Addressing the learning crisis: an emergent consensus

Success can make a previous consensus not so much wrong as just irrelevant. The Washington Consensus joined in a broader consensus that governments need to spend on education in order to reach universal schooling to create human capital. But ‘spend to expand access’ has been so successful there is less and less space for additional improvements in education outcomes – the skills and competencies children need to acquire in school – through ‘access’. Global, national, and local actors agree on the need to increasingly focus on improving learning outcomes. Moreover, there is an emergent consensus that improving learning will require much more than just ‘more spend’ and that a substantial re-alignment of education systems from ‘expansion of access’ to ‘increased learning’ is needed. And, while there is not yet a consensus on the granular details (and may never be as success tends to be home-grown and adapted to context), there is increasing agreement around a set of principles that will drive sustained gains in improving learning outcomes.