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Taleemabad
Field Note • February 2026
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The Forgotten Layer
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Everyone invests in teachers. Almost no one invests in the person responsible for making teachers better.
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50.6%
school heads
overloaded
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3 hrs
→
5 min
admin task
automated
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$1.50
per student
at scale
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Most education interventions focus on teachers and conveniently forget a significant layer in the ecosystem. When evaluating organisations, people look at the CEO and the quality of leadership. But when it comes to schools, the school leader who's responsible for running them is an afterthought.
Taleemabad has been working with school leaders for five years. It is not easy. They are flooded with tasks: teaching, administration, managing parents, attending government meetings, collecting data, coaching teachers, being responsible for teacher performance improvement. All at once.
A survey of 257 school heads across Islamabad confirmed every anecdote. The numbers were worse than expected.
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What 257 School Heads Told Us
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| Facing significant workload burden |
50.6% |
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| Rural heads teaching 3+ periods/day |
35.4% |
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| Urban heads: 4–6 hours on admin daily |
37.1% |
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Their #1 challenge: “Constant data requests.” Not pedagogy. Not student behavior. Paperwork.
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What Happens When Principals Coach
An A/B test by Innovations for Poverty Action in Ghana trained principals for just two days on coaching techniques. The teachers in their schools received the same training as the control group. The only difference was the principal.
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Control
43.5
out of 100
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With Principal Coaching
54.1
+24% improvement
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Teaching quality score (0–100). 40 schools in Cape Coast, Ghana. Two days of training. Two months of coaching. — Innovations for Poverty Action
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What We Built
First, Taleemabad created room. If a principal spends 3 hours compiling attendance, they can't coach teachers. Automated reporting, attendance, and data collection reduced that to 5 minutes.
Then came the intelligence layer: a dashboard where principals see exactly which teachers need support and why. Not from a feeling in the staffroom. From actual data.
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What a principal sees
Principal Dashboard
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Week 40 • Oct 2025
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14
Teachers
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9
Active
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25.6%
LP Ratio
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Teacher Training Status
| 6 Not Started |
7 In Progress |
1 Completed |
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Principals see which teachers are struggling and can act the same day.
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Islamabad
522
active principals + 55 Taleemabad coaches
575 schools • 3,902 teachers
Cost: ~$10/student
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Rawalpindi
204
head teachers + 23 AEOs + DEOs
260 schools • ~1,300 teachers
Cost: ~$4/student
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The Path to Scale
In Islamabad, Taleemabad deployed 55 of its own coaches alongside 3,902 teachers. That cost roughly $10 per student. It worked, and it built the evidence base for what effective coaching looks like.
In Rawalpindi, the system was designed around the government's existing infrastructure: head teachers, AEOs, and DEOs (District Education Officers). People already on the payroll, already in the schools. Same platform. Same dashboards. The cost dropped to ~$4 per student.
In Punjab, Moawin, one of Taleemabad's partners working with adopted government schools, has brought the cost down further to $1.50 per student. That's the trajectory: not adding cost, but reshaping how existing resources are used.
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Adoption
99.6% onboarding rate. 139 mentoring visits in six weeks across 38 schools in Rawalpindi. 14 AEOs conducting 53 monitoring visits. Organic, not forced.
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Baseline
Across 1,701 observations in Rawalpindi, 5.8% of practices rated proficient. Student engagement: 2.5%. Assessment: 5.0%. This is exactly why daily coaching matters.
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One principal influences 10 to 20 teachers. Each teacher reaches 30 to 40 students. With 522 principals in Islamabad, 204 head teachers in Rawalpindi, and 23 AEOs, the system now reaches over 5,200 teachers and more than 130,000 students.
If you're investing in education and not investing in school leaders, you're building on the wrong foundation.
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Know someone investing in school leadership? Forward this.
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Taleemabad enables teachers to teach well so students learn.
www.taleemabad.com
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