Since the early days of Geneva Global’s accelerated education Speed School program in Ethiopia and Uganda for children ages 9 to 14 who are out of school, local officials and agents have routinely commented that the initiative’s former students tend to surpass both academically and socio-emotionally their classmates who have only learned in conventional classes.

Validated by Geneva Global’s own annual data collection and two independent longitudinal studies in Ethiopia and one in Uganda, we have harbored ideas about why this happens but have yet to study the question rigorously, until now.

In 2024, Geneva Global’s two country teams joined with local education partners in order to explore, finally, why former Speed School students regularly outperform their classmates.

The study’s design

The study surveyed 242 teachers of Grade 5 or 6 classes across 97 schools divided nearly evenly across the two countries for a total of 37,000 students. This allowed us to compare students who had completed Speed School at least 2 years before with the classmates whom they had joined in conventional classes.

Each teacher provided insights on an average of 152 students taught across a few classes. In many cases, the researchers had to help the teachers identify which were the former Speed School students before asking the questions.

In addition to their subjective insights, teachers referred to their gradebook records to identify the top ten and top twenty scoring students.

Comparing students’ class rankings

The study compared students who participated in Speed School with their peers who didn’t from a pair of angles.

The first angle confirmed empirically that former Speed School students were in fact achieving better academically than their counterparts based on their class ranking:

Though constituting fewer than a quarter of the average 152 students per teacher (27% in Ethiopia and 15% in Uganda), former Speed School students comprised over one-third of the top ten academic performers and well over half the top 20 academic performers.

Comparing learning strategies and behaviors

Looking from the second angle, the study aimed to explain the higher academic performance of former Speed School students by asking the 242 teachers to compare the two groups of students across 23 different learning strategies and behaviors which we selected as learning assets and organized into 10 categories.

The aim was to determine if there are concrete learning assets that students acquire in Speed School that set them up to excel after they join conventional classes.

Using a scale from “0” – “Used rarely or not at all” – to “4” – “Used regularly by all or most students,” the teachers consistently rated former Speed School students about a full point higher than their peers:

In only one instance was the difference not statistically significant when comparing the academic performance between the 2 groups of students.

This was for the learning assets “parental support” which one might conceivably consider as an endorsement of the importance of the students’ acquired learning assets.

It suggests that it is the students’ effort and not parental intervention in their learning that explains the differences in their academic performance.

In addition, anecdotal evidence suggests that the positive impact of participating in Speed School may even be larger as many attest that the former Speed School students’ learning habits have “rubbed off” onto other students in the classroom who did not attend Speed School.

Speed School facilitators learn to prioritize learning over teaching in their instruction in the sense that teachers are not focused simply on delivering the curriculum’s content but rather concerned to ensure that students are understanding the content.

This, we believe, is essential to the students’ better and more enduring academic and social school outcomes.

Implications for education reform

Speed School’s original motivation was to provide older children who have been out of school a “second chance” to rejoin formal education.

Viewed as a “nonformal” education option, Speed School implementers had the freedom to color outside the lines of the prevailing pedagogic orthodoxy in terms of both what and how they taught.

As the program’s “graduates” continue to transition to conventional classrooms and excel there, it remains obvious to educators across the system that the model is valuable not just to expand school access but also to strengthen quality across all of formal education. This is the path Geneva Global is now pursuing with both countries. Stay tuned. (Read a more complete overview of the study here.)

As supported by research funded by the GPE Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX), governments should consider including accelerated education programs in education sector planning and budgeting to ensure their sustainability and to unlock their full potential to get children back in school and learning.