An independent evaluation of Morocco’s Pioneer Schools program has found it continues to produce learning gains of ‘exceptional magnitude,’ even as it is rolled out at national scale. The assessment, by the Morocco Innovation and Evaluation Lab (MEL), a collaboration between Mohammed VI Polytechnic University and MIT’s J-PAL, covered roughly 36,000 students across 483 schools, comparing learning progress between Pioneer Schools and comparable schools that had not yet adopted the program.
After one year of participation, students in Pioneer Schools made progress equivalent to nearly three ordinary years of learning. The evaluation detected an average effect of 0.6 standard deviations across all cohorts and subjects — equivalent to moving the average beneficiary from roughly the 50th percentile to close to the 72nd. The MEL noted the indicator measures progress attributable to the program relative to a counterfactual, not students’ absolute performance level.
Effects varied by subject: after one year, gains reached 0.76 standard deviations in French, against 0.63 in mathematics and 0.38 in Arabic, and extended across student profiles, with an effect of 0.59 for struggling students and 0.50 for higher performers. A separate evaluation of students now in Pioneer middle schools found those who had previously attended a Pioneer primary school showed larger gains — 0.76, against 0.52 for other students.
The study also assessed the impact of scaling the program nationally. For the first cohort, which entered in 2023-2024, the impact remains significant over time, though smaller than in the first year; researchers describe the effects as still ‘very high.’ They attribute the decline partly to the scale-up, with roughly 2,000 additional schools added each year, and note third-year results suggest the impact has now stabilized.
Researchers noted the first schools had been selected partly for their capacity to implement the reform, making later cohorts more diverse, and cited added challenges of organization and capacity-building inherent to rapid scale-up. They conclude that continuity of the reform matters for new practices to spread, and that combining methods such as Teaching at the Right Level and structured pedagogy appears to have created favorable conditions for improving foundational learning.
