Re Education : Issue #30 - The Velcro Approach to Scaling in Education [Full Article]
Combining Strengths for Effective Scaling
In Conversation with Brad Olsen….
This is the full text of my conversation with Brad Olsen of the Brookings Institution. See Issue #30 for the introduction.
Andy Brock
The Historical Context
Andy
Let’s kick off with a bit of history. I’m interested in the history of the development of education systems – how they “scaled”. If you could go back to, say, the history of education in Scotland, how did that go from being a handful of schools in the 15th Century to a school in every parish within 100 years? What were the processes and drivers that enabled that? So, let’s talk a bit about how you see the history of education development in those broad terms.
Brad
Sure, that’s a good place to start. I feel like there are four histories that come together when you think about contemporary scaling.
For the first history—education as a formal practice—we go all the way back to China 1,000 years ago. Before that, education was a process of generations informally passing down their knowledge, skills and culture. So, education became formalised in China and in other countries, but it took another significant change near the end of the 19th century with the emergence of scientific efficiency, industrialization, and what’s now called the factory model of schooling.
That’s one’s history. I think a second history is when people began to think of education as a system. That started, arguably, in the 20th century. First in the early 1800s and then again in the 1950s two kinds of systems thinkers emerged : those who thought about systems in terms of mechanical processes and those who thought about systems in terms of biological processes, two schools of thought if you will. Sadi Carnot described the steam engine as a system of interdependent parts in 1824 and Biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy outlined in 1950 a theory of systems: think of the human immune system or a social group.
Then, I think there’s a third history to consider – which comes from the private sector. The private sector has been strategising about what it means to penetrate a new marketplace with a product for quite a while – in fact that’s where the term scaling first originated.
Some people think that it’s solely about technology, but it’s not. It started with how do you get a new product, say a toothpaste, into the marketplace? And we can learn a fair amount from the private sector history of scaling, but there are also limits because scaling a product in a marketplace is so incredibly different from what it means to scale a public sector program.
The fourth history is when we get to scaling. In the private sector, scaling is about bringing a product to market and getting everyone to use or want it. But it’s in the public or social sector that most of education scaling is located. I’m simplifying a lot here, but I think that it really started in the 1960s when a widespread belief began to take hold that government wasn’t really capable of improving social life all by itself. People began asking who else - NGOs, social institutions, community groups - who else could work to improve education, whether as a system or as a set of institutions?
I believe that’s when the modern conception of scaling first began, but for several decades scaling was understood as short-term project implementation. And in fact, I think that we still suffer from a short-term project mentality when we talk about scaling—thinking there are discrete projects that can be carefully and successfully dropped into a system and will automatically stick.
This logic holds that scaling is a technical process and implementation is relatively simple and straightforward. If the education reform or innovation model is good, it’s going to take hold. In the United States, that flawed view of improving education started in the 1960s with the post-Sputnik math and science curricular reforms. And it was a disaster.
Electrifying Failure
As a result, in the 70s and 80s, a group of researchers including Milbrey McLaughlin, Paul Berman, and Seymour Sarason asked, how can a well-meaning implementation attempt with a high-quality innovation fail so badly? Along with Michael Fullan and Alan Pomfret, they were the first to propose that implementation itself is a science—an area of study of its own. They pointed out that if you’re not taking into account the culture of the place and the systematic components of the context—in this case the schools and surrounding policy environment, the place will reject the new innovation the way a body sometimes rejects an organ transplant
And so I think in some ways that created at least the beginning of focusing on how a great innovation needs to be actually developed for scaling, and how it needs to be scaled carefully. John List’s thoughtful book called The Voltage Effect comes to mind. He says not only was the era of short-term project-minded implementation something that often failed, and therefore sacrificed opportunities for potentially good systems change, but it also turned decision-makers cynical and untrusting of program developers, because they had spent their reputational capital supporting innovations that did not take hold at scale.
So, all four histories when combined lead us to this notion that the idea of introducing or embedding a new program, an idea, a practice, or initiative in education for sustained use is not simple. It’s complex. And complex is very different from complicated. It requires political buy-in. It requires multi-stakeholder coalitions that are durable but flexible. It requires a sort of cultural and socio-political component. It often requires a decade or more.
