After completing her Post-Doctorate Research Fellowship at Australia’s National Centre for Student Equity, Rachel Outhred moved to education consultancy. In 2011 she led a team to design and implement Zimbabwe’s first Early Grade Learning Assessment and embed it within national systems. Through this work she discovered her passion for using learning outcome data as a lever for education system change.

Rachel is a Principal Consultant and the Head of Education at Itad and brings her 14 years of experience as a consultant to a variety of evaluations, to better understand ‘what works’ (under what conditions) to improve learning outcomes in low and middle-income countries. Rachel’s work measuring learning outcomes includes assessing if children in Lago’s private schools are learning, strengthening examinations and assessment systems in Uganda, monitoring the learning outcomes of hard-to-reach girls in Northern Nigeria, working with donors to understand how best to monitor global progress towards SDG4 and monitoring national progress in Zimbabwe.

Through this work Rachel has learnt much about the importance of producing valid and reliable data to inform the big decisions, the strengths and limitations of popular analytical models to help understand ‘what works’, the challenges of measuring literacy and language in complex linguistic landscapes (forthcoming paper) and the importance of opening up political space to support the use of data in decision-making.