PiXL International

The project seeks to improve the life chances of students in under-resourced primary and secondary schools by supporting education systems to tackle academic underperformance.

 This is achieved with PiXL strategies, tools and resources, including:

• intensive teacher training on using assessment data in the classroom; 
• technology for teachers to help them input and track student data and plan targeted interventions; 
• the digital provision of national learning materials and past exam papers; 
• rigorous analysis of academic performance data to help schools set and work towards goals; and 
• access to an international network of schools and leaders willing to share best practices and champion each other's successes.

The key objective is to help students get the best exam results they are capable of achieving.  This helps primary students enrol in and be better prepared for secondary education; and secondary students enrol in advanced and higher education.

Students in under-resourced schools have reduced life chances due to lower than average exam results at the end of primary and lower secondary education. Academic underperformance prevents many students from progressing to the next stage of education, or on to employment or vocational training. 

Globally, 1 in 10 children do not complete primary school (World Bank). In low and middle-income countries, more than 60% of primary age children fail to achieve a minimum proficiency in mathematics and reading, and only 1 in 3 children will complete secondary school (UNESCO).

Causes of student underperformance are rooted in poverty and include: 

1. Undiagnosed gaps in learning from absence due to disease, child labour, rural geographical barriers, menstruation, marriage, and pregnancy; and a lack of catch up education; 
2. A lack of training programs for school staff, resulting in limited improvement planning and data management; low teacher motivation; and a prevalence of common societal attitudes to girls’ abilities and education; and
3. A lack of critical inputs, particularly learning materials and enough quality teachers.

PiXL International is a community of schools designed to equip leaders so they can support their teams and improve academic performance of all students. 

PiXL schools meet at regular regional conferences to receive training on PiXL methods; share strategies and resources; provide feedback to the community; and celebrate school success stories. Schools also receive individual laser-focussed support when interventions are required.

PiXL’s proven methodologies are transferrable across schools, curriculums, cultures and countries. We provide intensive training on how to set important goals; track and use student data and assessment data in the classroom; professionally predict grades; and plan targeted interventions, along 8 key Steps to Success: 

1. Dream big
2. Know your students
3. Plan ahead
4. Spot challenging topics
5. Take action
6. Test, test, test
7. Motivate students
8. Celebrate success. 

Training helps schools improve student academic performance; creates shared accountability and capability across school leadership teams; improves capacity to oversee outcomes orientated improvement; and increases teacher motivation.

Our new technology is the PiXL App which allows teachers to track student progress and have instant access to teaching and training materials. It is our key digital tool for sharing strategy manuals, data analysis and exam preparation resources with schools.

PiXL International works with communities when invited by regional education officers. In Tanzania where we predominantly work, PiXL International’s community includes 1,367 primary and secondary schools across 5 regions. Since 2012 more than 1.5 million adolescents in Tanzania have failed to access secondary education due to their primary school exam results. The Tanzanian government acknowledges that outcomes in education remain at a low level, with an obvious gap between the number of girls and boys accessing and progressing with their education (National Five Year Development Plan for Tanzania). For example in a key district we work in, Morogoro Rural District, there are 14 primary schools with zero passes for girls in the Primary School Leavers' Examination (5 of these schools have no passes for boys as well).

It was the end of 2019 when we were invited to work with Morogoro Region. 88% of Morogoro’s 2.2 million population live rurally in low-income settings where students are critically underserved. Schools in this region have a 6:1 student to textbook ratio, and teacher ratio of 42:1 (UNICEF 2018 Out-of-School Children Report, Tanzania). There are limited provisions for students with disabilities, a lack of access to high quality digital learning materials and resources for teachers, and sometimes limited internet access. Morogoro Rural District is the lowest performing district in Tanzania for exam performance, placed at 186th out of 186 districts in the national rankings. Here the primary pass rate was 54% and the secondary pass rate was 63% in 2019. Rural students are particularly at risk of lower academic performance because of geographical barriers and other poverty-led causes of absence, such as child labour at harvest time.

When we are invited to work in a school region, it is essential we work collaboratively with the Education Department for the region. We begin by having consultations with regional education officers to understand their needs and wants. PiXL International is driven by Human Centered Design and our strategies and methods are uniquely tailored to each region. In Morogoro, we trained local Ward Education Officers to act as PiXL Associates and serve local networks of schools. We also set out to partner with key established providers in each region. In Morogoro we partnered with ETETA, a sustainable ICT program of teachers who create learning videos on YouTube tailored to the Tanzanian curriculum.

