In Part 1, I told the story of a rural Zambian secondary school, a headmaster's short-lived push for better attendance, and George — the one teacher whose habits never wavered no matter what norm surrounded him. I promised that this second post would turn from story to data. So let's do that.
The 20% Problem
Foundational literacy programs typically concentrate on Grades 1–3, and within those grades, narrowly on reading and mathematics instruction. That's a sensible place to start. But it also means these programs occupy only about 20% of a pupil's school day. The other 80% — every other subject, every other grade, every other lesson — carries on exactly as before.
That's not a rounding error. It's a structural problem for implementation. A new pedagogy introduced into a fifth of the timetable has to survive contact with a school culture where the other four-fifths runs on a completely different, unchanged set of norms.
What the Data Says About Teachers
Research from Northern Nigeria gives us a clearer picture of just how powerful that surrounding culture is. It found that teacher behaviour is shaped overwhelmingly by what happens on the school grounds itself, not by outside intervention.
Of those on-campus interactions, 82% are with other teachers rather than external coaches, and 88% of teachers say they prefer arrangements where advice flows both ways, not top-down from a designated expert. Teachers are already each other's primary source of professional influence. Foundational literacy programs, by focusing their coaching model on a periodic external visitor, are largely building around that reality instead of working with it.
Environments Beat Willpower
This lines up with a broader idea from behavioural science: it's usually easier to change the environment around a behaviour than to change the behaviour directly while the environment stays fixed. Daniel Kahneman has made versions of this argument throughout his work on decision-making — that context shapes choices more reliably than willpower does.
External coaching models are attractive because they're measurable and controllable: a coach visits, checks a box, logs a score. But a periodic visit from outside the school is not an environment. It cannot compete with the daily, ambient pull of "how we do things here" — the norm that, in Part 1, dragged teacher attendance back down to 50% within days of a headmaster's direct instruction.
Toward a Genuine Whole-School Model
If the environment is what actually shapes teacher behaviour, then a foundational literacy program that only touches 20% of the school day is fighting an uphill battle by design. A genuinely whole-school approach would need to engage all grades and subjects, not just the early-grade reading block; encourage teacher collaboration that happens on its own terms, not only through formal training sessions; and help establish new institutional norms around pupil-centred learning that hold up even when no one from outside the school is watching.
None of that necessarily means more money. It means reconceptualising what support looks like — building it around how teachers actually influence each other, rather than around a coaching model that's easy to measure but hard to sustain.
We keep asking "what works?" But per Part 1, that's the wrong question if the answer only ever describes the George Chileyas of the world — the exceptions. The right question is why programs so rarely change the environment for everyone else.