Teachers are the most important determinant of quality of education. A cavernous gap has emerged, and continues to widen, between both the quality and quantity of teachers we need in schools versus what we have today, which is known as the “Teacher Gap“.
The Teacher Gap, stands between today’s reality - a world where 190 million children are in schools but on track to leave functionally illiterate and innumerate - and a future where all children get a quality education and the opportunity to lead fulfilling lives.
Research and experience tells us that the Teacher Gap can be achieved by giving teachers a career worth having; one of continued learning and growth where teachers are always equipped with evidenced based approaches, where their efforts translate into outcomes and where their commitment to teaching is continuously reinforced.
For the first time, the combination of a connected world, transformative technology and a generation of teachers seeking to impactful careers has created an opportunity to transform the teaching profession from one of isolation and plateau into a highly professional career of continued development and fulfillment through purpose and impact.
LRTT: Limited Resource Teacher Training is a global teacher movement and a social enterprise committed to closing the Teacher Gap by building a technology enabled teacher movement to rollout teacher led personalised professional development at scale.
Our approach is built on two transformative insights. Firstly, that teaching is a purpose, not just a profession and secondly that teachers are themselves the solution to delivering quality education and that it is in fact failure to recognise that that is the problem.
Since 2012, we have been mobilising teachers from the UK, US and Australia to facilitate intensive professional development programmes for teachers in limited resource environments.
In 2018 we have 580 LRTT Fellows spending their summer supporting 2500 local teachers across 11 countries through immersive in-person professional development programmes. We operate these programmes through capacity-building partnerships with 15 local education organisations across the 11 countries.
We support each local teacher for three years with a coaching methodology designed to foster teacher agency. The approach is guided through diagnostic self assessments enabling each teacher to have a needs based, personalised learning learning experience.
Central to our movements growth (100x since pilot) has been our sustainability model - our fellows contribute membership fees that fully cover our operating costs.
Technology enables of our works scalability and we are looking to deepen our investment in our tech platform to support our personalised training model by introducing machine learning based recommendations to support teachers as part of our training process.
Our ambition is to have 5000 LRTT fellows supporting 20,000 teachers to provide quality education for supporting 1 million children by 2023. We will do by mainstreaming our global education fellowships and building technology tools to improve our efficiency and effectiveness as we scale.
