A corporate funder with one education budget and two proposals in front of her is making a comparison that almost nobody sets down in full, because the people making the case tend to sell one side of it. I run a teacher development company, so my interest is obvious; I would still rather set the comparison out, including the part where my side loses.
The case for reaching teachers
By our estimate, one teacher reaches around 1 155 learners over a 35-year career. Funding that teacher's development improves what every one of those learners receives, and the improvement carries on after the funding year ends. No learner-facing programme has that shape; a bursary reaches its recipient, and a workbook reaches the class it lands in.
The multiplier is an estimate, and it assumes a full career. Many teachers leave sooner; I state that assumption whenever the figure appears.
The case for reaching learners, which is stronger than my sector likes to admit
Three things belong here.
A learner-facing programme produces evidence a funder can verify. A bursary yields a named graduate with a qualification; a feeding scheme yields attendance data. Teacher development yields a change in classroom practice that is hard to observe and expensive to measure, and my sector, mine included, has been slow to solve that.
Some needs cannot wait for a multiplier. A child without a meal, a textbook or a working classroom has a problem that improved teaching doesn't solve this year, and the learners in that building now don't get a second Grade 3.
Teacher development also depends on conditions the funder doesn't control. A teacher carrying a larger class every year, in a system where the national learner-to-educator ratio in public ordinary schools rose from 27.4 in 2012 to 29.8 in 2021, is being asked to apply new practice under pressure that has grown across her whole career.
Where I think the comparison lands
The two are not competitors, whatever funding cycles make them look like. A learner programme fixes a present shortage; teacher development changes the standard of what happens in that room for years. A portfolio holding one and not the other has a gap in it, and most South African education CSI portfolios hold the first.
If I were the one allocating, I would ask which of the two the school in front of me is missing, then fund that. The honest version of my pitch isn't that teacher development beats learner programmes; it's that it receives around 10% of education CSI spend, which strikes me as smaller than its reach justifies.
