The figure I return to most often is 1 155. One teacher reaches an estimated 1 155 learners over a 35-year career. I use it in almost every funder conversation, and I have come to notice that it does two jobs at once.
The first job is the obvious one. A corporate deciding where education spend goes has a choice between reaching learners and reaching the people who teach them. Money that reaches a learner reaches a learner. Money that reaches a teacher reaches every class she will stand in front of for the rest of her working life. That is the whole case for teacher development, and it is the reason kolab. exists in the shape it does.
The second job is less comfortable, and I think it matters more.
A multiplier applies to whatever is already in the room. If nobody has put something new in front of a teacher for years, the multiplier carries that forward too, class after class, for decades. The same number that makes teacher development attractive to a funder raises the standard for what we hand a teacher once the funding lands.
I think about this when I read our own feedback. We asked teachers in our Hammarsdale pilot how they set spelling tests before they watched one of our modules. The answer came back as one shape, repeated. Nobody in that room lacked skill or lacked care. They received one tool early in their careers and they made it work, which is what South African teachers do with almost everything they are given.
A word on the number itself. 1 155 is an estimate, and it assumes a full 35-year career in the classroom; many teachers leave sooner, and some move out of teaching altogether. I state it as an estimate every time it appears, because a funder who checks deserves to find the assumption sitting in the open rather than buried. The argument survives the caveat. A teacher still reaches more learners than any programme that goes to learners alone.
The number asks something specific of us. If one teacher carries that many learners across a career, then what we put in front of her has to be worth repeating for that long. We build against that standard, and we publish what teachers tell us when we fall short of it.
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