The Lean Education Manifesto

The global expansion of education is one of the greatest successes of the modern era. More children have access to schooling and leave with higher levels of learning than at any time in history. However, 250 million+ children in developing countries are still not in school, and 600 million+ attend but get little out of it ¿ a situation further exacerbated by the dislocations from COVID-19.

In a context where education funding is stagnating and even declining, Arran Hamilton and John Hattie suggest that we need to start thinking Lean and explicitly look for ways of unlocking more from less. Drawing on data from 900+ systematic reviews of 53,000+ research studies ¿ from the perspective of efficiency of impact ¿ they controversially suggest that for low- and middle-income countries:

• Maybe pre-service initial teacher training programs could be significantly shortened and perhaps even stopped
• Maybe teachers need not