ABSTRACT
An education ministry may adopt a new curriculum at all teacher education institutions. For national educators, enlarging an effective small-scale innovation is an attractive strategy for broader reform. Development advisers, decision-makers and practitioners commonly assume that education reforms must ‘go to scale’. Scaling up in education is intended to expand access and improve quality for more people over a wider geographical area, and to do so in ways that are efficient, equitable and sustainable. Scaling up may focus on structure: organisations expand in size or constituencies; on programmes: organisations expand the number and type of their activities; on strategy: organisations move beyond service delivery towards empowerment and change in the structural causes and contextual roots of underdevelopment; or on the resource base: organisations increase their financial and institutional base. Both the general literature and the studies of African experiences emphasise that scaling up success stories rest on both systemic and specifically local elements.
