Reach & Match Inclusive Education Program

Vision

We envision a world where every child, regardless of their abilities, is empowered to learn equally, to participate inclusively, and to develop essential skills through the joy of play.

Mission 

Our mission at Reach & Match is to create and provide a range of inclusive educational resources that empower children globally. We achieve this through our flagship Reach & Match Learning Kit, Inclusive Learning Program, Training Course, and an expanding portfolio of innovative tools. By consulting and co-designing with educators, therapists, and partner organizations, we incorporate our comprehensive resources into existing curricula and services, addressing the significant challenges of inclusive education in diverse settings, including emergencies. We are unwaveringly committed to ensuring all children, especially those with special needs, are given the resources and support they need to succeed.

Core Values

1.     Inclusivity: We are committed to ensuring that every child, regardless of ability, has the chance to learn, grow, and play in an inclusive environment. We strive to make sure no child feels isolated.

2.     Empowerment through Education: We believe in the transformative power of education, and we strive to empower all children through our research-based learning programs.

3.     Collaboration: We value the importance of working closely with educators, therapists, governments, not-for-profit organizations, and schools to deliver the best possible outcomes for children.

4.     Innovation: Our origins in research and development guide us in continually innovating to improve and expand our offerings, ensuring they meet the diverse needs of children worldwide.

5.     Social Responsibility: We are a social enterprise that understands our duty to support vulnerable children, especially in emergencies. We partner with international organizations to ensure these children have access to inclusive, quality pre-primary education.

6.     Play-Based Learning: We believe that play is an essential part of learning and development. It serves as a natural, enjoyable way for children to explore, create, and understand the world around them.

As the founder and CEO of Reach & Match, Mandy provides strategic direction and sets the organisation's goals in alignment with its mission to foster inclusive education. She envisions the future of the organisation and formulates plans to realise this vision. Leveraging her diverse background in industrial design, engineering, and special education, Mandy leads innovation in product development. She transformed her research into the award-winning Reach & Match educational resource and continues to guide the development of new inclusive educational tools. Mandy also excels in cultivating partnerships with leading humanitarian organisations and is instrumental in offering training and consultation services that broaden the impact of inclusive education. A dedicated advocate for inclusive education, Mandy’s work through Reach & Match continues to empower children with disabilities worldwide. 

Mandy is also a Westpac Social Change Fellowship 2023 and Singularity University Impact Fellow 2016, both programs focusing on SDG4 (Quality Education for All) 

The founder, serving as the Team Lead, along with one or two dedicated team members, are well-positioned to effectively support the LEAP Project. Strengthening the evidence base is a high priority for our organisation, and we have already made a commitment this year to dedicate time and resources to further enhance our understanding and impact.

With a commitment of 2-4 hours per week from the Team Lead and supporting team members, we will allocate focused and dedicated time to drive the success of the LEAP Project. This time will be utilised efficiently, balancing other organisational priorities while giving due attention to the project's needs.

The Team Lead, being the founder and diligently involved in the development of the Reach & Match program, brings a deep understanding of the program's objectives, challenges, and potential impact. Their experience and expertise will guide the project's strategic direction and ensure alignment with our organisation's overall mission.

The supporting team members (Research Assistant / and additional advisor) will bring complementary skills and knowledge to the project, assisting in areas such as research, data analysis, and project coordination. Their commitment to the organisation's objectives and their passion for inclusive education will drive their active engagement and contribution to the LEAP Project.

Inclusive Play-based Program accelerates school readiness and promotes social welling for young children with all abilities

Around half the world's pre-primary aged children, which amounts to over 175 million children, are not enrolled in pre-primary education. This lack of access to quality early childhood education further exacerbates the school readiness gap, especially for children with diverse needs. According to 2021 UNICEF data, approximately 240 million children worldwide live with disabilities. These children are 42% less likely to achieve foundational reading and numeracy skills and with a low school readiness rate, 47% more likely to be out of primary school, and 51% more likely to experience unhappiness.

The problem we're tackling is the significant shortfall of inclusive, accessible educational resources for children with diverse needs, particularly those with disabilities.