With the relationship established at regional level, we run introductory conferences to engage school leaders and District Education Officers (DEOs) in setting wildly important goals for their school and region. Attendance at PiXL conferences allows attendees to find out about PiXL strategies and give feedback on adapting them to local contexts.

Once schools are onboard, we work continuously as a community to achieve set goals. First, we analyse exam results to identify low performing schools and beneficiaries. The PiXL App technology ensures every student is visible, flagging under-performers (and non-attendance) by default, and helping DEOs conduct community mapping where low school attendance is apparent and interventions are required.

Crucially, our strategy then involves student engagement. Students provide feedback on the process from the outset, which starts as they are informed of the school’s goals for the year, and when they receive a predicted grade and a target grade from each subject teacher. Teacher and student sit down one-on-one so that students can agree upon or challenge target grades allocated to them, and the proposed process to attain them. Teachers discuss student feedback with the school’s appointed PiXL Raising Standards Leader who meets with a local PiXL Associate. As students are involved in the improvement process and as teachers celebrate big and small achievements with them, it gives students confidence and drives ambition, which along with key learning interventions enables exam results to improve.

Finally, we work with teachers on best ways to integrate use of PiXL learning materials, practice test questions and the PiXL App into daily teaching practices. Via the App and on USB drive teachers have the syllabus, textbooks, past examination papers, examination answers and feedback reports, practice questions, ETETA learning videos and more. Teachers can also collect badges on the App as students progress, and send feedback and questions to PiXL.

Morogoro was a success story for us last year, despite Tanzanian schools being closed for 3 months during the pandemic. Using PiXL strategies in 2020, Morogoro region moved up from 16th to 8th place out of 31 regions in the national ranking for students’ performance in their Primary School Leavers Exams. PiXL schools achieved a magnificent improvement in their average pass rate from 78.5% in 2019 to 87.2% in 2020. The excellent results achieved by the schools means that 5603 more students in this region passed their exams and so were able to go on to access secondary education.

PiXL International is driven to create a community of schools and classrooms that support all boys and girls to achieve equal standards of excellence. We succeed because we make the journey personal for school leaders, teachers, and students no matter who or where they are, which fosters motivation and ambition in schools and empowers students to succeed. 

We challenge schools and students to set wildly important goals; use positive language and celebrate successes; and critically harness the power of data to ensure accountability and the successful planning of purposeful, personalised and targeted interventions.

PiXL International is at growth stage at service level, and pilot stage with the PiXL App.

PiXL International has been established since 2014, when we started working with 3 schools in Tanzania to help their students improve their academic performance. Seven years later we work with 487 secondary schools and 880 primary schools across 5 regions in Tanzania; 296 secondary schools across 6 regions of Brazil; 6 secondary schools in Ghana; 20 in South Africa and 14 in Uganda. In total we serve almost half a million students. Although we are lean to run, we are not yet sustainable to be at scale stage. We hope to achieve sustainability via our PiXL App, which was launched in 2020 and we are piloting with 237 school leaders in Morogoro, Tanzania.

PiXL International offers unique partnership collaborations for schools; we create and co-construct resources that address specific national/local areas for development; and we help leaders and teachers harness the power of data without a commercial agenda. 

Solutions using individual country’s criteria, curricula and syllabus are linked to our strategic Steps to Success for each individual context, and a menu of choices is available for each school, district or region to adopt and adapt as appropriate to their needs. Successes are owned by schools; PiXL are privileged facilitators of school improvement on the ground.

Because we are ideas based and evidence based, our community has the potential to scale to benefit thousands of schools around the world at low cost. On a micro level, PiXL has been catalytic in Tanzania as improved school results have fuelled exponential growth in recent years from 3 schools to 1300+. We foster a culture of kindness, respect, and collaboration, giving us confidence that we can make productive partnerships around the world.

Pure-tech solutions cannot succeed alone in remote schools and markets with many barriers to entry; connection is needed on a human level to determine what the local goals are for each school community. PiXL has a deep respect for education cultures, collaborative expertise, and methodology and strategies that have been proven against challenge after challenge. We hope our results can encourage others to recognise that great impact can be made via sharing and supporting each other, making the journey personal for every individual involved.

PiXL International currently serves approximately 474,000 students across 5 countries: 405k students in Tanzania; 60k students in Brazil; 1k in Ghana; 4k in South Africa; and 3k in Uganda.

