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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.

A growing concern for education policymakers is how to improve teaching and learning quality at scale, and how to strengthen delivery systems to achieve this. IIEP-UNESCO and edt see the ‘middle tier’ of education systems as a potential solution to this challenge. In a new research collaboration, we are investigating the potential of middle tier professionals – district supervisors, pedagogical coaches and teacher mentors – to act as catalysts for change in local school reforms.

Over the past two years, we have conducted the first two stages of a research project looking at the effectiveness of an education assessment centre and its ability to predict teacher effectiveness. Following our first report published in 2020, we have now published an update report for 2021, which accounts for the additional data we have gathered on our Future Teaching Scholars’ later classroom performance.

Around the world, young people face considerable challenges. Even before the disruption of the Covid-19 crisis, policymakers were seeking to respond to rapid technological advances, climate change and – in some countries – an ageing population and workforce.

Evidence increasingly suggests a link between good female school leaders and positive learning outcomes, yet women remain severely underrepresented in school leadership. To date, this has not been an easy challenge for education policymakers to address. EDT’s transformational model of girls’ education recognises the need for a combination of approaches to increase the quality of teaching and learning for all children. This includes directing attention to gender within school leadership.

Globally, there are 70.8 million forcibly displaced persons. Among these are 25.9 million refugees, over half of whom are children. Effective teacher management is key to ensuring inclusive, equitable, quality education for these young people, and teachers constitute the most important factor affecting student learning. In crisis and displacement situations, the role of teachers is particularly significant: they are sometimes the only resource available to students.

Edt is delighted to announce that we have been successful in securing the new National Careers Service delivery contract for the North East, Cumbria and Yorkshire and the Humber. We have been delivering the service since 2004 and will now continue to work with some of our trusted partners across the regions for the next three years.

Our new report about systems thinking and its place in education transformation reflects on key published literature and on specific outputs from our own programme of research which has placed emphasis on system reform over the past five years. The work we do at Education Development Trust brings us into direct contact with education systems, and their governments. We are tasked with helping to solve intractable educational challenges. Systems thinking is a vital component part of what we do, how we understand the nature of the issues and how we support change.