The next frontier: testing “what works” at national scale

When Pratham launched Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) in India over two decades ago, it was a direct response to the learning crisis: millions of children were attending school but still unable to read or do basic math. The problem was clear; the solutions were not.

TaRL helped change that. Backed by rigorous randomised controlled trials, designed to be cost-effective, and built around a simple but powerful insight – that instruction should meet children where they are, not where the curriculum assumes them to be. And it proved to work repeatedly, across contexts.

Twenty years on, the question has evolved. We know TaRL can work. We have strong evidence of the mechanisms behind it. What we know less about is how to make it work at national scale, across thousands of schools and hundreds of thousands of students, without losing the quality that makes it effective in the first place.

Botswana has spent the last decade answering that question. This blog shares what we have learned.

A decade of impact and staged scale-up in Botswana

Botswana has now achieved a historic milestone: the national scale-up of TaRL, reaching all government primary schools across all ten regions. It represents more than a decade of sustained collaboration between the Ministry of Child Welfare and Basic Education and Youth Impact, and the accumulated effort of regional and district education officials, school leaders, and teachers across the country.

The numbers tell part of the story. TaRL has reached almost 400,000 students across more than 760 schools – 96 percent of all primary schools in Botswana (see Figure 1: School reach over time). What started as a single-school pilot in 2018 has now reached full regional coverage by 2025 (see Figure 2: Regional expansion)

Figure 1: School reach over time

Figure 2: Regional expansion

But reach alone does not define this achievement. What makes Botswana's experience significant is that expansion and quality have moved in tandem. Across nearly all primary schools in the country, an average of 53 percent of students learn a new operation in mathematics and 43 percent a new literacy concept each four-to-six-week cycle – and that figure has held relatively stable as the programme has grown. Most programmes trade depth for breadth as they scale. TaRL in Botswana has not.

Equally striking is the resilience behind these results. These gains have been sustained through six changes in Permanent Secretary, COVID-19 school closures, and repeated fiscal pressures. Programme quality has endured because of the strength of the systems, partnerships, and school-level ownership built over ten years.

What made it possible: Lessons learned

Reaching national scale while maintaining impact is neither automatic nor guaranteed. Below are some of the operational and strategic lessons that made it possible in Botswana.

1. Simplifying processes to protect teaching time

Teachers are the backbone of TaRL and anything that adds to their administrative load threatens implementation quality. While regular assessments are core to TaRL delivery, teachers reported that data collection was consuming significant time, with inconsistent submission as a result. The response was a series of targeted process innovations, including:

• Pre-filled baseline sheets: Rather than asking teachers to create student records from scratch, they receive pre-populated sheets with existing enrollment information. This reduces data entry time and ensures all students are captured in TaRL from day one.

• WhatsApp chatbot for data submission: Teachers photograph levelling sheets and submit them via a centralised WhatsApp chatbot, which automatically consolidates the data for analysis. What previously required manual compilation now happens in near-real time.

• Group-based classroom assessment: A core component of TaRL is baseline assessment, where individual one-on-one levelling takes approximately 20 minutes per child – placing a significant time burden on teachers and making baseline assessment challenging at national scale. Group-based classroom assessment levels an entire class in the same 20 minutes. Tests have found that there is no trade-off as a result: both approaches produce equivalent learning outcomes, with group-based assessment delivering baseline data at five times the speed. (see Figure 3: Bigger and faster data collection).

TaRL in Botswana has reinforced an important principle that successful scaling often requires doing less, not more  – simpler delivery means more consistent implementation, and more consistent implementation means better results.

Figure 3: Bigger and faster data collection

2. Building a culture of continuous improvement and learning

Knowing that TaRL works is the starting point, not the end. The Botswana programme has been shaped by a commitment to learning how to make it work better – term after term, year after year.

Youth Impact has pioneered the use of rapid, rigorous, and regular testing in the social sector that blends randomised controlled trials, A/B testing drawn from the technology sector, and human-centred design to test programme innovations rapidly and at low cost. This methodology has allowed the team to run iterations up to ten times faster than traditional evaluation cycles, generating actionable insights within the same academic term rather than waiting years for results.  