There needs to be capacity. There needs to be thoughtful, multipartite engagement in what it means to prepare the new practice or innovation, prepare the place, and then make sure that the two sides come together in productive ways so that there’s sustained impact—and that it doesn’t fall apart as soon as the funding ends or get washed out by the larger system.
The Velcro Partnership
Andy
Let me pick up a couple of points there, zoning down onto the development sector and education development in particular.
I think you’re absolutely right about people seeing scaling as being about projects, but, there’s there seems to be a dilemma - that is that aid agencies want to fund things that are durable and sustainable, and I think that desire has morphed into seeing scaling as the equivalent of sustainability.
I like the distinction you made in your recent paper between scaling and systems transformation. I think these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, confusing the whole discussion about what’s being attempted.
But, if one accepts all the things you’ve just said about how complex it is to actually scale something within an education system, aren’t you really saying that it can’t be done by outsiders ? Outsiders are not there long enough, their funding isn’t there long enough, they aren’t there long enough, and so on.
And yet, many of the systems we’re discussing are actually relatively dysfunctional. That’s why donors and philanthropies are there supporting. So, can you actually scale change if the driver is from outside of the system ?
Brad
Yes, I think you can. I mean, I don’t believe that there is no role for outsiders. And the metaphor that I like to use here is Velcro (hook and loop fasteners often in clothing). A trusting partnership, you know, is like Velcro: one side of the piece of Velcro is useless without the other side. And even if you have both sides, they don’t do their job until they’re hooked together. But when they are, it’s working as it’s supposed to.
So, I absolutely think there’s a value for outside actors, organizations, agencies. I think that when you talk about aid agencies, you have to remember that they themselves are beholden to incentives, boards, and funders. And those incentive systems often privilege quick wins, short-term thinking—i.e. what can we get out of it? Sometimes funding groups themselves have in-built limitations. Even with the best ones (for example I think GPE is working hard to get it right), it’s hard to do, no matter how good your intentions are. Funding and donor organizations are big, slow systems with lots of moving parts, and they have to answer to others.
And yes, the weaker, less functional LMIC governments may be more likely to say yes to any innovation or effort that has money attached to it, so they may end up approving projects that don’t fit the needs of their location, which is completely understandable.
But, if you’ve got a relatively strong, relatively coherent, functional government that can work as an equal partner with aid agencies, then I think you’ve got the potential for that healthy Velcro partnership. Those governments are close to the people; they’ve got a commitment to secure local ownership of reforms and hopefully the capacity to do so; they’ve got an understanding of the local contours. Those are all incredibly important ingredients for success.
Case Study : The Lively Minds Scaling Experience – a Change of Mind
Despite successfully supporting the Government of Ghana to integrate and scale a parenting programme into its pre-primary system, Lively Minds have taken the courageous step of re-thinking their scale approach as they begin work in Ethiopia and the Gambia – why ? (read more)
The actors and levels inside a country have weaknesses and blind spots, think equity considerations for example. The external actors and groups have different weaknesses and blind spots too, think development fads for example. So, each side’s got some strengths and weaknesses and that’s why I really love this idea of creating a kind of healthy partnership—that’s the Velcro. I definitely think it’s viable.
Scaling and Systems - Marriage or Serial Monogamy ?
Andy
I like your Velcro metaphor. But, let me press you on the time issue. We’ve both been involved for decades in discussions about the short political cycles that drives most aid agency funding. But, it seems to me that this short-termism becomes even more acute when you start talking about scaling (and connecting that with systems strengthening in general), because we know that the changes needed are often generational, or may take several decades to show observable and measurable results. And even an agency like GPE is still subject to the vicissitudes of funding like everybody else at the moment.
So, the question is, should donors actually be promoting scaling with their limited funds ? Should they be talking about system change, about significant scaling, if the reality is that the only way to be successful in this Velcro partnership is for the external partner to be there, and to be committed, for a long period of time.
In another paper you use the metaphor of a marriage – that it’s for life. In other words, we’re not getting divorced in two years’ time just because my parent has changed their mind. But, sometimes that’s actually what’s happening.
Brad
OK, I’m going to play with that metaphor. When I talked about marriage, I was talking about scaling and systems change. But, you’re asking about the relationship between the donor agencies and the locations ; that’s a bit different.
That relationship might be better seen as serial monogamy, and I’ll tell you why. It might not be the same aid agency that sticks with the country over 25 years. And so, I’m not trying to be glib here, but let’s play with the metaphor. What if you had six six-year relationships with six different aid agencies for a total of 36 years of committed support? Then you’ve got the potential for system change.
