When it first launched in 2020, Schools2030 had a point to prove: that every teacher is a designer. Across 1,000 government schools in ten countries, the programme aimed to show that the people best placed to improve education are the people already standing in front of a classroom every day. Using Human-Centred Design (HCD), teachers were invited to identify the challenges facing their learners at three pivotal transition ages – five, ten and fifteen – and to prototype low-cost, contextually relevant teaching and learning innovations to address them.
The first years were about building a foundation that could generate the evidence Schools2030 needed to prove its central thesis. Through Phase 1, running from 2020 to 2022, teachers and school leaders were introduced to the HCD process, learning to move through cycles of empathising, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing; and throughout this process, their feedback was used to refine and improve both the HCD toolkit itself, but also holistic learning assessment tools capturing both academic and social-emotional attainment, as well as the quality of the classroom environment. Country teams worked with in-country stakeholders to define locally relevant holistic learning domains that the programme would focus on, ensuring that these reflected national policy priorities and community realities rather than a one-size-fits-all model imported from elsewhere.
Phase 2, from 2023 to 2025, took that foundation and turned it into something more robust. The focus shifted to co-developing a teacher-led, school-tested body of innovative practices that tackled a range of classroom issues – from developing opportunities for peer collaboration, building fine motor skills and creativity through play, or turning recycled materials into word games – and then measuring their impact through frequent testing. Alongside this, the teams and teachers worked continuously to document and showcase the work so it could feed into ongoing improvement and spread awareness beyond the initial community. A calendar of showcasing events was developed, from local, district and national levels, through to international opportunities and Schools2030’s own series of Global Forums, held in Dar es Salaam (2022), Porto (2023), Bishkek (2024) and Nairobi (2025), which gave teachers and their ideas a public stage and created opportunities for meaningful dialogue with a diverse range of system actors, including researchers and policymakers.
Five years in, the headline figures tell their own story: 640,000 students have benefited from Schools2030 holistic learning tools and innovations; more than 21,000 teachers have participated in Schools2030 programming, professional development and events; over 3,000 of those teachers have been supported to share their innovations and impact on local, national and global stages; and over 2,200 new holistic learning innovations have been designed and developed by teachers. Behind every one of those figures sits the same underlying claim the programme is now trying to prove at system level – that these tools and approaches produce measurable impact on student holistic learning outcomes, and measurable, positive change in teaching practice and pedagogy.
“Schools2030 began with a promise to put teachers at the centre of educational change.” commented Dr Bronwen Magrath, the programme’s Global Manager. “Through Phases 1 and 2, we worked with over 21,000 teachers and 2,500 school leaders, supporting the co-design of thousands of new context-driven holistic learning innovations and directly benefiting over 600,000 students. 3,102 Schools2030 teachers have presented their innovations and evidence in showcasing events and policy fora – that is one in seven of all teachers participating in the programme. This is the fulfilment of our promise to amplify teachers as educational change-agents, and it has led to real, meaningful action. As we embark on our final phase of the Schools2030 programme, our focus is shifting to system-level integration of teacher-led, school-tested tools, evidence and innovations. By 2030, Schools2030 will be a leading voice informing the next phase of Global Education Goals to transform teaching and learning by 2050.”
2026 is the programme’s ‘Catalyst Year’. It sits deliberately between Phase 2 and Phase 3: not itself a full phase, but the year in which Schools2030 identifies and tests the strategic scale pathways each country will carry into Phase 3, which runs from 2027 to 2030.
This is the fulfilment of our promise to amplify teachers as educational change-agents, and it has led to real, meaningful action.
Dr Bronwen Magrath, Schools2030 Global Programme Manager
This is not about cosmetic change. For the first six years, success was measured largely in classroom-level terms – innovations designed, teachers trained, learning outcomes measured. But through 2026, the ten countries have been asking a different question: what will enable effective integration of the Schools2030 model into the institutions that will outlast the programme – teacher training colleges, ministries of education, national curricula and professional development frameworks? Every country team has organised its 2026 objectives around two pathways for scale, and by the year’s midpoint, that work is well underway.