This issue is compounded in developing countries where 90% of children with disabilities living in developing countries do not attend school. These children confront significant barriers to quality education, often stemming from inadequate resources and the lack of appropriately trained teachers. Furthermore, basic services are often insufficient, with mainstream educational services regularly excluding children with disabilities. In emergency contexts, these children become even more invisible, often overlooked in relief and support efforts.

A considerable contributing factor to this problem is the lack of teachers' knowledge, confidence, and skills in effectively supporting children with disabilities. Without these skills, teachers may struggle to provide equal learning opportunities for all students, leading to the social isolation of children with disabilities and increasing their risk of dropping out of school. Such disparities in educational attainment contribute to social inequity and isolation, reinforcing the urgent need to address these issues.

Our solution seeks to confront these disparities, ensuring that all children, regardless of their abilities, have access to quality education and opportunities for social inclusion. Reach & Match aims to bridge this gap, facilitating an inclusive learning environment that can cater to children with diverse needs and abilities.

Reach & Match is an award-winning holistic learning program, conceived through extensive postgraduate research conducted by our founder, Mandy Lau. The research has been awarded the Monash University Vice-Chancellor’s Social Inclusion Award. The program is crafted through detailed research and user testing. It seeks to bolster early childhood learning outcomes and facilitate the integration of children with disabilities into mainstream Early Childhood Education (ECE) services, preschools, and early primary schools. Our core ethos dictates that no child should be left behind. Hence, our objective is to provide the most vulnerable children with inclusive, quality pre-primary education that readies them for a successful educational journey, thereby enabling them to unlock their full potential.

Our program actively supports children aged 3-9 years, both with and without disabilities. By championing the concept of inclusive play-based learning, Reach & Match enables children with disabilities to learn and interact with their peers in an enriching environment. This approach enhances foundational physical, cognitive, language, and social-emotional skills, vital for every child's overall wellbeing and learning progression.

The program is structured around four integral components:

1.     Reach & Match Learning Kit: The kit is a tactile educational tool, incorporating large, double-sided sensory play mats, braille, and print alphabet tiles with four distinct sounds, a cushion, and a portable bag. These play mats can be arranged into various 2D and 3D configurations to facilitate both individual and group learning experiences through playful interaction.

2.     Diverse Learning Program Activities: Our program offers over thirty individual and group learning activities that target seven fundamental learning outcomes: Braille and print literacy, cognitive skills, sensory integration, sense of satisfaction, language enrichment, body movement, and social interaction. The activities are adaptable and designed to align seamlessly with national curricula and learning outcomes.

3.     Educator Training: We provide a thorough Teacher Professional Development (TPD) manual to enhance educators' ability to create inclusive learning environments and promote play-based teaching and learning strategies, suitable for children of all abilities.

4.     Focus Group evaluation tools: We collaborated with educators to develop evaluation tools to M&E tools to monitor our program's effectiveness and drive continuous improvement.

Reach & Match program embraces the concept of learning variability, recognising that each child is unique in their learning needs and abilities. Our activities are thoughtfully designed to cater to a broad spectrum of developmental stages and learning capacities, progressing from simpler tasks to more challenging ones, and ranging from individual exercises to group interactions. This method accommodates the distinctive needs of all children, enabling us to address the specific requirements of those with disabilities and special needs. A notable feature of our program is the inclusion of Braille on the alphabet tiles ensuring that visually impaired and blind children can also engage and learn. We provide thorough training for educators, enabling them to effectively adapt the program to their students. 

Please check out our impact projects in partnership with Save the Children for the Marawi response and with World Vision supporting rural tribal children in Thailand!

1.     Foundational Research: Our journey began with foundational research. The Reach & Match system was developed as part of Mandy Lau's postgraduate research project. This research was informed by literature reviews on inclusive education, blindness and low vision, sensory learning, child development, and the needs of children with disabilities. It involved consultations with special educators, therapists, parents, and children with vision impairment and multiple needs. This research provided the underpinnings for our product design and informed our understanding of how to make learning more accessible and enjoyable for children of all abilities.

