This article is written by Alex Beard, Senior Director of the Global Learning Lab at Teach For All.

Faced with 8.7 million children out of school in the UK in April, the Department for Education turned to practitioners and nonprofit leaders to shape a response. As they looked for ways to quickly support 22,000 schools to deliver remote learning, UK Schools Minister Nick Gibb heard about a plan from a network of 40 teachers to start an online classroom that would be ready by the end of the Easter holiday.

“I was very excited,” Gibb told me when we spoke recently. “It was clear they were going to have things up and running in two weeks flat, which is precisely what we needed.”

A new kind of academy

Starting from scratch, in just fourteen days the group of teachers planned, staffed and launched Oak National Academy, an online classroom and resource hub designed to support teachers and parents for the duration of the pandemic with a high-quality daily plan of video lessons and resources in subjects including mathematics, art, and science.

I had called Gibb because of Oak’s success. On its first day, users across the country accessed over 250,000 lessons. The number now stands at 17 million. I wanted to know what the model could teach us about the importance of partnerships between practitioners and ministries.

In a crisis like the one caused by the current pandemic, this example shows that practitioners and nonprofit leaders can be well placed to lead the response

Matt Hood, an education nonprofit leader, was one of the key figures in the group. As a graduate of the Teach First programme, Hood knew the dangers to the most disadvantaged students of a school shutdown, and was well-placed to hear the struggles hundreds of thousands of teachers were facing in switching their practice online. He told me that he was able to leverage his own networks to help the group of teachers build support among dozens of leading schools and nonprofits. Hood is now the principal of Oak National Academy.

“Oak National Academy came from teachers,” Hood told me. “We provided support to organise and amplify their work but it was the teaching profession at its best. They saw a problem that was affecting their colleagues and stepped up to support one another.”

In a crisis like the one caused by the current pandemic, this example shows that practitioners and nonprofit leaders can be well placed to lead the response. “We couldn’t provide the support that schools needed, and indeed parents needed, without working very closely with some of the leading practitioners,” Gibb added during our conversation.

In this case, government partnership acted as a multiplying force. In the UK, ministers were glad to provide political backing, a small amount of seed funding, and technology support to the initiative. The backing of the Department for Education brought credibility and reach.

We’re learning that the education systems of the future must involve much stronger partnerships with ministries working directly with teachers, school leaders and nonprofits on the ground

There are global implications for this approach. In a crisis that at its peak saw 1.5 billion children out of school worldwide, and still presents significant uncertainty, it shows that creative, innovative leadership is needed within the social sector. As in the case of Oak National Academy, solutions to crises increasingly come from the bottom up, where leaders have more sensitivity to the issues, and greater flexibility to adjust course. Ministries can benefit from finding practitioners and nonprofit leaders; and working with them.

Grow local leadership to create a more resilient social sector

At Teach For All, a global network of independent organisations in 53 countries working to ensure that all children can fulfill their potential, we invest in the development of entrepreneurial leaders like Matt Hood, who understand the power of networks in generating quick, effective solutions. And in the current crisis, from Teach For India and Teach For Lebanon, to Teach For Nigeria and Ensina Brasil, we’ve seen hundreds of teachers, policymakers and public sector leaders working together to rapidly generate solutions that have been scaled with government support.

I recently spoke to Teach For Nigeria teacher Martin Odebowale. He is leading a group of nine others teaching millions of students live on TV in partnership with the Ogun state government. They focus on making lessons interactive because they want students to feel like they’re with their teachers in their various classrooms. The state government has launched a website to share the video lessons online, where students interact with each other and their teachers; and submit feedback.

In Chile, two teachers from Enseña Chile began using radio to reach students in communities without internet access. Targeting secondary schools, they recorded 30-minute lessons in five subjects, which were picked up by media influencers, a radio association and many local mayors. Now 50 Enseña Chile teachers are working to make new programs, and their lessons are being broadcast by more than 200 stations across the country. The initiative will continue after schools reopen, reaching students in 3,000 rural schools.

Two months into its existence, Oak National Academy will continue to be an important part of the UK educational landscape for the coming months. It was recently announced that the initiative will continue for the duration of the next school year as a crucial pillar of the approach to reopening schools. “This is a safety net for the system,” Gibb told me.

In all of these cases, we’re learning that the education systems of the future must involve much stronger partnerships with ministries working directly with teachers, school leaders and nonprofits on the ground. “This could be a template for future collaboration between groups of teachers who have particular expertise and a particular issue that they want to help us address,” said Gibb. In uncertain times, building in resilience as a permanent feature of the public sector means distributing leadership, not centralising it.

As governments worldwide plan to reopen schools, we should all see this as an opportunity to invest in the development of teacher, school and nonprofit leadership – and build the networks that will enable them to act quickly and in close partnership with the government. — Alex Beard

(Picture credit: Unsplash)