Keith M. Lewin is a British academic who is a professor of International education and Development at the University of SussexProfile on University of Sussex website and Director of the Consortium for Research on Educational Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE).Consortium for Research on Educational Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE) website He is known for his work in educational planning, economics and finance of education, teacher education, assessment, science and technology education policy in developing countries, educational aid and program evaluation. He has been adviser to the World Bank,Secondary Education in Africa Follow-up: Technical Workshop on Science and Mathematics – World Bank reports by Keith Lewin DFID,Compilation of reports produced by Keith Lewin for DfID UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning, UNICEF, UNDP and AusAID.
From 1995 to 2011 he was the Director of the Centre for International Education (CIE), at the University of Sussex, which he developed as an internationally recognised centre for research on education and development in low income countries. Lewin was the founding director of the master's degree program in International Education and Development at the University of Sussex. He has been grant holder for over £4.5 million worth of research and development project. Lewin is an honorary professor at Hangzhou University and Beijing Normal University. He is the author of numerous books, journal articles and reports on education and development.
Early life and education Lewin was born in Kent in the United Kingdom. He attended school in Kent and South London. From 1968 to 1971 he read physics at Manchester University where he graduated with a first class honours degree. He then went on to complete a Masters in Innovation and Science Policy jointly taught with Manchester Business School and wrote a thesis on the scientific research organisations that were supported by British aid. He then moved to the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex as one of its first graduate students. He joined a large multi-country project on education and development across six countries focusing on the "Diploma Disease" and the interface between education systems and labour markets. His thesis explored science education in Malaysia and Sri Lanka and the impact of externally supported innovations to improve access, quality and outcomes linked to development. In 1973/74 he took time out from his Doctorate to work with Voluntary Service Overseas teaching physics and maths in Kelantan, Malaysia. In 1977 he was appointed to a tenured post at the University of Sussex. He was appointed Reader in 1986 and Professor in 1995 when he became Director of the Centre for International Education. He is a chartered physicist and an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Career Lewin has worked in South East Asia with a focus on Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and India. In Malaysia he was a visiting lecturer at University Malaya whilst completing his doctorate working with colleagues in the Pusat Perkembangan Kurrikulum (PPK). Subsequently, he co-authored a report on science education in Malaysia published by the Malaysian Ministry of Education and the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning. In Sri Lanka, Lewin worked with the national curriculum centre and was then an advisor for the establishment of the National Institute of Education (NIE) for UNDP. He also contributed to the development of the Sri Pada College of Education for UNDP. In India, Lewin has worked with the National University of Educational Planning (NUEPA) on a large-scale programme of research on access and equity using household surveys and child tracking to understand more about why more than half the children in North Indian states fail to reach secondary school. CREATE, a research consortium that Lewin helped develop, has designed and developed a programme of empirical research involving large-scale household surveys and village-level school-based data collection. Lewin has worked with teams from Bihar, Tamil Nadu, and Madhya Pradesh and with the Ministry of Human Resource Development and NUEPA to develop state level framework plans for Rastriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA).
Lewin established the first educational link programs in China with a UK university in the early 1980s after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the fall of the "Gang of Four". Hangzhou University in Zhejiang provided a centre for UK-China education links under the leadership of Wang Chengxu. The first phase of work centred around evaluating the impact of the 1986 Basic Education Law. This anticipated the global commitments made at the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) in Jomtien to universalise access to primary schooling, and followed from China's "Four Modernizations" drive to develop. A similar exchange was established with Beijing Normal University and Wang Yingjie. This led to a UNICEF supported program to research educational reform in three different districts – one rich, one poor, and one with a national minority population.Implementing basic education in China: progress and prospects in rich, poor and national minority areas, Keith M. Lewin and Wang Jing Yie, International Institute for Educational Planning, 1994. This was consolidated into a book published by the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning. The study was replicated in 2009–2011 after twenty years of development had transformed many parts of urban and rural China. The new study show dramatic changes in all the case study areas and draws attention to changing patterns of horizontal and vertical equity and to large scale demographic changes related to internal migration.Education and Change in Rich, Poor and National Minority Areas in China: Two Decades of Transition, Keith M Lewin, Wang Lu, CREATE PATHWAYS TO ACCESS Research Monograph No. 61, April 2011 Lewin was made an Honorary professor at Hangzhou University (now Zheijiang University) in 1993 and at Beijing Normal University in 1994.