But glibness aside, I really do think that countries and decision makers and groups that have ideas about systems change need to find multiple kinds of flexible funding that last for the several years of a scaling journey, but that are interlocking.
We need to think about scaling in four phases. First, there’s developing, refining, and proving the innovation, in other words proof of concept, and that tends to be relatively easily funded – getting five years of funding to show that an innovation is viable.
But then the next phase is the question of - is it scalable and how can scaling capacity be built ? Though I’m pretending it’s sequenced, it shouldn’t really come after the proof of concept, but should be in place during the course of the proof of concept, but it’s too often separate. This part of the work is where we need to ask : the innovation might be a great thing, but can it be scaled? What does it take for it to scale? So, that’s your second phase.
And then you’ve got a third phase: building capacity on the ground, adopt your a scaling pathway, create a scaling strategy, prepare the locations for scaling, make sure there’s significant capacity in all of these different locations, make sure that there are stakeholder supports inside and outside government, collect and use data along the way. That’s what we might call the middle phase. That’s really hard to fund.
So maybe that six or eight-year period has a different set of funders that help one through that. I’ve heard it called the Valley of Death. I hate that phrase because it’s fatalistic, but I get the point that that it’s a difficult, arid desert that scalers must walk through.
And finally there’s the fourth phase, which is how do we engage in the change management and sustainability so that the innovation, now tentatively in place, lasts the test of time? And that, again, is not quite as difficult to fund as the middle phase because the effort is proven now. It’s got a lot of success and attention.
And so I’ve proposed four different phases: proof of concept, scalability, the valley of death, and sustained use. Maybe each of those needs a different aid agency to commit for five or six years, and then you got 4 * 6, that’s twenty-four years of funding. It’s not as easy as that, it’s really hard to do in reality. But you get the point.
With respect to the funding aspect of your question my answer would be : Yes, more. Yes, but. And Yes, and. Let me explain :
Yes, more : scaling actually matters more now, because we can’t waste those limited funds that exist. We need to and follow the evidence about what works in scaling and draw on successful scaling principles and practices. Chasing after non-scalable innovations or trying to scale reach but not impact, or working to scale without really knowing how it works... those are wastes of resources and social capital and should be avoided
Yes, but : scaling needs to be integrated with systems change to make a lasting difference. This is how to defend scaling currently. It’s not enough that an innovation works and scaled- does it change the system so the system—schools or a teacher network or a governance level—produces better outcomes year after year?
Yes, and : developing, piloting, and scaling the right low-cost or no-cost innovations might be a most promising direction right now because they cost less, do not always need government approval, are often home-grown so typically have equity considerations and local ownership built in. And additionally, they can work to increase innovative thinking, a scaling mindset, and reform ownership at local levels through practice and repetition.
Scaling - A Clash of Agendas
Andy
That’s clearly set out, but one difficulty is that donors have their own agendas. They always want to have something a bit different, even to the point of getting competitive. Maybe that will dissipate a little with the reduction in funding.
But, you’ve also got this element where donors feel they need to make a mark. Like a new boss coming in, and things are going fine, but they feel they need to shake things up to establish themselves. You see that with donors too. They look at an initiative and say we can’t just do what they did before, no matter how successful it is. We’ve got to do something different.
Brad
Yes, that’s true and, personally, I struggle with this. Joni Mitchell has a great line in one of her songs where she sings love has two faces, hope and despair. I think that my view of the global educational development architecture has two faces: hope and despair. So, what you’re saying is true. I don’t know how we get out of it.
And yet, I have conversations with people who work in these development or funding organizations and they too are struggling with this. I don’t know how to get through it, but I think we have to keep talking about it and be honest about it.
I’ve also noticed that there’s a difference between these conversations I have where sometimes people are faking their way through the conversation, toeing the party line, talking from the perspective of the aid agency. It doesn’t ring true to me. But then I have other conversations with folks who are very genuine about it. They’re like, ‘look, we know this is a problem and we’re trying to remedy it in this way.’ ‘We’re accepting that we’re part of the problem as well as part of the solution.’ I hope that the wise people are continuing to work through it. They’re smarter than I am and I hope they get it right—and soon.
