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Improving Catch Up Implementation Fidelity (ICUIF) – Phase 2
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Challenge
Zambia has made significant progress in expanding access to education, with 85.6% of children now enrolled in primary school. However, many learners have not mastered the foundational literacy and numeracy skills they need to thrive in school and beyond. According to the 2023 UNESCO Assessments for Minimum Proficiency Levels, nearly nine out of ten (87.3%) Grade 4 learners did not reach the minimum proficiency levels in literacy and numeracy. As learners progress through primary education without acquiring these foundational skills, it can be increasingly harder for them to meet the curriculum requirements.
Remedial learning is a national priority to ensure that learners who have fallen behind in literacy and numeracy can catch up to grade-appropriate levels. For the last decade, VVOB has been working closely with the Ministry of Education (MoE) and other partners on Zambia’s Catch Up Programme. This evidence-based programme is a locally adapted version of Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL). TaRL groups children by their current learning level, rather than by age or grade, and uses engaging, level-appropriate activities to build foundational literacy and numeracy skills.
After 10 years of Catch Up, the programme has shown positive results in improving learning outcomes. Learners who were enrolled in the programme for two years showed notable gains in both literacy and numeracy compared to those who did not participate. Beyond the short term, learners who went through the programme also performed better on their Grade 7 national school-leaving exams in both language and mathematics. However, challenges remain in ensuring the Catch Up Programme is consistently implemented by teachers across schools with the quality it deserves. Key challenges include:
- Teachers and schools applying the Catch Up activities differently.
- Inconsistent support for teachers and mentors.
- Using learner data effectively to identify priorities for additional support.
- A lack of data to track how well Catch Up is being followed at various levels of the education system.
Goals
The goal of the Improving Catch Up Implementation Fidelity (ICUIF) project is to strengthen Zambia’s Catch Up Programme by sustaining its impact, improving implementation quality, and embedding it within Ministry of Education systems. It aims to scale effective practices, test innovations, and increase institutional capacity to ensure long-term sustainability and improved learning outcomes.
Project Partners
Approach
The project is organised around four areas of work:
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Maintaining Impact
VVOB and the MoE will continue to carry out data review meetings, and joint school visits in eight provinces. During these visits, they will verify the assessment of learners and grouping practices. These activities will strengthen the Ministry's capacity to independently monitor schools, conduct mentoring visits and sustain Catch Up while making sure schools implement the approach as designed.
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Improving Impact – Learning Labs for Catch Up 2.0
The project will set up Learning Labs, which are small-scale innovation pilots in selected schools across three provinces. These labs will test three approaches to strengthen Catch Up’s impact. More specifically, they will look at ways to boost lesson delivery, to improve literacy outcomes, to upgrade training models, and to integrate structured pedagogy.
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Institutionalisation Plans
A third approach to ensure Catch Up is uniformly implemented is to gradually transition the responsibilities of the programme to the Ministry of Education through capacity-strengthening and readiness assessments. The programme will select and support a small number of Ministry officials to present and promote the impact study results at national and regional forums.
Additionally, TaRL Africa will migrate Zambia-specific date from their Data Portal, a multi-country data platform that collects and manages learning assessment data across Sub-Saharan Africa, to a portal owned by the Ministry. - Scaling to Western Province
The Catch Up Programme will expand to six districts in the Western Province (227 schools) that were used as comparison districts in the recent impact study, and three other remaining districts that have not yet implemented the TaRL approach (212 schools).
The Catch Up Coordinating Committee (CUCC) consists of the Ministry of Education and key partners and will continue to oversee the planning, design, and implementation of Catch Up. The project will also strengthen the capacity of both VVOB and the MoE to ensure the approach can be sustained and expanded after the project ends.
By the end of the programme
- VVOB and MoE will have carried out 648 school visits per month across eight provinces to improve the implementation quality of Catch Up.
- 30 schools in the Northern, Southern and Eastern provinces will have participated in Learning Labs to test innovations to improve the Catch Up model.
- Catch Up will have been further embedded within the Ministry of Education. More specifically, the Ministry will have taken over key delivery functions in Luapula, Southern and Muchinga provinces. Catch Up will be reflected in the national teacher education policy.
- MoE officials, known as “champions” within the project, will have disseminated the project results, embedding them in national dialogue and donor engagement.
The programme will have expanded Catch Up throughout the Western Province (over 400 schools), reaching 1,544 teachers and school leaders.