Lewin has worked in Sub-Saharan Africa. For ten years he worked with Ude Bude and colleagues on a network to support development for environmental science and agriculture programs across fourteen Sub Saharan African countries. Lewin was also Special Advisor to the Minister of Education in Mauritius on financing and the implementation of the Education Masterplan, supported by UNDP. Lewin started working in post apartheid South Africa in 1994. Lewin developed a link program with the University of Durban-Westville (UDW) and was instrumental in locating the Rockefeller Foundation funded African Children's Literacy in Science and Technology programme at UDW. He subsequently developed a close partnership with the University of the Witwatersrand to undertake research on access and equity in Gauteng and Eastern Cape. He was also the director of the Mpumalanga Primary School Initiative (MPSI).
Lewin developed and co-directed the Multisite Teacher Education Research Project (MUSTER) with Janet Stuart. This was the largest DFID funded education research project in the 1990s. It undertook empirical work in South Africa, Lesotho, Malawi, Ghana, and Trinidad and Tobago in initial teacher education and newly qualified teachers.
In 2001 Lewin was invited to be a senior consultant to the Government of Uganda and DFID to develop the national framework for Post Primary Education and Training (PPET). Subsequently, he was also senior consultant to the Government of Tanzania and the World Bank on finance for the Secondary Education Development Programme (World Bank) and for Planning Nine Year Basic Education in Rwanda,MAPPING WAYS FORWARD: PLANNING FOR 9-YEAR BASIC EDUCATION IN RWANDA – report produced by Keith M Lewin and Albert Kwame Akyeampong, March 2005 funded by DFID and the CfBT Education Trust.
His work in Ghana includes planning and financing teacher education and the extensive program of research of CREATE. In Malawi he has worked closely with the Centre for Educational Research and Training (CERT) in Zomba on secondary school financing and non-state schooling.
Bilateral and multilateral organisations After presenting to the Bellagio Group of development partners in Mt St Marie, Quebec in 1981 he became increasingly involved in educational planning working closely with the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) in Paris where he developed approaches to planning in financial austerity and to planning science education. The latter developed over time and led to seminars on the development of science education at the World Bank and a book.Lewin, K. M., Education in Austerity; Options for Planners. Fundamentals of Educational Planning Series, International Institute for Educational Planning, 1987 Lewin's interests in financing led to an invitation from UNICEF to co-convene the Round table on "Educating all the Children: The Financial Challenge for the 1990s" at the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) at Jomtien, Thailand in 1990World Conference on Education for All: Meeting Basic Learning Needs, WCEFA, 5–9 March 1990, Jomtien, Thailand, pp. 75 and to the first estimates of the costs of Education for All and the reforms needed to create affordable systems. Downstream this resulted in a flow of activities related to addressing problems of sustainable financing for the expanded access to secondary schooling critical for development dependent on more knowledge intensive production and competitive service sector industries. This was the subject of a Round Table at the World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000 hosted by IIEP. Lewin's work on secondary school financing and development was presented in plenary to the Commonwealth Education Minister's Conference (CCEM 16) in Cape Town and to the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) biennial meeting in Maputo. In the recent past UNICEF's program to undertake research on out of school children has drawn on models of educational exclusion developed by Lewin for CREATE. These models have also been used by DFID in its 2010 Strategy paper, and by AusAID in its 2011 Thematic Strategy for Education. They were recently presented in the opening plenary of the ninth meeting of the Forum of Education Minister's (FEdMM) in Vanuatu. Lewin gave the plenary address to the Commonwealth Minister's meeting in Mauritius in 2012 on the post 2015 development agenda for education. As a result, a Ministerial Committee was established with Lewin as technical advisor. The resulting matrix of goals, targets and indicators was published in January 2013.
Research