2. Formative Research: We have applied design thinking methods and carried out a series of formative research. This has involved detailed interviews and observational studies, coupled with usability and feasibility analyses, as well as numerous case studies. These methods have allowed us to gain invaluable feedback and insights directly from our user base, including educators, specialists, parents, and the children themselves. As we gathered this feedback, we have been concurrently prototyping and refining the Reach & Match learning Kit and program, making significant improvements in its usability, overall effectiveness, and user appeal. Furthermore, we have been able to observe the implementation of Reach & Match in a diverse range of settings, enabling us to gain a deeper understanding of its real-world application, practicality, and adaptability. This iterative process of research, prototyping, and modification has been crucial in shaping our program and ensuring it meets the needs of all users.

3. Summative Research: Our summative research encompasses quasi-experimental studies, Focus Group surveys, and questionnaires, with the intent of quantifying the effectiveness of the Reach & Match program. In collaboration with children's relief organisations like Save the Children and Plan International, we have leveraged different measuring tools to validate our products and gather comprehensive data. This accumulated research data underscores the effectiveness of the Reach & Match program, demonstrating its capacity to enhance key learning outcomes in children. These improvements span various areas, including braille and print literacy, cognitive abilities, sensory integration, language development, body movement, and social interaction. Additionally, our program supports children's emotional well-being and sense of satisfaction.

Our multifaceted research approach has been critical in the development and refinement of the Reach & Match system. Each phase of research revealed critical aspects of our solution and informed our progress.

The Reach & Match system was initially developed as part of the founder's postgraduate research, which formed the foundational research that laid the groundwork for our understanding of the challenges and needs in inclusive education, particularly for children with vision impairment and multiple needs. This comprehensive understanding allowed us to design a product with the intent to make learning more accessible and engaging for all children.

Formative research underscored the importance of iterative development, user feedback, and adaptability. Through this phase, we obtained critical feedback directly from users, which led to substantial improvements in the system's usability, effectiveness, and overall user appeal. Moreover, the diverse settings in which the system was implemented helped us appreciate its real-world practicality and adaptability.

The summative research validated the effectiveness of the Reach & Match system and quantified its impact. Our evaluations found improvements in children’s participation, learning outcomes, attendance rates and emotional wellbeing. An additional outcome of implementing the Reach & Match system was the positive effect it had on educators. Teachers reported improved skills and a more profound understanding of inclusive teaching pedagogy. The system enhanced their confidence and capacity in working with children, particularly those with multiple needs.

These insights greatly informed our work moving forward and the validation drives us to explore potential enhancements and advocate for wider adoption. For example, in Responding to COVID-19's challenges and our partnerships' insights, we're creating a more portable, family-friendly version of our Reach & Match kits for small groups. This will increase the accessibility and flexibility of our resources.

In addition, market feedback highlighted a need for early numeracy support. Therefore, we're developing a braille and print number version of our kit to foster early math skills in children, especially those with vision impairment and multiple disabilities. These advancements showcase our commitment to continually improving our offerings based on user feedback and research.

Reach & Match has successfully established partnerships with renowned children's relief organisations globally, such as Save the Children, Plan International, UNICEF, ChildFund, and World Vision. Our Learning Kits and programs have been deployed in various emergency and development situations, supporting thousands of children with their learning readiness. While these partnerships and the endorsement from the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has indicated the potential of our program, these organisations rely on reliable tools and evidence to support their implementation efforts, and in some cases, it is a requirement for collaboration. Therefore, we recognise the critical importance of solid, evidence-based outcomes to effectively scale and adapt our efforts.

To evaluate our program, we have developed several tools: head-teacher key informant interviews, teacher self-assessments, lesson observations, and parent/caregiver focus group discussions. These have provided meaningful insights, but have limitations in effectively quantifying our program's impact on children's development, especially concerning motor skills, social-emotional health, and early literacy and numeracy. Inconsistencies in data collection methods across our partners further complicate the evaluation process. Therefore, there is an urgent need to strengthen our evidence base through standardised, reliable, and user-friendly evaluation tools. Furthermore, assessing the learning progress of children with diverse needs presents additional challenges. Children may have different levels of abilities, learning styles, and progress rates, complicating the evaluation process.

