Catalysing Global Change in Secondary Education

Co-authored by Transform Schools and Global Schools Forum

The UNESCO GEM Report 2023 highlights significantly lower secondary education completion rates at 45% in low-income countries against 85% in middle-income countries and 90% in high-income countries. 1 in 5 young people in low- and middle-income countries leave secondary school without basic skills. Despite SDG4 enshrining inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all, in many parts of the world, secondary education remains an elusive dream for millions of adolescents. On 21 November 2024, this urgency was at the heart of the inaugural State of Secondary Education (SOSE) Convening at the London School of Economics (LSE), where global leaders, educators, funders, and innovators united to discuss how to unlock the potential of secondary education.

Transform Schools & Global Schools Forum partnered to launch the inaugural SOSE convening with the primary objective of shining a light on secondary education’s continuing challenges around access, quality/relevance, financing and policy salience.   

Why are we talking and doing Secondary Education?

Transform Schools was set up in 2019 with a focus on improving secondary school learning and life outcomes in India. They build and scale evidence-based models and have worked with 9.8M children across 8 states in India. An RCT, conducted by J-PAL, on Transform’s at-scale learning programme in India, shows that targeted interventions in secondary education can lead to improvements of up to 1.5 years of learning for secondary school students, demonstrating that it’s never too late to invest in the foundational skills of adolescents.

GSF is a collaborative community of 155 non-state practitioners across 63 low-and middle-income countries promoting South to South learning. Its distinctive value addition is building purposeful networks and driving collaborative action through meaningful dialogue. GSF’s focus on secondary education started in 2022 and is built on needs identified by and the experience of its community of organisations who are delivering secondary education to children and youth of often marginalised settings. This resulted in a Community of Practice (CoP) followed by a Study Tour in Uganda, designed to explore how secondary schooling can help build agency in young people. 

A recent publication by Esther Duflo underscores the intergenerational benefits of secondary education, particularly through scholarship programmes for girls. The findings reveal that such initiatives significantly delay early marriages, lower fertility rates, improve health outcomes, and enhance cognitive development in subsequent generations. This evidence highlights the pivotal role of secondary education in breaking the cycle of poverty and advancing long-term societal development.

Our Top 5 takeaways from the inaugural SOSE convening 

The convening surfaced critical lessons and open questions for advancing secondary education:

1. Adolescents are not instruments of the future, they only need support to unlock their agency to act in the here and now: The leadership at Breakthrough reminded us that young people are whole individuals already, with innate capacity to make informed choices about themselves and their communities. Facilitating their agency is what programmes run by Launch Girls and Milaan Foundation India and Africa focus on. They empower girls to build and nurture their own peer collectives, transforming them into active contributors to their communities while promoting applied learning and preparing them for the future. 
2. Interventions must be cost-effective and focus on making existing institutions permeable to drive long-term systems change: Rather than relying on costly and disruptive reforms, participants advocated for permeable systems change—leveraging existing structures to drive contextually relevant improvements. Reap Benefit’s work in India and Educate!’s work in East Africa have proven that it's possible to deliver change through public schools and local communities. Reimagining integrative curriculums, and leveraging technologies will empower young people with tools to lead change for individual and collective growth. 
3. A clear North Star with a cohesive narrative will catalyse public & private investment: Secondary education must integrate academic learning, well-being, and employability skills to avoid fragmented policies and investments. A cohesive narrative is vital to position it as a foundation for life skills, workforce readiness, and social resilience. This shared vision will enable in positioning secondary education a minimally acceptable threshold in societies and ensure that resources are channeled towards impactful, scalable solutions.
4. Embedding long term research and evidence-building within public systems is essential to shaping the secondary education ecosystem: Sectoral research has the power to build entire ecosystems—similar to how early childhood education research informed large-scale preschool programmes. Long-term, embedded research within government systems is key to shaping policies that genuinely improve secondary education. What Works Hub for Global Education (WWHGE)’s research has found that by continually revisiting and improvising programmes based on evidence using methods like rapid A/B testing, we can create policies that not only address immediate needs but also improve long-term life outcomes for adolescents. 
5. A holistic and participatory approach to inclusion and equity is essential for adolescent empowerment: A holistic approach is critical—one that considers the intersecting barriers of poverty, gender, and cultural contexts. This requires co-creating solutions with young people themselves and their families, communities, and governments to ensure every adolescent has the opportunity to thrive. Amala Foundation, Milaan Foundation, Reap Benefit, Launch Girls, Breakthrough, all of them design & iterate with these participatory principles. 

A Call to Action: Join the Movement 

SOSE is imagined as a collaborative infrastructure uniting funders, researchers, policymakers, multilateral organisations, and practitioners to drive systemic, sustained change in secondary education. Inspired by successful global coalitions across human development sectors, it will foster long-term partnerships rooted in trust, alignment, and a shared vision. While making visible the scale of the problem, SOSE will be designed to demonstrate tractability. 

Transform Schools and GSF call on all stakeholders to align our collective strengths and join the movement through this Expression of Interest, co-creating a future where secondary education becomes a cornerstone of societal progress. 

Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.