In one year, we will be serving a further 6k students with a current commitment from 12 schools in Jamaica who will be onboarded in the coming months. Otherwise we expect figures to stay the same as we focus on the roll out of the PiXL App and help schools recover from missed learning during the pandemic. 

In 5 years we anticipate PiXL International will serve approximately 2 million students for the following reasons:

1. Leads are being generated with contacts in Zambia, Kenya and Rwanda indicating at least pilot 20 schools in each country will sign up in 2022 (serving approximately 30k students)
2. We have early leads in Maharashtra, India. This state has more schools than the whole of the UK, so there is significant potential for scale in the region.
3. In Tanzania so far we are serving 3 regions out of 30, and the scale to serve 405k students has been swift. We anticipate a further 6-7 regions in Tanzania will join PiXL International within the next 5 years, impacting a further 1 million students.
4. We anticipate a network effect to take place in the above-mentioned countries in the same way it is has occurred in Tanzania.

We monitor progress by analysing school mock exam and national exam results. We upload school results to our app to:

• compare a school’s exam results over the past 2 years;
• reveal which target grades were met and if the failure rate improved;
• calculate the accuracy percentage rate of grade predictions per teacher;
• present gender analysis on grades achieved and pass and failure rates; and
• assess proficiency levels in reading and mathematics, by sex.

Each term, PiXL Associates review how schools are progressing, speaking with school leaders and using pupil focus reports and analysis of app data and usage. Regional termly conferences are held for school leaders to share news of progress and challenges faced.

The app gives teachers and pupils real-time feedback on progress. It has a Personalised Learning Checklist (PLC) for each subject and year group, where teachers give students a red, amber or green rating per subtopic to reflect levels of understanding. Pupils, teachers, school leaders, and PiXL Associates can identify where pupil performance is lagging. Interventions can be scheduled on the app, and the app rewards teachers for completing them and updating in-app pupil progress reports.

Pupils are continuously in the loop with their progress and are able to monitor their PLC on the teacher’s app. A PiXL principle is to ‘test, test, test’ to monitor understanding, and obtain pupil feedback on what gaps exist in their learning and how they can be filled.

Full-time paid staff (UK)

Martin Rainsford - Founder & Director
Charlotte Beckett - Head of Operations 

Paid contract workers:
Vishal Dubey - App developer (India)
Subject experts; content developers; camera and microphone operators in country who collectively develop PiXL learning materials (in each country)

Volunteer program leads (UK) = 6

PiXL International was founded by its Director Martin Rainsford in 2014 with the support of PiXL UK founder, Sir John Rowling. Martin had been a headteacher in London secondary schools for 19 years. He led a London Challenge school out of special measures, and became a founding director of The Diocese of Westminster Academy Trust, one of the highest performing trusts in the country. 

It was in working in challenging inner-city schools to urgently improve academic performance that Martin honed intervention strategies. It is his lifelong passion for providing children the best education possible that he dedicated his time to set up PiXL International and serve students in some of the poorest schools in the world.

Martin is supported by volunteer country operational leads who similarly have decades worth of expert leadership and consultancy experience. Each country lead has travelled extensively to meet with school leaders, grow personal relationships with them, and understand the needs and wants of each community they serve. 

PiXL International is founded upon the principle that collaboration and sharing best practice can drive success. Conferences are designed so that leaders may inspire each other, share ideas, celebrate each other's successes and feel part of an empowering community. Our network members become advocates for idea sharing, and it is in these chains of motivation that we witness schools succeed in an upward spiral of potential.

It is imperative to PiXL International's mission of giving boys and girls everywhere an equal chance at achieving standards of excellence that we reflect this value in our leadership. Our organisational structure is relatively horizontal, as leaders train other leaders and we gain network effect in an open community of idea sharing. We are a community that thrives upon feedback and accountability and it is a continuous goal to fill gaps in our understanding as to how we design and implement our solution in each cultural setting.

In each country, PiXL is regionally and locally led by country nationals and we ensure inclusivity and gender balance when making appointments. As we scale and fill national lead positions, processes will be in strict adherence to the equality, diversity and inclusion Charity Governance Code. Key goals include providing diversity and inclusivity training to all PiXL members; updating training and policies to the App to be accessible to every teacher, school and regional leader; and publishing performance information and learning about how to identify and tackle inequalities that arise.