Also, Teachers play a vital role in classrooms, not just as facilitators but also as learners, enhancing their skills in inclusive teaching. To mirror the progress of the children we serve, it's critical to evaluate the program's impact on teachers' pedagogical practices and abilities. Therefore, we aim to generate solid evidence showcasing the program's effectiveness in improving teachers' inclusive teaching skills.

Engaging in a LEAP Project now is timely and crucial for several reasons. Firstly, Reach & Match is currently in an expansion phase, partnering with more global children's relief organisations. As we scale, having a robust, reliable evidence base becomes increasingly important to foster confidence among our current and potential partners. Secondly, as we respond to the learning challenges posed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and adapt our solutions, validation of these efforts is essential. Thirdly, we are introducing new features, such as early numeracy support, which require evidence-based validation. Therefore, undertaking a LEAP challenge will help us scale our impact, refine our strategies and improve the children’s learning outcomes on a global scale.

1. How can we develop a standardised, reliable, and user-friendly tool to effectively measure the impact of the Reach & Match program on children's motor skills, social-emotional health, and early literacy and numeracy development, considering diverse learning needs and abilities?

2. How can we accurately quantify the impact of our program on enhancing teachers' skills and pedagogical practices in inclusive education?

1. Measuring & Evaluation Tool Development and Evaluation Study Designs: We hope to formulate a strategy for creating a standardised, dependable, and accessible tool to measure the Reach & Match program's impact. This will consider the effects on children's motor skills, social-emotional health, and early literacy and numeracy development, while keeping in mind the diverse learning needs and abilities of children. This strategy would offer recommendations on potential evaluation methods and tools, evidence-based techniques for measuring diverse learning needs, and guidelines on the process of tool development, testing, and implementation. We anticipate the development of a proposed evaluation study design, including methodologies, sample sizes, data collection methods, and analysis techniques to ensure robust, actionable findings.

2. Teacher Impact Measurement Framework: Our second key output is a framework to accurately quantify our program's effect on enhancing teachers' skills and pedagogical practices in inclusive education. This would encompass key performance indicators to measure teacher performance and inclusive pedagogy, strategies to mitigate bias in self-assessment, and techniques for effectively gathering and analysing data. The framework should also include a comprehensive study design to evaluate this aspect of the program, including ideal data collection methods, potential sample sizes, and suitable analysis techniques.

3. Implementation Strategies: A set of strategies tailored to enhance the implementation of the Reach & Match program in emergency and development contexts. This should include methodologies for improving inclusivity, adapting to diverse student needs, and maximising teachers' skill development.

4. Recommendations for Evaluation and Implementation: The final desired output will be a set of actionable recommendations to enhance the evaluation and implementation of the Reach & Match program. These will be derived from the insights gained through the new evaluation tool and teacher impact measurement framework. The recommendations could potentially cover aspects like effective data collection and interpretation methods, improved strategies for integrating the Reach & Match learning kit into different learning environments, and enhanced methods for training and supporting teachers in inclusive teaching practices. This doesn't imply changes to the learning kit's content or structure, but rather, focuses on maximising its utility and impact in the field.

5. Assessment Templates (if available): A comprehensive list of sample templates for the newly developed assessment tools for children's development and teachers' skill enhancement. These templates should serve as an easy-to-use reference for partners implementing our program worldwide.

1. Development of M&E tools and Evaluation Study designs: Based on the recommendations and strategies generated during the LEAP Project, we will begin the development phase of the standardised, reliable, valid, and user-friendly tools. This process may involve pilot testing, refining, and validating the tools to ensure their effectiveness in measuring the impact of the Reach & Match program on children's motor skills, social-emotional health, and early literacy and numeracy development across diverse learning needs and abilities.