Scaling Impact not Innovation
Andy
I think we have similar views on that. But, let me come back to another thing you said when you were talking about the phases of scaling – about planning for scaling right at the very beginning, before you have actually proved that your concept is workable and doable.
So, I would tend to agree with that, but I can also see where people are coming from who say, well, how can you do that if you haven’t actually proved that something works ?
So, maybe the question is the opposite of the one I asked before : should aid agencies be saying almost everything that they do should be scalable?
For example, if you assume from the outset that an intervention will work and can scale, you start planning in that way. So, your thinking is not “can I service 200 schools”, but “how do I get my service from 200 to 2,000?” That means designing the prototype service or material now so that what works at small scale can be reproduced easily, cheaply, and reliably by others at much larger scale.
I think it’s rare to see that kind of discussion in education, in the kind of areas that we’re talking about. Do you think that’s what agencies should be thinking about when they’re funding education in developing countries ?
Brad
Yes, I do think they should be thinking about that. And we, at Millions Learning, have about 10 principles of scaling that we will say whenever we have the chance. And number one is plan for scaling from the beginning. I must say at this point that quite a lot of what I have learned recently about scaling impact in education comes from the Research on Scaling in Education (ROSIE) project we in Millions Learning lead. ROSIE is part of the Knowledge and Innovation Exchange—or KIX—and KIX is a fantastic multi-year multinational education initiative supported by the Global Partnership for Education and the International Development Research Centre. It’s thanks to them and this work that I have been able to learn so much over the last five years.
My colleague Larry Cooley is really wise about all this. He says, when you’re thinking about scaling, don’t think about restaurants, because a really good chef can make maybe one or two really successful restaurants. Not a hundred. Larry says public sector programs don’t work that way. They don’t succeed if there’s only one or two of them. Scaling them is required due to the scope, severity, and depth of the educational dilemmas around the world. They must, if they’re good programs, find a way to impact more people so that they can expand and deepen the quality of people’s lives across whole swaths and so they can change systems. So, I believe it doesn’t make sense to spend too much time or money developing a thing that cannot be scaled.
Now, should aid agencies be thinking about that? Yes. I would not want to spend a ton of money thinking about how to scale a digital learning device in Guatemala before I’ve thought through whether in fact it can be implemented in three quarters of the country and in places without stable electricity, let alone internet. And whether the hardware can be maintained—especially in humid climates or where rodents might eat the rubber casings of the cable, whether the software is going to be updated regularly, whether people will really learn to use it, whether it’s only going to be the wealthier families that have access to the digital learning.
So, sure, I do think that it’s important that we always think about the scalability question, and just I want to get something else in, which is sometimes people mistakenly talk about scaling as increasing the reach or the size of a thing.
But, it’s not about growing the innovation itself ; it’s about scaling the impact of the innovation.
And that’s a subtle distinction, but an important one. The innovation or the program or the initiative is just the means to an end. The end, the goal is the impact that the innovation can offer. Improved early-grades literacy in Sri Lanka, better tertiary school access for girls in West Africa. Teachers supported to develop the kind of agency to enact their professional judgment in a classroom. It’s not the innovation, that’s what gets you there, but the impact. A lot of people, when they talk about scaling, are talking about scaling the innovation. I’m interested in scaling the impact of the innovation.
Andy
But, it is a distinction though, isn’t it? Because if your impact is from a small number to a much larger number, then the innovation and its ability to expand in that way is also a critical part of that equation, isn’t it?
Brad
Absolutely. Absolutely. But it also raises things like optimal scale—something that Rob McLean talks about regularly.
Sometimes a particular initiative in a particular location for a particular purpose has a ceiling to it. Essentially, you are losing impact as your marginal increase sees diminishing or flattening returns. The economy of scale might turn negative.
For example, when innovations are relatively small or when they’re being piloted, there are all kinds of potential biases. There’s more attention paid to it, there are more resources given to the innovation. Many times the participants opt in, they’re volunteering so you might have a group of teachers incredibly focused on girls’ education because that priority brought them into the pilot. And so, at a small scale, they’re committed, maybe they work harder they typically do. This can artificially inflate the results and therefore the proof of concept.
