17 august 2026

Evaluating the Results of the Glittery Schools Project, 2025–2026

The long-term vision of the programme is for all children in Romania to develop strong reading and writing skills by the end of fourth grade, laying the foundations for educational success and lifelong learning.

In many rural schools across Romania, challenges related to learning to read and write make students’ educational journeys more difficult.

To address this need, Glittery Schools directly tackles the risk of functional illiteracy by giving children the tools they need to understand information and develop critical thinking skills.

At the end of this project year, together with our strategic funder, Pepco, we wanted to see how close we were to achieving this vision. So we turned the usual end-of-year assessment into a results report containing individual data for every child in the programme.

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Each child is assessed by their own teacher at the beginning and at the end of the school year, while their progress is tracked from the preparatory grade through to the end of primary school.

This year, that meant 4,177 children, assessed by approximately 225 primary school teachers, across five cohorts, from the preparatory grade to Grade 4.

It is substantial work, requiring several hours from each teacher, but in return it gives us something that no aggregated indicator at school or county level could ever provide: we can see exactly which children are falling behind and what changes for those who start from the lowest level.

Key Results of the School Year

Three findings from this year’s data stand out as the most relevant indicators of the programme’s impact:

• ●Remarkable progress in the preparatory grade: Children in the preparatory grade improved by an average of 73 points on a 150-point scale, moving from a limited set of emerging literacy skills to a solid foundation for decoding in just one school year.
• ●Consolidated performance in 1’st Grade: In 1’st Grade, the year when children truly begin to read texts rather than simply recognise individual words, 69% of students were reading at the expected level by June.
• ●Meaningful progress for vulnerable children: Perhaps the most important result, and the one that tells us most clearly where we need to go next, concerns the children who start furthest behind. They make the greatest progress of any group in the programme, something that is clearly visible in the data. However, one year is not enough for them to fully catch up with their peers. This recovery is real and can be seen across every cohort. However, the gap does not close on its own within a single year. This means we need to consider additional support designed specifically for these children.

Teachers’ Confidence in the Programme

Ultimately, the programme comes to life through the teachers who make it possible every day. Their confidence in Glittery Schools has grown steadily over the past three years:

The end of a project year is not a final destination. Rather, it is the moment when everything we have gathered throughout the year begins to make sense and can be transformed into decisions.

The findings in this report show us where the programme works best: in the preparatory grade, where we are able to intervene at the earliest stage.

At the same time, they compel us to think seriously about the support offered to children who start from the lowest level, so that their learning gap does not become permanent. All of these findings feed directly into our planning for the next school year.