2.  Integration of Teacher Impact Measurement Framework: Building upon the recommendations from the LEAP Project, our organisation will integrate the Teacher Impact Measurement Framework into our existing teacher training programs. We will collaborate with educational specialists and consultants to develop training modules, materials, and resources aligned with the framework. These resources will focus on enhancing teachers' inclusive teaching skills and pedagogical practices. The framework will provide a systematic approach to assessing and measuring teachers' growth and the impact of their practices on inclusive education.

3. Implementation of Actionable Recommendations: The actionable recommendations generated during the LEAP Project will be reviewed, and a comprehensive implementation plan will be developed. This plan will outline the steps, timelines, and responsibilities required to put the recommendations into practice. We will engage with our partner organisations and educators to communicate the recommendations and provide support and resources to facilitate their implementation. Regular progress monitoring and feedback loops will be established to ensure effective implementation and address any challenges or adjustments needed along the way.

4. Pilot Testing of Tools and Training: Before full-scale implementation, we will conduct pilot testing to try and test the developed evaluation tools and actionable recommendations. This pilot phase will involve inviting partner organisations and educators to participate in the testing process. We will provide comprehensive training and capacity-building initiatives to ensure educators and stakeholders understand how to use the tools effectively. This pilot phase will provide valuable insights and ensure that the tools and recommendations are practical, effective, and align with the needs of educators and children with diverse learning needs.

We recognise that building the tools requires additional time and resources, and we are committed to allocating the necessary support to ensure their successful development.

Short-term Outcomes:

1. Enhanced Data Collection and Evaluation: The short-term outcome is to establish a robust system for data collection and evaluation. By developing standardised evaluation tools and study designs, we aim to improve our ability to measure and assess the impact of the Reach & Match program on children's motor skills, social-emotional health, and early literacy and numeracy development. This outcome will enable us to gather reliable and comprehensive data to inform decision-making and program improvements.

2. Improved Teacher Training and Practices: Another short-term outcome is to enhance our teacher training programs. By integrating the Teacher Impact Measurement Framework into our training, we aim to improve teachers' inclusive teaching skills and pedagogical practices. This outcome will contribute to building a more inclusive learning environment for children with diverse needs, positively impacting their educational experiences and outcomes.

3. Actionable Insights and Recommendations: The short-term outcome includes generating actionable insights and recommendations. Through the evaluation process, we aim to gain valuable insights into the strengths and areas for improvement in the Reach & Match program. These insights will inform recommendations for program enhancements, such as curriculum adjustments, instructional strategies, or resource allocation. This outcome will guide our efforts in continuously improving the program's effectiveness and impact.

4. Piloting and Refinement: A short-term outcome is the successful piloting of evaluation tools, teacher training, and recommended program adjustments. Piloting will allow us to test and refine these components in real-world settings, gaining valuable feedback and insights from educators and stakeholders. This outcome will help us validate the effectiveness of the tools and recommendations and make necessary adjustments before full-scale implementation.

Long-term Outcomes:

1. Improved Learning Outcomes: A long-term outcome is improved learning outcomes for children with diverse needs. By implementing the insights gained from the evaluation and refining the program based on recommendations, we aim to positively impact children's motor skills, social-emotional health, and early literacy and numeracy development. This outcome will contribute to their overall educational achievements and future success.

2. Increased Inclusivity and Equity: Another long-term outcome is increased inclusivity and equity in education. By strengthening the Reach & Match program through evidence-based improvements, we aim to create a more inclusive learning environment where all children, regardless of their diverse needs, can thrive. This outcome will contribute to reducing educational disparities and promoting equal opportunities for all learners.

3. Scalability and Sustainability: The long-term outcome is the scalability and sustainability of the Reach & Match program. By gathering robust evidence and demonstrating positive outcomes, we aim to advocate for the program's wider adoption by educational institutions, policymakers, and NGOs. This outcome will contribute to expanding the program's reach, ensuring its long-term impact, and securing ongoing support and resources.

In summary, the short-term outcomes focus on enhancing data collection, improving teacher training and practices, generating actionable insights, and piloting and refining the program. The long-term outcomes encompass improved learning outcomes, increased inclusivity and equity, and scalability and sustainability of the Reach & Match program.