Nations around the world—whether they are rich or poor—have dramatically widened access to education over the last century. But results remain mixed and unfairly distributed in terms of basic literacy and human development. International voices grow louder to improve the quality of schooling and transform the core aims and practices of the education sector. Today’s students face daunting global challenges: rapidly evolving job demands, worsening inequality and doubts over economic sustainability.

This brief argues that policy-makers and educators must grasp the levers of organisational change inside education institutions to rethink goals and lift school quality. Systems thinking offers key tools for leveraging gains inside classrooms and enriching the quality of teaching and student engagement. This brief shares differing pathways for sparking systems change and details country and state cases that have raised student learning by deploying the powerful tools of systems analysis.