The paper highlights the need for a sharper focus on foundational skills in light of school closures due to COVID-19 as many primary-school-aged children would have missed critical foundational learning while out of school. This could ensure that short term learning losses do not compound into larger, long term cumulative losses.

This paper takes an updated look at the Education Reform Support series and attempts to consolidate many of its theories, frameworks,and operational guidelines. Ten years of experience have reconfirmed the ideas on which ERS was founded and have added a multitude of examples to show how strategically targeted and opportunistic support can move a reform agenda forward—instigating demand for change, promoting dialogue around and new insight into issues, leveraging implementation, or removing political and institutional barriers to success.

In this article, the authors dissect the Liberian and Kenyan experiences with implementing large‐scale reading programs, documenting the critical components and conditions of the program designs that affected the likelihood of successfully transitioning from pilot to scale.

Existing systems of education have some elements promoting learning as an objective, but are mainly coherent as systems only around enrollment targets. This paper builds an accountability framework of actors and the four design elements of accountability (delegation, financing, information and motivation) to emphasize that effectiveness in promoting learning requires systems of education that are coherent.

This paper provides a framework for thinking about the problem as a series of interdependent principal-agent relationships in complex organizations, where one type of actor, the agent, takes actions on behalf of another, the principal.

This paper brings together two promising intellectual trends in development: Doing Development Differently (DDD), and whole-system reform.

This paper, using the case of education delivery, attempts to probe an administrator’s perspective in resolving the implementation problem at the last mile and is based on detailed primary fieldwork in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh along with some quantitative surveys conducted in Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh.