SIMPLIFYING TEACHING
TO MAXIMIZE LEARNING
WHAT WE DO
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Learning Alliance partners with schools and the Ministry of Education in Uganda to bring evidence-based teaching practices into every classroom, supporting teachers to deliver an excellent education to every child.
We focus on cost-effectively scaling what works, drawing on strong, pre-existing local curriculum and teacher training structures wherever possible.
THE PROBLEM
Most students in Sub-Saharan Africa attend school but learn very little.
For instance, 86% cannot read with comprehension by the end of primary school. Math skills are similarly far behind.
Teachers face steep challenges: class sizes averaging >70 students, with few classroom resources, and little training on what teaching practices actually work to drive learning.
But this challenge is also an opportunity: The government has already invested to build thousands of schools, hire tens of thousands of teachers, and enroll millions of children. Small additional investments to increase teacher effectiveness can leverage the existing school spending to achieve huge increases in learning.
THE SOLUTION
Structured Pedagogy is an evidence-based approach to improve learning outcomes by helping teachers be more effective. It combines 4 elements:
Lesson Plans
Teacher Training
Teacher Coaching
Digital Monitoring
Lesson plans provide simple daily instructions for teachers, to make it easy to integrate teaching best practices into their classes. Our lessons align to the Science of Reading, using phonics instruction, comprehension activities, and participatory reading and writing practice to improve learning in ways that are joyful and effective. Learn about our pedagogical approach here.
Training and ongoing coaching help teachers learn and integrate the new approaches into their daily practice. Coaches observe every teacher in their classroom several times per term to provide tailored advice and encouragement.
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Digital monitoring helps ensure the program is running smoothly, and teachers are implementing the program as intended. During every classroom visit, coaches fill out an observation form on their phone, generating continuous data on which classrooms were visited, how much progress the teacher has made through the curriculum, and how well the teacher is performing across targeted teaching skills. See this data here on our live program dashboard. We review this data on a weekly basis to plan teacher visits, identify where we need to improve training, and conduct a/b tests to improve the program design.
Evidence
Numerous rigorous studies of Structured Pedagogy from around the world have found it to be among the highest impact, most cost-effective, and most scalable ways to increase learning. See our evidence review here.
Better educational outcomes lead to big income improvements. The most-cited meta-analysis suggests that 1 standard deviation increase in test scores leads to a 10-45% increase in individual income.
Structured Pedagogy is one of the most cost-effective programs ever identified in education. For instance, the Copenhagen Consensus calls it a “best buy” in education, with a cost of roughly $5 per student, and an estimated benefit of $105 for every $1 spent.
2026 Program
In 2026, our second year of operation, Learning Alliance is serving 20,000 children across 72 primary schools in Eastern Uganda. In February, we trained 264 teachers to deliver our program and are now supporting those teachers with a classroom coaching visit every 3 weeks. These teachers deliver Learning Alliance's English language phonics and reading comprehension lessons 3-4 times per week throughout the year, aiming to rapidly increase student reading fluency (speed) and comprehension. Our lesson routines help teachers adopt more effective teaching practices based on the science of reading, moving teachers from lecture- and memorization-based approaches toward evidence-based practices like phonics and "scaffolded"student engagement (I do/we do/you do).
In addition to this year's impact, we are innovating to maximize the impact and scalability of our program, including:
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Deploying fully revised lesson plans, incorporating feedback from last year to simplify lesson activities for teachers and increase the amount of time students spend actively practicing reading and comprehension.
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Collaborating more closely with our government partners to co-create and fully integrate the program into the existing school system.
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Increasing the rigor of our impact measurement, including control schools and deeper data analysis, and incorporating a/b testing for ongoing improvement.
2025 PILOT
2025 was our first year of operation. We conducted a pilot with 75 primary schools and 20,000+ students from Jan-Dec 2025. We partnered with the Ministry of Education in Iganga District in Eastern Uganda, working with a representative mix of town/rural and government/low-cost private schools.
Implementation and Adoption
Our team of 6 teacher coaches trained and mentored 278 teachers and made 1492 classroom coaching visits, an average of 5.3 visits per teacher. We achieved high teacher interest (92% training attendance) and adoption of our lesson plans (>95% during random checks). We saw rapid improvement in teacher effectiveness after 1-2 coaching visits, with an enthusiastic response from most teachers. A key pilot goal was continuous program improvement; our coaches and HQ team collaborated each week to experiment with improvements to our teacher training, coaching model, and lesson plans.
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Impact evaluation
To evaluate our pilot impact, we used the EGRA (Early Grades Reading Assessment), an internationally-benchmarked reading test. We tested a sample of 1400 students at the start of our pilot (Feb 2025), at midyear (July 2025), at the end of the school year (Nov 2025), and again compared to control schools at the start of the next school year (Feb 2026). Our midline assessment showed large, statistically significant learning gains at every grade level, with an average increase of 11 Sounds Per Minute and nearly 8 Words Per Minute, both key precursors to reading fluency and comprehension. See the full midline report here. A long, nationwide teacher strike during the third trimester substantially affected all school-based programs, including ours, but we still achieved substantial impact gains, including an increase of 13.5 Sounds Per Minute and 10.4 Words Per Minute relative to the start of the school year. Our causal program evaluation found that the Learning Alliance program decreased the share of non-readers by 10 percentage points compared to control schools, and that students read 0.6 standard deviations more sounds per minute compared to controls. See the full pilot impact report here.
Work with us
Thanks for your interest in working with Learning Alliance! We are seeking entrepreneurial, values-aligned staff who are passionate about improving education, and excited to build an evidence-based, cost-effective, ultra-scalable program. See below for current openings.
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​We don't have any current openings. Follow us on linkedin to be alerted when we post new job openings.
