'Yes we can': Good teaching and effective leadership can overcome context and social challenge

Education matters, a lot, in lots of ways, and for everybody on the planet. I don't mean 'going to school' or anything else to do with the process of education. Rather, it's the impact of the process on learning outcomes. That's what matters. And that's why it's such a privilege for me to have a role in PwC in the world’s largest education programme that focuses on improving learning outcomes for marginalised girls. We deliver it for the UK government and it’s called the Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC). The overall aim of GEC is to educate over 1m marginalised girls in 18 African and Asian countries. We’ve been doing this work since 2012; it’s a huge agenda, a massive challenge, and I’m very proud of what the programme has achieved (see here for an overview).

Prior to leading GEC I hadn’t really done any ‘international development’ work. I had a strong personal interest, but no professional involvement. My ‘thing’ was education.  I did a PhD in the economics of education, and as a young academic I did lots of research on the school-to-work transition in the UK. With PwC I led the first ever longitudinal evaluation of Academies. These were conceived by the great public sector strategist Lord Andrew Adonis, whom I’ve had the privilege of meeting once or twice. When the PwC academies evaluation report was published over 10 years ago, he told me he didn’t agree with it all, but he thought it was a solid piece of research – that was good enough for me!

Irrespective of where I’ve worked in education, the data have always shown that context, environment and disadvantage are strongly correlated with education outcomes.  The empirical evidence is pretty emphatic. In the UK, for example, the traditional articulation of this is in terms of the strong correlation between the per cent of a school’s pupils on Free School Meals (the standard proxy for social deprivation) and education outcomes.  The correlation is pretty clear visually and pretty strong statistically.  But if you spend any time at all looking at the data, there are clear exceptions to the rule.  Some schools are clearly dealing with lots of disadvantage and yet somehow manage to cut through this and drive good education outcomes.  And the flip side is also true.  Some schools with pupils from more advantageous backgrounds aren’t achieving well in the way we’d expect them to. 

Of course it’s harder to drive good outcomes when there’s poverty, unemployment, and low aspiration.  But, the data show clearly that it’s always possible to find great examples of schools in the UK that break this rule and buck this trend. 

One great UK example is in a school where we had a GEC team away day recently, Alperton Community School, which is close to the iconic Wembley football stadium.

Alperton Community School is based in Brent in London, close to the famous Wembley Stadium. Brent’s demographic profile is very diverse, in 2011 71% of the population was not White British and 48% were born outside the UK. According to the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (2015), Brent is ranked 39th out of 326. In other words, it is in the top 15% of deprived areas in the UK. Against that background, Alperton Community School, made a focused and sustained effort to turnaround the performance of their school and the attainment levels of their pupils. Under the leadership of Mr Gerard McKenna, the school received an Ofsted report in 2016 which found them to be ‘Good with outstanding leadership and management. This is contrasted with a finding in May 2014 of ‘Requires improvement’. This transformation is also illustrated in attainment levels with the percentage of students achieving five good GCSEs (Grade 4+/A*-C) including English and maths has increased by 22% over the last four years and now stands at 64%. How did they achieve this? Mr McKenna, in discussions with some of my colleagues recently, put this down to a range of factors including resources but also noted, above all else, he and his team were ambitious for their students not despite their levels of deprivation, but because of it. That same ambition says its Art and Textiles teacher, Andria Zafirakou, won the $1m Global Teacher Prize in 2018. Further information on the school is available on their website.

In developing countries, such as the sub-Saharan and Asian ones the GEC operates in, it’s equally possible to find situations in which good education outcomes are perfectly possible in hugely challenging social environments. For example, one of the first wave of GEC projects demonstrated clearly that investments in leadership, teaching quality and community engagement could break through the barriers associated with marginalisation in rural Tanzania, and drive strong improvements in education outcomes.

Camfed's GEC project in Tanzania targets girls in rural areas. These girls suffer from various forms of marginalisation - from severe poverty, to being orphaned or having serious illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, and very often a combination of these factors. To improve the educational attainment and life chances of such marginalised girls in the first phase of the Girls' Education Challenge from 2013-17, Camfed supported teachers to develop an active, engaging teaching style. Doing so helped pupils to understand lesson contents and build their literacy and maths skills.

The project also engaged community leaders and parents in school management through fora like Parent Teacher Associations and Community Development Committees. Such outreach activities ensured that school leadership was held accountable and focused on creating a positive and safe environment for marginalised, disadvantaged girls. The results of these teaching quality and school leadership activities speak for themselves. Literacy and maths skills of Camfed's girls improved by more than four times the ambitious target set between 2013 and 2017 when compared to girls who did not receive Camfed's interventions.

For far too long I’ve heard commentators and educationalists blame poor education outcomes on social disadvantage and marginalisation. I’ve heard this in relation to education in the UK and in developing countries. The context is different, but it’s the same argument. Of course there’s a correlation between disadvantage and education outcomes. But there’s no inextricable link. And we know both from the quantitative data and the qualitative case studies that it’s perfectly possible to buck the trend. Isn’t it about time that we stopped focusing on context and started focusing on the quality of the school teaching, leadership and other interventions that we know can buck the trend?  

Dr David Armstrong leads PwC’s Consulting work in the UK in the areas of international development and trade, and since 2012 he has been the PwC Partner responsible for the Girls’ Education Challenge programme that PwC delivers on behalf of the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.