Today, Youth Impact conducts dozens of randomized tests every single year to directly feed into and inform government-led delivery. Examples of the importance of this approach abound, including generating the world's first evidence during COVID-19 on remote education within just a few months after the pandemic shuttered schools, subsequent scale-up trials across five countries in just two years, and over 12 randomized A/B tests to maximize cost-effectiveness. 

The outcome is an approach that improves with every cycle – becoming more scalable, more cost-effective, and more embedded in government delivery with each passing term.

3. Innovating to reduce costs

Reaching every school is one challenge. Staying in every school sustainably is another. For TaRL to be truly sustainable at national scale, it must be deliverable within the constraints of a government budget. 

One of the most persistent cost pressures in TaRL delivery is teacher coaching. In-person school visits are among the most effective forms of support but at national scale, with schools spread across ten regions, they are also among the most expensive. A series of structured tests identified that the quality of coaching could be preserved while reducing the cost of delivering it by replacing two in-person coaching visits per term with one visit and a structured phone call.

Training is also one of the largest costs drivers behind delivering TaRL. While training was originally held centrally a few times a year, government budget constraints eliminated funding for venues, transport, meals and accommodation. In response, training was re-organized around clusters of local schools, led by Youth Impact Sub-Regional Coordinators already based in the regions – eliminating the need to mobilise a central training team from the capital and reducing costs and travel time for participants significantly. The results have been a more sustainable model by lowering costs, allowing faster replacement of transferred teachers and more targeted support given the smaller cluster groups.

This finding reflects a broader principle that has shaped TaRL’s approach in Botswana: sustainable scale requires not just demonstrating effectiveness, but continuously testing whether there are more cost-effective ways to deliver it.

4. Following the leader 

The sequence by which you scale can make-or-break the success of a scale-up. Start strong, and others will follow. Start with mixed results, and the program is dead on arrival. 

The private sector has long embraced an "early adopter" model, where new products or technologies are introduced in stages, starting with a small group of early adopters and moving through the market in a staged, segmented approach. In the social sector, however, expansion decisions are often driven by the availability of funding and geography, rather than by prioritizing the champions who will ultimately make or break implementation.

TaRL in Botswana has taken a different approach – one built around identifying and following the leaders who can ensure a strong start, and who inspire the next set of leaders to follow:

• Starting with strong leaders above all else: TaRL started in the North East region, based on a former Permanent Secretary recommendation to prioritize motivated leaders, rather than geography, need, or other factors. The regional leader in the North East became a trail blazer, lighting the torch for others to follow. Had TaRL launched elsewhere, progress most likely would have been slow and stagnant.  

• Peer advocacy from within government: Champions within government do more than implement – they advocate. A Regional Director or ministry official who believes in TaRL becomes a powerful messenger to their peers. Drawing on previous successes from other regions has served as a motivating, credible example to secure buy-in and commitment from the next cohort of leaders.

• Seconding staff to government offices: Placing a Youth Impact Officer directly within the regional ministry has created a standing channel for collaboration, trust, and day-to-day problem-solving – deepening the partnership well beyond what periodic meetings could achieve. This is not a parallel system, but rather a spark and a support, with a little going a long way. It ensures a strong start, paving the path to scale, and providing balanced support to the government. 

TaRL's approach to scale in Botswana has prioritized people over place – identifying and cultivating relationships with champions and prioritizing them above other competing factors. 

5. Ensuring real-time data flow to inform decisions

Data collection, analysis, and sharing have been critical at every stage of scaling TaRL in Botswana not just to prove the approach works, but to keep improving it as it grows. This has entailed:

• Developing lean data systems: Within the classroom, teachers collect, analyze, and use student learning data to identify each student's level and target instruction accordingly. Ongoing efforts to simplify and streamline this process have ensured that only the data with immediate value to teachers is collected and nothing more.

