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In September 2020, the Rwanda Basic Education Board (REB) – in its efforts to improve the country’s school leaders – formed a learning partnership with the Education Commission, Education Development Trust, and WISE to undertake rapid research on school and system leadership during school closures and as they started to reopen for the first time.

Covid-19 caused considerable disruption to education around the world. Disadvantaged and marginalised learners have been particularly hard-hit. Naturally, earlier in the pandemic, the focus of much attention was on how to safely reopen schools, often with a preoccupation on hygiene and social distancing considerations. With schools in many jurisdictions reopening partially or fully, there is now a growing interest in the immensely important area of recovering the learning lost while pupils have been away from face-to-face education.

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Following Covid-19-related school closures across Rwanda, our Building Learning Foundations team commissioned an inequity impact assessment of the country’s primary-age school population to investigate how children from different backgrounds and contexts have fared during the period of closures, and to inform plans for school reopening.

The Covid-19 crisis has tested education systems in unprecedented ways. In this report, we summarise ten key lessons from the pandemic, which should be used to inform planning for the long-term reconstruction and recovery of education systems. These lessons are drawn from a thorough global review of evidence and policy throughout school closures and plans for reopening around the world, with a particular emphasis on examples of good practice.

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Education policymakers around the world have long shared a key priority: achieving high-quality teaching and learning at scale. This requires strong delivery systems at every level. While there is significant evidence on the important roles played by teachers and leaders, comparatively little attention has been paid to the role – and potential – of middle-tier professionals such as supervisors, instructional coaches and mentors at the regional, district and sub-district level. These actors are key intermediaries in education systems, but their role in teaching and learning improvement has often been overlooked in research and policy debates. In our latest report, together with IIEP-UNESCO and the Education Commission, we highlight the potential of these middle-tier actors as a critical part of the ‘machine’ for quality teaching and learning at scale.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been intensely disruptive to education all around the world. With children in many countries continuing to face prolonged absences from the classroom, innovative solutions are needed to maintain education continuity, especially for the most vulnerable students. Such crises require solutions that go beyond the resources of the ‘traditional’ education workforce, with local communities and inputs from other sectors playing a potentially important role in ensuring continuity of learning. This report, the second in our Learning Renewed series, explores the solutions adopted by our team in Kenya, where we have redesigned the roles of community health volunteers (CHVs) to support continuity of learning for the vulnerable girls we work with, and identifies key lessons which may prove valuable both during and beyond the current crisis.

This edition of Successful School Leadership brings in the latest evidence and material to what has remained a popular publication. While the fundamentals of what drives successful school leadership remain the same, new evidence further supports the arguments put forward by Christopher Day and Pam Sammons back in 2016. The growing interest in system leadership that we have witnessed over the last five years also features in this edition, as does a reflection on the expanding body of international literature focused on school leadership in low-income contexts.

This report is based on a rapid survey of recently published materials, guidance documents and media commentary. It summarises what we know and understand about the impacts of the prolonged school closures that followed the spread of Covid-19 and the context of school reopening and plans for learning recovery.