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Okada, Alexandra; Ebubedike, Margaret; Hedges, Claire and Zwier, Janelle (2025). Catch Up Education Research Report: Foundational Literacy, Numeracy, and Social Emotional Learning Skills in Vulnerable, Conflict, and Migrant Settings. The Open University.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00096569
Abstract
Settings
The Catch-Up Program (CUP) is an educational initiative designed to address the learning needs of children who are most affected by educational disruptions, particularly in vulnerable communities. The primary objective of CUP is to support the acquisition of foundational skills in literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional learning, providing a pathway for children to re-engage with their education.
This mixed methods research focuses on CUP implementation in three very different settings.
• Chile – a pilot implementation reaching 400+ migrant children in temporary learning spaces and schools.
• Ethiopia – a community-based ‘try and learn’ implementation reaching 300+ vulnerable children in conflict affected areas.
• Zimbabwe – an at-scale school-based implementation reaching 16,500+ children in communities affected by poverty, migration, climate crises and food insecurity.
Spotlights on El Salvador and the Philippines are featured, along with a landscape review looking more broadly across the iNGO sector’s work in this area.
Key Findings
• Reach: In all three contexts, CUP was able to reach children in the target groups specified by the respective WV country teams. Particular groups of children, for example, children with disabilities, appear harder to reach. Stakeholders in all settings point out that more children need and are interested in the CUP clubs, which positively reflects perceptions of success.
• Learning Gains: In all three contexts, most children (70% or more) are learning within a 16-20 week learning cycle. For example, in literacy, these improvements are most commonly moving up one skill level - from not reading to reading letters, from reading letters to reading words, from reading words to reading sentences, from reading sentences to understanding sentences. 27% and 17% of children in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe respectively reached the exit criteria of being able to read and understand a paragraph of 4 simple sentences. This broadly relates to the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) simple comprehension. However, in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, improvements in literacy learning were harder to achieve than numeracy, in particular for boys. In all contexts, there are examples of centres, where learning outcomes are stronger.
• Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Development: The integration of SEL into CUP sessions not only fosters learning progress but also addresses the broader psychosocial needs of children affected by migration, conflict, and economic instability.
• Shared Ownership across Stakeholders: The high level of collaboration between educators, communities, and education officials and policymakers is a key contributor to CUP’s successes in all three contexts. In settings, where time, money and resources are so scarce, the commitment and energy of communities is striking.
• Adaptations and Design Choices: Whilst global principles and resources guide and support CUP implementation, significant adaptations can be seen in different aspects of the program at national and local level, indicating the freedom and confidence given to local teams.
Challenges and Questions
• Sufficiency: The goal of CUP is to enable children to engage or re-engage in effective learning in school (or further informal learning opportunities). A critical area for further research is to look at if the learning time given and learning gains seen are sufficient to enable children to successfully engage and progress in regular classes and complete primary school.
• Those Not Yet Learning: If 70%+ of children are learning, attention now needs to be given to the nearly 3 in 10 learners showing no improvement. Whilst use of Washington Group questions and referral mechanisms are part of the theoretical design of CUP, these do not appear to be playing out in practice. A study focussed on these children, who are not showing progress in their literacy, numeracy and/or SEL skills, could find out more about who these children are and their challenges. Transformative thinking may be needed to effectively support learning for these children, which may also benefit others.
• Resistance of School Systems: If long-term change is to be achieved, schools themselves need to change, and a key consideration is whether the approaches from CUP can be used in Government schools and can these schools be influenced to adopt the pedagogy themselves.
• Scalability and Sustainability: In Zimbabwe, the example of implementation at scale, volunteer facilitator recruitment and retention remain a challenge, and many schools face high volunteer turnover. Even in areas where take-up is currently high, continuation may therefore be precarious despite the current achievements. In all contexts, funding, and training support is an ongoing challenge.
• Evidence Generation: Data collection across the learning cycles has not been systematically embedded within implementation but has been opportunistic taking advantage of favourable conditions in terms of who is available to collect data, and the operating environment, and has been confined to individual learning cycles.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