Pathway 1 is about institutionalisation: scaling Schools2030’s tools and resources through the professional development architecture that already trains and supports teachers. In Portugal, this means disseminating the Schools2030 three-step model through a national, accredited teacher training course — a 15+15-hour programme, delivered through a growing community of trained facilitators, aiming to reach over 600 teachers. In Pakistan, it means integrating HCD into teacher education systems through strengthened partnerships, institutional adoption and policy advisory committees, alongside a parallel push to institutionalise HCD mentorship so that district-led mentors can cascade the approach to their peers. In Kenya, it means policy dialogue with the Teachers Service Commission and the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development to fold Schools2030 components into pre- and in-service training aligned with Competency-Based Education. In Brazil, it has translated into an official agreement with the Ministry of Education, riding on the back of a national push to extend the school day to seven hours – a policy that has already brought nearly a million students into full-time schooling. The Kyrgyz Republic is working the institutional angle from three directions at once: building a credit-based HCD training syllabus for endorsement by the National Academic Council for Pedagogical Education, integrating HCD training into in-service teacher institutes for CPD accreditation, and getting Schools2030 assessment tools formally incorporated into the Ministry of Education’s national assessment repository. In each case, the ambition is the same: move the model out of a defined set of programme schools and into the systems that train every teacher, whether or not their school has ever heard of Schools2030.
Pathway 2 takes a complementary route: rather than embedding the infrastructure, it seeks to scale the innovations themselves. Each country has used the Schools2030 Innovation Evaluation Tool to identify its most promising teacher-led practices, then tested them in new schools, with new teachers, often in new provinces. Afghanistan is scaling ten promising innovations into 34 additional schools across Badakhshan, Baghlan and Bamiyan. Tanzania is incubating climate action and pedagogical solutions among 30 new teachers across pre-primary, primary and secondary settings in Lindi and Dar es Salaam, while co-developing a How-to Guide to support the Ministry of Education and the Tanzania Institute of Education to operationalise the country’s own National Climate Coping Actions. Uganda is working with Sightsavers to adapt and adopt ten inclusive innovations, packaging them into ‘starter kits’ so they can travel well beyond the thirty schools currently piloting them. India is testing innovations in non-Schools2030 institutions entirely, aiming to integrate a cohort of champion teachers’ work into a government e-learning platform. And in Tajikistan, ten teacher-led innovations spanning STEM and climate education are being selected, refined and scaled, with the process captured in a methodological handbook intended for nationwide use and shared with policymakers at a national roundtable.
Both pathways follow their own defined process, but the underlying discipline is the same. Pathway 1 moves through the same steps in each country: identify the right partners in government and teacher-training institutions, map what’s already being offered and where the gaps are, co-develop modules that supplement rather than duplicate existing provision, co-test their efficacy, then build out further scale plans for 2027 to 2030. Pathway 2 moves through a parallel but distinct sequence: identify the most promising innovations, align them to priority thematic areas, test them in at least five new settings, iterate based on teacher and student feedback, then package them for further dissemination.
Everything achieved so far carries forward into what comes next. The assessment tools, the HCD toolkit, the teacher networks and the innovations and evidence generated over the past five and half years are the raw material on which Phase 3 is building; without them, there would be nothing to institutionalise. But 2026 marks a genuine turn in ambition – from demonstrating that teacher-driven innovation improves learning, to ensuring that ministries, teacher training colleges and national systems carry that improvement forward long after Schools2030’s ten-year clock runs out in 2030. We are only halfway through the Catalyst Year, but what is already becoming clear is bigger than any one programme: give teachers the right tools – and the agency to use these tools effectively – and they will transform education from schools to system levels. This is what the Schools2030 programme has taught us over the past six years. As we enter Phase 3 of the Schools2030 programme, we will ensure this lesson outlasts the programme that taught it.
