The Ministry of General Education is eager to scale the programme to more children in Zambia. The Ministry rolled out the Catch Up programme to approximately 1,800 schools in 2019.

Although the pilot has concluded, the team looks at this next phase of scale as another opportunity to learn and improve. Already, the team made a number of improvements since the pilot, including:

• • Development of master trainers (selected from province, districts and zones) who were involved in the pilot to lead the scale up.
  • A more intensive training for new master trainers and the creation of training programmes, videos and step-by-step guides for facilitators on how to train mentors and teachers. Pratham staff came back to Zambia to support the 10-day training of government master trainers and continues to support these officials with occasional visits.
  • Improvements made to the teacher guides, lesson procedures, and activities in the programme following analysis of pilot learning outcome data and focus group discussions with Ministry and VVOB staff from the provincial level, district level and school level.
  • VVOB support in the scale-up is provided to the zone, district, and provincial leaders of the programme rather than directly to the teachers. This system helps promote government ownership of the programme.
  • Further strengthening the monitoring and feedback system, with more data collection and analysis conducted at the school level by senior teachers. This encourages data-based decision-making to take place at school, and makes aggregation and analysis easier at the zone and district level.