In coming months, we are keen to appoint an advisory board to the charity. This is a critical opportunity to put our values into practice and we are hugely excited to garner the expertise of a diverse expert team.

PiXL International has grown carefully and organically over the past 7 years from 3 schools to 1400+. We are now primed for faster growth and are keen to have the best support network possible to help this happen successfully.

We are seeking expert strategic advice on ways to:

• scale whilst maintaining the quality of our service to current PiXL International members;
• integrate our new PiXL App into under-resourced communities; and
• become sustainable by harnessing our tech, data and expertise.

We believe the MIT Solve community could be the perfect network through which we can learn from peers, mentors and experts, whilst also sharing our own ideas on careful networking and strategically improving performance.

Finally, we believe in scaling by meeting people in the community who want to work with us, and need our input. This can significantly be achieved by making partnerships in the learning sector and with the support of foundations who are focussed on grants for non-profits dedicated to helping boys and girls achieve equal standards of excellence in the classroom. We would hugely appreciate the exposure MIT Solve would give us so that we may make introductions in this space.

Human Capital: PiXL International is dedicated to scaling carefully and in communities where we are invited and needed. Though we have the expertise in education and the resources, we are about to train people at scale and we need the best advice in how to do this efficiently.

Business Model: As mentioned in previous answers we are keen to achieve sustainability through monetising our PiXL App and consultancy at a premium and are seeking strategic advice as we take next steps. 

Monitoring & Evaluation: We also need to be able to streamline data at scale. We look closely at data per school and per region in order for schools to be able to plan goals and interventions, but as we reach 1 million+ students, how we harness the power of the data we are gathering in the aggregate is an area we would like to obtain expertise in.

PiXL International's goal is to partner with large scale impactful grant givers and networks in education such as the Global Partnership for Education and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who would be best positioned to help us accelerate our growth in the most under-resourced communities around the world.

We are also very keen to partner with Solve Members who are seeking to improve performance in the classroom, particularly for the most vulnerable students such as girls, SEN learners and students with disabilities in under-resourced settings. 40K Plus is one such Solver team we would be fascinated to learn from and to see if we could collaborate to compliment each other's efforts at providing quality education in restricted environments.
In developing our strategy, it would be a privilege to connect with Hala Hanna and other MIT mentors who have worked with social impact organisations to scale sustainably.

Inequity of access and learning outcomes between genders continues to present a major challenge in Tanzania (and globally). Girls lag behind boys in the transition rate from primary to secondary and on to higher secondary and higher education; and girls underperform in exams compared to boys (p16 Education Sector Development Plan for Tanzania). It is a key PiXL objective to improve the pass rate for girls in rural districts, to empower girls and give them greater choice when it come to comes to future life decisions. 

The Tanzanian National Strategy for Gender Development identifies as a concern ‘unfriendly learning environment for girls, inadequate trained teachers on gender issues, gender biased curricula, and social and cultural values which are resistant to change for girls’ education.’ With Women Prize funds and in collaborative partnerships we would be able to develop a training program for teachers and school leaders on inclusive education, conducted at our conferences and via Whatsapp and the PiXL app. 

Crucially the PiXL App categorises pupils by gender, so we and our schools can test the impact of training and collaborative strategies and hold ourselves accountable in real-time through data monitoring.

We know that education interventions, particularly for young women, are more cost effective than later attempts to improve life chances. Educational achievement of girls is associated with a reduction in poverty as women with secondary education earn almost twice as much as those without. For example, each year of secondary education reduces the risk of early childbearing by 9 percent (Tanzania Economic update, The Power of Investing in Girls, World bank Group, 2019).

In providing ed-tech interventions, PiXL International needs to be careful to tailor our offerings to each project and school. School IT suites are rare, require expensive internet lines and may be inaccessible if schools are closed again due to COVID. Because schools have limited access to Excel and desktop computers, we developed and launched our app in early 2020 as we witnessed growing use of smartphones and affordable data. 

The app allows teachers to track student progress in the classroom and have instant access to a suite of teaching and training materials. It is now our key tech tool for sharing strategy manuals, data analysis and exam preparation resources with teachers.

Constraints arising from COVID are fast-tracking the way schools want to use the app to access condensed learning materials. Funds from the GSR Prize would be used to make our tech solutions and digital teaching resources available in more countries around the world, with tailored versions for each country's curriculum as we expand and help more schools tackle academic under-performance.