New report proposes 'great buys' for education spending

A new report sponsored by the U.K. government, USAID, UNICEF, and the World Bank has ranked supporting teachers through lesson plans and teaching students according to ability, rather than age, as two of the most cost-effective “great buys” for education policymakers. Presented during an online event on Wednesday, the 2023 Cost-Effective Approaches to Improve Global Learning report from the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, or GEEAP, aims to synthesize the latest evidence on cost-effective interventions for improving learning for children in low- and middle-income countries. It comes as many countries face a “learning crisis,” that the World Bank estimates has left up to 90% of 10-year-olds in some parts of Africa unable to read or understand a simple sentence. But some have questioned the report’s terminology and say it downgrades crucial issues such as safeguarding, school feeding programs, and socioemotional learning. “There’s a big learning crisis and GEEAP is trying to put together evidence to address it,” Rukmini Banerji, CEO of Pratham Education Foundation and a member of the GEEAP panel, told Devex by telephone. The report fills a gap by translating the growing body of academic research on how to improve learning into what Banerji called “usable stuff” which can guide policymakers, she added. Further, the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education budgets means cost-effectiveness is on the mind of every minister from low- and middle-income countries, according to Jaime Saavedra, GEEAP panel member and head of education at the World Bank. “The GEEAP report is designed to help countries maximize the impact of their education budgets by highlighting cost-effective ways to ensure every dollar spent has an impact on the experience of the student in the classroom. Otherwise, their children will not gain the knowledge and skills they need for life,” he said in a press statement. This second edition of the report — which was first published in 2020 — was put together by a panel of global education experts, who make upGEEAP and whose job it was to sift through thousands of research papers to evaluate education interventions and sort them into five categories: “great buys,” “good buys,” “promising but limited evidence,” “effective but relatively expensive,” and “bad buys.” To receive a recommendation, an approach has to be cost-effective, show it improves learning levels, be tested in multiple countries, and be shown to work at scale. The 2023 report gives the highest rank – great buys – to teachers supported with structured pedagogy programs, citing success in Kenya through USAID’s Primary Math and Reading, or PRIMR, Initiative. Giving parents and students information on the benefits, costs, and quality of education is another “great buy.” Teaching by learning level instead of by age, known as Teaching at the Right Level, or TaRL, also gets the highest ranking. The report lists two early childhood education, or ECE, interventions as “good buys,” reflecting growing evidence around the importance of pre-primary learning, according to Benjamin Piper, head of global education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Investing in computers and other education inputs, such as textbooks, without addressing underlying issues like poor teacher training or poor governance, were ranked as “bad buys,” with the evidence showing they can negatively impact learning. However, some education experts criticized the report for commodifying education by presenting it as an investment opportunity rather than a right or public good. Meanwhile, Susannah Hares, co-director of global education at the Center for Global Development think tank, objected to the report’s conclusions, specifically its ranking of school meals as merely “effective but relatively expensive,” and safeguarding children from violence as “promising.” “I don't think anyone writing this report would choose info campaigns and structured pedagogy over addressing hunger and violence for their own children,” Hares wrote on Twitter. Another expert criticized the report as being overly narrow regarding which research was included for consideration, potentially missing valuable evidence on education interventions that are not easily evaluated through experimental approaches. The panel looked at over 13,000 research papers, according to a press release. From these, 550 studies were reviewed, with 120 including cost data, the report stated. “There is a very high bar of what GEEAP recognizes as evidence, which means crucial things potentially don’t get considered,” Pauline Rose, professor of international education at the University of Cambridge, told Devex by telephone. Much of the evidence comes from a relatively small pool of well-known researchers, she said. While the research is no doubt rigorous, evidence produced by low- and middle-income country researchers is not sufficiently visible in the report, Rose added. Piper emphasized that while the report is intended to guide policymakers toward getting better learning outcomes for their “investments,” the recommendations are just a starting point and not top-down, universal externally imposed policy diktats. “These are interventions that are starting points for experts on the ground in countries to think about how to apply it,” Piper said, adding, “it is nonsense to say ‘just do this thing that is now in the report in our country’ without thinking about it.”