Big Ripples from Small Places: The Role Schools Play to Innovate Entire Systems

In an era dominated by innovation and large-scale reform, schools remain one of the most overlooked yet essential units of change in the fight for economic justice and opportunity. During UNGA week, five global education organizations collectively serving 500,000 students in 950 schools spanning 11 countries convened to share their perspectives on the critical role schools play to foster innovation—and the tangible impact they make on both their communities and the wider education system. Below are key takeaways from this important conversation.

School-Based Innovations Drive Systemic Change

High-quality schools are ideal environments to test and refine new ideas that accelerate educational quality in the wider system. Over time, schools in the Christel House International network have developed a five-year College and Careers program to support the network’s high school graduates to achieve upward economic mobility. Participants are provided with career guidance, coaching, assistance with post-secondary enrollment and work-based learning experiences to bridge the gap between high school graduation and early career success. Based on its success, this innovation is now being adopted by four public high schools in Indianapolis. In partnership with Christel House, these schools are learning and applying the program’s methods to strengthen their students’ life outcomes.

Teachers and School Leaders Are the Linchpins

Any education initiative – local, provincial, or national – thrives or falters based on the capacity of school leaders and teachers. Effective school leaders are change agents who understand the initiative’s relevance to their community, invest stakeholders in its benefits, and possess the operational know-how to implement it. High-quality teachers are willing to take risks, learn new skills, and pilot new practices. Collectively, the school-based practitioners’ courage and adaptability are the heartbeat of innovation.

PEAS trains school leaders to deeply understand their school’s data and to create targeted School Improvement Plans (SIPs) focused on areas they can directly influence – without relying on external resources. This includes leading a high-quality CPD cycle for teachers, grounded in the PEAS Top Ten Teaching Practices. This sense of ownership and accountability of the SIP is crucial for driving long-lasting change within each school’s students. In Zambia, empowered leaders and teachers have driven inclusive, data-informed change that’s measurably improved learner outcomes These leaders have become catalysts for innovation, translating insights into action and fostering ownership across their communities.

Community Input Turns Good Ideas into Great Ones

Schools sit at the center of key stakeholder groups: faculty, families, and community members. When their collective wisdom is tapped, ideas are not only championed—they’re transformed into robust, contextually grounded initiatives. Innovation becomes a shared endeavor, rooted in lived experience and local relevance. Equipped with the right data, Rising Academies supports school communities to identify challenges and create community-driven solutions. At a government partnership school in Sierra Leone, regular student attendance was identified as a problem. Linking the attendance challenges with learning data that showed students had not yet mastered the foundations, the school community agreed that children attending school, every day, was a priority. To ensure accountability, the school, parents and wider community decided to create their own community by-laws, with agreed accountability from the local chief, enforced the very next day. SHOFCO achieves this through an active and empowered PTA. Whenever there is a desire to make a big change at the school, PTA members are informed first and then empowered to help cascade down to class parents. SHOFCO plans both retreats and capacity building sessions with PTA members. In the end, while the school is largely driving the policy and implementation, the engagement of the PTA ensures there is both trust and ownership from parents.

Proximity and Trust Enable Deep Collaboration

In contrast to large systems, schools are communities where the same people work in proximity day after day, year after year. In high-quality schools, the consistency builds trust among staff, students, and families. In places like Christel House, where students have an 18-year educational experience, trust becomes the foundation for strong relationships, which in turn creates fertile ground for collaboration, experimentation, and sustained change.

A Call to Invest in the Source

If we are serious about scaling innovation, we must start where innovation lives—in schools. Not as pilot sites or passive recipients, but as active architects of change. Schools hold the relationships, the trust, and the proximity to real-world challenges that make innovation stick.

Investing in the unit of school is not just a gesture of support—it’s a strategic imperative. When we fund schools directly, we accelerate the spread of ideas that work, strengthen the capacity of those closest to students, and unlock the wisdom of communities.

Let us shift the lens: from seeing schools as endpoints of reform to recognizing them as the starting point of transformation.

About The Author

Morty Ballen is the Senior Vice President of Global Academics at Christel House International. With over 20 years in education, he has founded and scaled schools, including Explore Schools in Brooklyn, and served as Program Director at Global Schools Forum. Morty began his career as a teacher and holds a B.A. from Franklin & Marshall College and an M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University.