• Making data visible: Beyond the classroom, using data strategically has helped demonstrate TaRL's potential making learning gains visible, informing adaptations, fostering buy-in across the system, and continuously monitoring implementation quality. These insights are shared routinely across audiences, from regional government offices to school leaders, teachers, and parents. Youth Impact maintains a live data visualization dashboard so stakeholders can view results in real time, holds regular meetings with regional leaders to share student learning data, and develops a yearly evaluation report for the Ministry of Basic Education – developed with input from the government to ensure it directly supports ministry decision-making.

• Demonstrating results beyond numbers: Visible signs of children's progress, alongside testimonials from students, teachers, and community members, have helped build buy-in among diverse stakeholders. This has included bringing high-level government officials into classrooms to see TaRL in action to observe student energy firsthand, hear directly from teachers and school directors, and witness grassroots demand for the program.

Data isn't just a one-time proof of concept but part of a continuous feedback loop to ensure program fidelity, inform necessary adaptations and maintain support at every level of the system.

Priorities going forward: Sustaining TaRL nationwide

With national scale achieved for numeracy and literacy expansion underway, the question shifts from whether TaRL can reach all schools to sustaining quality delivery at national scale.

Three priorities will define the next chapter.

Implementation fidelity: Protecting the instructional conditions for quality delivery

An important structural step has been formalising a 60-minute daily TaRL session in school and regional timetables. This occurs in a portion of the regions, but not all. Evidence shows that dosage is one of the strongest predictors of impact: when schools consistently allocate and deliver sufficient TaRL time, learning outcomes improve. Protected time makes TaRL part of routine instruction rather than an optional activity dependent on individual school leaders. This aligns with a recent synthesis of TaRL’s core components, which identifies government guidance on integration into the school calendar as essential for sustainable implementation at scale. 

Sustained fidelity also requires sustained teacher capacity. TaRL methodologies should be embedded in both pre-service teacher education – so new teachers enter the profession already equipped – and in-service training, through regular refresher courses, peer learning, and coaching. Recognising and incentivising teachers who deliver TaRL well, through professional progression credits, Continuous Professional Development accreditation, or formal recognition in performance appraisals, will sustain the motivation that training alone cannot.

Integration of action with accountability in national data structures

A highly salient existing accountability structure in the education system in Botswana includes the Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE). Tapping into this politically salient accountability structure to facilitate action could be transformative and facilitate ongoing political will for the approach. This means implementing TaRL potentially in higher grades or aligning with adjacent exams such as the the Standard 4 Attainment Test, which are a precursor to the PSLE, and other national assessments, so that foundational learning progress is tracked systematically and contributes to national accountability rather than sitting in a parallel monitoring framework. 

Continuing to learn and improve

The learning never stops – even at scale. TaRL in Botswana has been shaped by years of iterative testing, and that commitment to learning must continue. Priorities for ongoing investigation include further optimising dosage and delivery fidelity, understanding whether learning gains persist beyond the programme period and whether TaRL's approach spills over into broader classroom practice. Ongoing rapid, regular and rigorous tests will help to generate the evidence needed to inform the next generation of TaRL adaptations – in Botswana and for the broader education ecosystem working to address the learning crisis. 

Conclusion

In just under a decade, TaRL has achieved a historic scale-up milestone: reaching and sustaining scale nationwide in Botswana. TaRL has moved from a single-school pilot to a programme that reaches 96 percent of Botswana's primary schools – training thousands of teachers in evidence-based methods, strengthening national data systems, and reaching nearly 400,000 students with improved foundational skills. More importantly, it has done so while maintaining quality, surviving disruption – ranging from political shocks, a national budget crisis, to COVID-19 — and building the kind of government ownership that makes sustainability possible.

The Botswana story is not simply about what TaRL has achieved. It is about how — the sustained partnership, the willingness to iterate, the investment in systems, and the commitment to learning as relentlessly as we ask of students. Those are the lessons worth taking to scale.