Pratham’s Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) approach has been listed as a ‘good buy’ to improve learning in low- and middle-income countries by the new Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP). The panel is co-hosted by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, and the World Bank and convened by the Building Evidence in Education (BE2) global working group. The Panel released its first recommendations on the Smart Buys in education for low- and middle-income countries on Oct 28, 2020. The recommendations list TaRL as a cost-effective program with a strong evidence base.
To inform countries’ decisions about where to allocate their budget and reform efforts, the report groups education programs into the following tiers of cost-effectiveness:
- Great buys” and “good buys”—programmes that are highly cost-effective, with a strong evidence base
- “Promising but low-evidence”—those that are highly cost-effective according to some small rigorous studies, but where the evidence base is more limited
- “Bad buys”—cases where strong, repeated evidence shows that these programmes have not worked in the past in many situations or are not cost-effective