Scaling inclusive teacher professional development: Evidence from Kenya’s literacy training model

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Inclusive Education for Belonging: Equity, Identity, and Innovation

Proposal

Teacher professional development (TPD) programs implemented at scale often struggle to balance three critical elements: reach, quality, and inclusion. While many countries have piloted training models that achieve one or two of these goals, few have sustained all three simultaneously. Kenya’s national literacy initiatives, Tusome (Let’s Read) and the Kenya Primary Literacy Program (KPLP), provide an important case study of how structured training, ongoing mentorship, and digital reinforcement can enable inclusive teacher professional development at scale.

This roundtable paper draws on program evidence from KPLP (2023-2024), which trained more than 71,000 teachers and 22,000 head teachers and deputies, reaching over 3 million learners across Kenya. The cascade-plus design was anchored in structured teacher manuals and targeted training content drawn directly from Teachers’ Guides and Learner Workbooks, ensuring immediate classroom applicability. The training was reinforced through classroom coaching, digital dashboards, and peer learning networks, which helped to minimize the dilution of quality often associated with large-scale cascades.

A central innovation of KPLP was that inclusion was not treated as an add-on but designed from the outset. Training manuals included adaptations for learners with hearing and visual impairments, and interpreters supported sessions to ensure accessibility for teachers with disabilities. This integration helped shift teacher confidence in addressing diverse classroom needs, moving disability inclusion from the margins into the mainstream of professional development.

Findings from implementation highlight three critical insights. First, scale does not have to mean dilution; structured content and digital reinforcement allowed for consistent delivery of quality training nationwide. Second, inclusion by design is both feasible and impactful, as demonstrated by adapted manuals and targeted disability strategies. Third, teachers themselves acted as multipliers; champion teachers and professional learning communities spread practices more effectively than top-down directives. Together, these insights underscore the importance of institutionalizing inclusive TPD into national systems, rather than treating it as a project-based intervention.

The Kenyan case offers broader relevance for international audiences. As education systems globally seek to address equity gaps while responding to large-scale learning crises, this experience demonstrates that inclusion and quality can be mainstreamed at scale when grounded in curriculum-linked training content, reinforced through mentorship, and supported by digital tools. The roundtable format will allow for reflection on comparative experiences across contexts, and for dialogue on how to reimagine teacher education to sustain both literacy gains and disability inclusion in national systems.

Author

• Leah Wanjiru Nguata, Zizi Afrique Foundation