Scaling education reforms requires more than expanding successful pilots — it demands disciplined choices about relevance, effectiveness, sustainability, system capacity, and political context to achieve lasting, large-scale impact.
Education is full of promising ideas. What's scarce is the ability to turn them into transformations that reach millions of students and stand the test of time.
Working in education policy and reform, I've seen pilots succeed brilliantly, only to fail at scale. The pattern repeats itself: a well-resourced intervention shows impressive results, everyone gets excited, scaling begins, and then... the impact fizzles out. The problem isn't technology or lack of innovation. It's that we need to be strategic enough about what to scale and how to scale it.
When done right, educational reforms can show impact faster than we think. We've seen systems transform literacy rates in a few years, countries leapfrog in international assessments, and entire regions close learning gaps. The difference? Choosing the right interventions and executing them with intention. In education it isn't just about the solution.
Context matters and success depends on an ecosystem of actors and their willingness and readiness to buy in and take up: communities, parents, students and thousands of teachers and administrators.
Here are six criteria that separate transformative reforms from well-intentioned experiments:
1. Relevance: Is the Problem Worth Resolving?
Are we addressing a structural problem? This is about discerning whether we are focusing on the right things. Not every educational solution deserves scale: it depends on the size and importance of the challenge.
Given the scarcity of resources, we need to focus on the problems that address the system's core bottlenecks. Finding a solution to address early literacy, foundational learning, school dropout, or teacher quality, is critical to make sure that the production function of human capital works. In those cases, even modest improvements can have enormous cumulative effects.
The first question isn't whether the solution is good, it's whether the problem is important enough to justify systemic reform.
2. Effectiveness: Is the Solution the Right One?
We need to make sure that the solution works outside ideal conditions. Many educational interventions show positive results and large effect sizes in "boutique" settings and well-supported pilots: highly motivated teams, intensive support, additional resources. The challenge appears when those ideal conditions disappear.
Technology-driven reading programs illustrate this well. They often show strong results in trials where schools have reliable electricity, high-speed internet, dedicated tech support, and teachers who receive ongoing training. But when scaled to rural schools with spotty connectivity, no IT support, and teachers juggling multiple responsibilities, the impact dilutes. The program didn't fail because it was bad: it failed because the essential conditions for success couldn't be replicated at scale.
Scaling requires asking not just if the solution works, but why it works, and which parts of the model are essential (non-negotiable). Without that clarity, effectiveness will dilute as you grow in scale.
3. Cost: Is It Sustainable at Scale?
We work in a context of macro restrictions. Education represents a large share of public spending, and in contexts of fiscal constraints, it's nearly impossible to increase expenditure per student unless we grow the size of the pie. That's why solutions need to be financially viable from the start.
Some educational solutions seem cheap per student but hide significant costs when scaling: digital infrastructure, training, management, monitoring, technical support, curricular adaptation. Unlike other sectors where economies of scale reduce unit costs, education interventions often remain human capital-intensive, even when incorporating technology.
An effective but fiscally unviable solution is not a scalable solution.
4. Complexity: Does the System Have the Capacity to Implement it?
There are conceptually solid reforms that require simultaneous changes across multiple levels: teaching practices, school leadership, assessment, curriculum, governance. The risk isn't ambition, it's overload. When a solution is too complex for existing capacity, the result is usually partial implementation that doesn't produce expected results.
Scaling happens within real institutions, with real people. If the capacity to implement a reform doesn't exist in ministries, schools, intermediate teams, that capacity must be developed as part of the design. Ignoring this leads to plans that depend on individual heroes or permanent external support.
Scaling well means investing as much in people and systems as in the intervention itself. The key question isn't whether the solution is elegant, but whether it's implementable given local capacity. What's beautiful but impractical usually ends up being irrelevant.
5. Political Economy: Is It the Right Time and Context?
No educational reform scales in a vacuum. Interests, incentives, public narratives, and political cycles matter. Technically solid reforms can fail without political will, minimum consensus, leadership, or legitimacy.
In public policy, political viability is an integral part of any scaling analysis.
Scaling in education isn't just a question of ambition, but of judgment. It requires choosing relevant problems, effective solutions, viable paths, and opportune moments.
Not everything should scale. But what we decide to scale must do so with clarity, evidence, and deep awareness of the complexity of educational systems and country contexts. Poor choices don't just waste resources: they erode trust, deepen inequalities, and delay the changes that actually matter for the wellbeing of countries.
Transformations at scale can and do happen in education. When we apply these criteria with discipline and execute with intention, we can reach millions of students in just a few years. The question isn't whether rapid, large-scale impact is possible; it's whether we're willing to make the hard choices that make it possible.
To deepen this discussion, the IDB published Smart Spending in Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, which examines how countries can improve the efficiency, equity, and transparency of education financing to strengthen learning outcomes.
Drawing on research conducted in 22 countries, it offers a conceptual framework to strengthen the way education budgets are mobilized and managed. Read more and explore how smarter spending can support reforms that are not only ambitious — but scalable and sustainable.
Check out this blog entry about why underinvesting in education is a fiscal risk, not a saving.
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*Note: Inspired by my interventions at the High Level Steering Committee (HLSC) Sherpa Group meeting and the Financing session organized in the context of the G7, here is the first part of certain reflections in this framework.