The global school system of approximately 5 million schools is highly fragmented. The different school sub-systems and school networks function predominantly in siloes due to diverse geographic or thematic foci. At the same time, individual schools and school actors have limited possibilities to contribute to, access and use relevant evidence to strengthen their everyday teaching to ultimately improve student learning outcomes. School leaders are seldomly a core player at policy debates, be it at regional, national or global level. Lastly, peer learning across different schools and education systems is usually limited despite emerging evidence showing the importance of such communities of practice.
The overarching goal of Learning Schools is to foster a global school system that facilitates the generation and transfer of research and good practices, allows for peer-learning among schools and incentivizes evidence use for teaching and decision-making. To maximize our impact, we will work with a selected group of school aggregators: organizations or institutions that group a large number of schools within and across national education systems. The role of an aggregator can vary from setting curriculum standards, creating a community of practice or being a pure information-sharing network.
The long-term partnerships with these aggregators aim to strengthen and link the different sub-systems of the global school system, such as public or private schools, schools in high-resource or low-resource contexts, or schools with a particular curriculum.
The key objectives of these partnerships are:
– to identify, strengthen and codify promising practices,
– to test and further develop good practices through applied research,
– to broadly disseminate relevant findings and ultimately replicate best practices and
– to facilitate peer learning among school members and across school aggregators.
Our current partnerships are: