrolments especially in urban areas, they generally perform better than government schools, and not all of this is to do with student demographics. The right policy response is a mix of sensible, proportionate, supportive regulation that is focused on outcomes (including safety) not inputs, along with looking for ways to harness the innovation emanating from a strong non-state sector in driving quality and standards in the public school system.

I’ve argued elsewhere that reformers that try to do everything will fail and that prioritisation is essential — to govern is to choose — but before you can prioritise you need the right analytical framework. Part of what often felt missing from these debates was a serious engagement with what was actually happening in classrooms. What were school leaders, teachers and students actually doing? What was working, what wasn’t, and why? In his Revisionist History podcast, Malcolm Gladwell (channelling Thomas Aquinas) has extolled the virtues of “descending into the particular” as a way to make progress on complex topics where approaches to reasoning based on abstract principles struggle to make headway. It was by doing that some of these binaries would start to be overcome.

A new consensus: foundational learning

Enter “foundational literacy and numeracy” (or FLN as the inevitable three-letter acronym now has it).

I can’t remember the first time I heard the phrase FLN. Yet it is now everywhere. Just in the past few years, the raft of FLN-related initiatives and alliances has included the Ministerial Foundational Learning Exchange, the What Works Hub for Global Education, the FLN Hub, uBoraBora, and GSF’s Impact at Scale lab on FLN, along with new funding programmes from the Gates Foundation, UNICEF, World Bank, FCDO and Enabel to name just a few.

One explanation for the surge in interest in FLN is, obviously, the persistent scale of the problem. In Africa nearly 9 in 10 schoolchildren are in schools where they aren’t learning the basics by Grade 9. But the scale of that problem has been obvious for more than a decade. The reason FLN has become the zeitgeist is that by “descending into the particular” it offers a more positive, a more practical and above all a politically more palatable way of talking about why children aren’t learning and what can be done about it.

I also don’t think it is an accident that the surge in interest in FLN has occurred in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. Across the world, the post-pandemic return to in-person schooling was accompanied by intense discussions and research about the scale of learning losses that students had incurred due to school closures, as well as what remedial measures might be required to help them catch up. It would be a very big stretch to say that the low learning levels of students returning to school in 2021 and 2022 were solely or even largely caused by COVID-related absences. But politically, COVID created the political space to talk about those low learning levels and the importance of investing in foundations that might not otherwise have existed.

Crisis? What Crisis?

But there’s a risk in all this consensus. If the price we have to pay to get all stakeholders singing from the same hymn sheet again is to stop asking difficult questions — about why proven approaches are so hard to diffuse, about why a status quo that is clearly not working is so difficult to change — is that too high a price to pay?

“Crisis? What Crisis?” was a front-page headline that ran in a British tabloid newspaper during the 1979 Winter of Discontent. It was a mocking reference to comments made by the Prime Minister of the day, James Callaghan, on his return to the UK from an overseas visit. With the country plagued by industrial action, his attempts to bat away questions from waiting reporters about the scale of the economic issues engulfing the country rang hollow. “Crisis? What Crisis?” (despite Callaghan never actually saying those words) came to epitomise a reluctance to confront hard truths.

What if, in our rush to discard talk of a learning crisis and embrace a language that is politically more comfortable, we too are looking away from the hard truths we need to confront?

In many ways the rise of foundational learning feels like the natural conclusion of the pivot to learning that was urged 10 years ago. It’s given us a new language and a new way to unlock funding, collective action and government attention on the most fundamental problems holding education systems back. That’s a development I hugely welcome. But the roots of the learning crisis were and are political, not just technical. If FLN succeeds in raising learning outcomes where so much else has failed, it will not be because it is technically superior or has better academic evidence behind it. It will be because the reformers championing it — several of whom we have had the privilege to work with — have the skills, judgment, confidence, moral compass, and above all the political courage to make tough choices and do hard things.