James Haughton, CEO, Pestalozzi International
There is an important distinction in education strategy between programmes of breadth and programmes of depth.
Programmes of breadth focus on scale. They aim to reach as many children as possible. Universal primary education campaigns, infrastructure investment and teacher recruitment drives fall into this category. They are indispensable. Without breadth, opportunity remains the privilege of a few.
Programmes of depth focus on intensity. Pestalozzi invests deeply in smaller cohorts over time, strengthening identity, resilience and leadership capability. We do not replace breadth. We complement it. We ensure that access translates into sustained contribution.
Programmes of breadth widen the doorway. Programmes of depth, like Pestalozzi's, strengthen those who will hold it open for others. A healthy education ecosystem needs both. If we wait for universal access before investing in leadership development, we risk building a system without enough leaders to sustain and improve it.
The scale of the breadth challenge
The breadth problem is not abstract, and it is not close to solved. UNESCO estimates that the world needs 44 million additional teachers to achieve universal primary and secondary education by 2030. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for one in three of that shortfall, around 15 million teachers, a figure that has barely moved since 2016, and the annual cost of the salaries alone runs to roughly 120 billion US dollars (UNESCO, 2024). This is the context in which any serious conversation about quality has to take place. The doorway is still far too narrow, and widening it is the work of a generation.
But the shortage is not only one of numbers. It is one of quality and distribution. In Zambia, the government estimates a need for around 30,000 more teachers, primary pupil-to-teacher ratios sit at roughly 38 to 1 nationally, and in about a quarter of districts they reach 80 to 1, with rural schools facing the most acute shortages of all (USAID, 2023; Learning Systems Institute, 2023). UNESCO and national reports consistently highlight the need not just for more teachers but for more qualified teachers, especially in science and mathematics. Breadth without quality is a half-measure. This is precisely where depth earns its place.
Holding the door open for others
Sixty per cent of Pestalozzi alumni enter public service careers, and six out of ten of those become educators. It is an outcome we value highly, because it is where depth begins to feed breadth.
The leverage here is easy to underestimate. One teacher influences hundreds of children over a career. If a teacher instructs 40 students a year and teaches for 25 years, they will directly shape at least 1,000 learners, and many teach far more. What the evidence now shows is that the quality of that teacher matters enormously to the life chances of every one of those children. The landmark value-added research by Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff, following 2.5 million children into adulthood, found that a single high-performing teacher raises the cumulative lifetime earnings of one class by more than 1.4 million US dollars, and that replacing a bottom-five-per-cent teacher with an average one is worth around 250,000 dollars per classroom. The effects extend well beyond income: students taught by high value-added teachers are more likely to attend college and less likely to become teenage parents (Chetty et al., 2014).
This is the mechanism behind a simple claim. When a teacher carries resilience, ethical grounding and a belief in every child's potential, the reach multiplies. Leadership development in childhood becomes national capacity building when graduates return as teachers. It is the depth effect feeding the breadth effect.
What Pestalozzi alumni carry forward
Pestalozzi alumni who become teachers do not simply deliver the curriculum. They carry forward the structure and values of the Leadership Pathway they experienced.
From Belonging, they carry an understanding of how stability and high expectations change outcomes, and they recreate classrooms where children feel safe and capable. This is not sentiment. One of the most replicated findings in education is the Pygmalion effect: in the original study by Rosenthal and Jacobson, children whose teachers were led to expect more of them measurably outperformed their peers, and subsequent meta-analyses across hundreds of studies confirm that teacher expectations shape achievement (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968). A teacher who genuinely believes in a child's potential changes what that child achieves. Alumni who have been believed in tend to believe in others.
From Growth, they carry resilience and self-belief. They understand that poverty is not just material; it is also psychological. They recognise how trauma and low expectations can quietly limit ambition, and as educators they respond not only with instruction but with encouragement and structured support, countering precisely the low-expectation dynamics that the expectancy research warns about.
From Active Citizenship, they carry systems awareness. They teach students how institutions function and how to participate responsibly in civic life.
From Leaders in Practice, they carry the lived experience of responsibility. They model agency because they have practised it.
This combination produces teachers who see themselves as shapers of citizens, not merely deliverers of content. It is the difference between filling a post and raising the quality of an entire learning environment.
Alumni in action: the Edulution effect
One of the clearest illustrations of leadership depth strengthening system breadth is the partnership between Pestalozzi alumni and Edulution, a social enterprise delivering tablet-based mathematics and literacy instruction in underserved schools.
More than 40 Pestalozzi alumni have worked as coaches and leaders within Edulution. Many began as classroom facilitators and progressed to centre leadership, regional coordination and educator training roles. Collectively they have supported thousands of learners across Zambia and neighbouring countries.
The model itself is well chosen, and the evidence for this kind of structured, personalised instruction is strong. The most rigorous evaluation in the field, a randomised controlled trial of the Mindspark adaptive-learning programme in India, found gains of 0.37 standard deviations in mathematics and 0.23 in language in just four and a half months, with the weakest students improving the most, and at a cost lower than many conventional interventions (Muralidharan, Singh and Ganimian, 2019). Technology that meets each child at their actual learning level can lift outcomes across the board, but it works best with capable, motivated people guiding it.
That is what Pestalozzi alumni bring. Each does more than teach mathematics. They model resilience, structure and high expectation. They carry forward the Leadership Pathway they experienced themselves. They know how to foster belonging in a classroom, they understand that poverty is psychological as well as material, and they bring systems awareness, accountability and problem-solving into daily practice. The technology supplies the personalised content; the alumni supply the belief and the structure that the expectancy and value-added research show are decisive.
If each alumnus working through Edulution reaches even 200 learners a year through direct and supported instruction, the cumulative reach across 40 alumni quickly exceeds 10,000. That is the multiplier effect of leadership depth feeding national breadth.
This is what happens when childhood leadership development meets national education needs. Graduates do not only succeed personally. They strengthen institutions, reinforce learning ecosystems, and extend quality education into rural and resource-constrained environments. Edulution is not an isolated example. It is evidence of how programmes of depth, like Pestalozzi's, can supply systems of breadth with capable, values-driven educators.
The case for both
The breadth challenge is vast, and it deserves the investment it receives. But numbers alone do not make a functioning education system. A system needs people within it who carry resilience, high expectations and a sense of responsibility for others, and those qualities are built through depth, early and over time. Depth without breadth helps too few. Breadth without depth lacks the leaders and the quality to sustain itself. The two are not competitors for the same budget line. They are partners in the same goal.
If we want education systems that not only enrol children but transform their prospects, we should fund the doorway and the people who will hold it open. We need both.
References
UNESCO (2024), Global Report on Teachers: addressing teacher shortages, and the figure of 44 million teachers needed by 2030.
UN News (2024), UN issues global alert over teacher shortage.
Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N. and Rockoff, J. E. (2014), Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood, American Economic Review.
Rosenthal, R. and Jacobson, L. (1968), Pygmalion in the Classroom; teacher expectancy effects, overview and replications.
Pygmalion effects in the classroom: teacher expectancy effects on students' mathematics achievement (replication).
Muralidharan, K., Singh, A. and Ganimian, A. (2019), Disrupting Education? Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India (Mindspark RCT), J-PAL.
USAID (2023), Solving the Problem of Teacher Shortages in Zambia.
Learning Systems Institute (2023), Solving the Problem of Teacher Shortages in Zambia.