The aid agencies might say, you know, this is absolutely scalable and will bring the same level of success and maybe it will, up to a point. But, maybe the funders or operations teams haven’t thought about what happens as you move to new unfamiliar locations where teachers are not already interested in the topic but are now required to participate, or they’re suffering from reform fatigue because they have to learn a new program every other year. You’ve got effects and variables that don’t show up at small scale that happen at large scale. And so the question should never solely be, how well are we growing the thing? It would be, are we still getting sufficient impact as it scales? And if we’re not collecting data and we’re not looking at that question, we might get to a point where the scale has got bigger than the impact is useful.
Scaling as Franchising
Andy
Yes, exactly. And that may be a qualitative dimension of the innovation that needs to be seen not just the quantitative impact. If Larry Cooley says that scaling is not about single restaurants, it’s also not about McDonald’s then, is it ?
Brad
It could be. There are multiple ways to scale and one of them is to franchise your innovation. Maybe Teaching at the Right Level (TARL) is an example of this. I want to be careful and a I don’t want to get it wrong or offend anybody, but TaRL is a promising methodology. It originated in India about 20 years ago. It’s now showing up in many places—Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America. Groups will work to take the TaRL model with permission, sometimes rename it, adapt and scale it in new locations. They still must adhere to fidelity to the TaRL model, but TaRL is essentially being franchised.
To go with the McDonalds analogy, they still have to talk to the Ray Kroc headquarters regularly and it has to have the golden arches and other definable features, but different groups can adopt, adapt, and scale it. To me, that sounds like successful scaling by way of franchising.
Andy
Besides the scaling and system change differentiation, and the Velcro model that we’ve talked about, I’m interested in where you think there are good examples of system level scaling, maybe like the example you’ve just given of TaRL. Are there examples where you actually see something really scale, not just in one district, not just in one set of schools. What good examples do you think there are of system level scaling ?
Brad
First, I want to say that small innovations can be very impactful: the right small innovations pressed into the right system levers in the right ways can absolutely catalyze systems change. It doesn’t have to be a giant macro innovation or comprehensive initiative - I’ll get to those in a second.
I think that there’s some real value in thoughtful micro innovations. And as an example, Larry Cuban wrote about the fact that in the beginning of the 20th century in the United States, someone decided to unbolt the classroom desks from the floor. And that revolutionized pedagogy—suddenly students could look at and talk to each other; the teacher could organize students for learning in flexible ways.
Scaling as Autocatalysis
Andy
So, pause on that, because that’s a good example to interrogate. How did that move from the first school that decided to do it, or the first district that decided to do it, to everybody deciding to do it? Was that an osmotic process or was it a deliberative process where somebody said, hey, great idea, now everybody else should be doing this.
So there’s also a bit here about “nudgeonomics”, where one little tweak over here has a kind of ripple effect. You actually don’t have to do anything other than do the small tweak because the system, specific individuals or groups of people, will make it happen. So, does this Larry Cuban example fall into that category ? Is it an example of a kind of “natural” scaling ?
Brad
I think it is, with a caveat that I’ll say in a second. We might call that organic diffusion. But, you know, when I think about systems change, I feel required to think about complexity theory. I think complexity theory is the best way to understand systems change.
And there’s a concept in complexity theory called autocatalysis, which I think you’ve essentially just described, which is that a system is made-up of all of these interdependent parts. The parts are dynamically interacting with each other. The stuff—or energy— of the system is actually not the parts themselves, but the active relationship between or among the parts.
And here’s the autocatalysis part. Autocatalysis is basically self-catalyzing, right? And so, if you change one part in a complex adaptive system, it will by definition change other parts, which then change other parts that ultimately loop back to change even the part that initially set the change in motion.
But, here’s my caveat, I don’t know the specifics of Larry Cuban’s example. I’d have to look into how and why the unbolting of the chairs happened. It may have had something to do with John Dewey and a pedagogy of student inquiry rather than rote instruction, and that someone or several people believed that such enquiry can only happen if the students’ curiosities are put at the centre of the learning teaching equation and get to learn by talking and working with each other. But, which came first, the idea or the action, I don’t know.
But, what I do think is that the unbolting of the desks was not an isolated act. It’s an autocatalysis. Because of this unbolting, teachers could stand in different locations. Students could look at each other. When students look at each other, they have to have something to say. Small groups of students could work on something together. So, all of a sudden you had a systems change because of one small thing.
Now, I don’t know whether the unbolting was the first thing or the tenth thing, or whether this was a sort of accidental diffusion movement or a deliberate strategy. That would be a cool dissertation for someone to write: unbolting of student desks as pedagogical revolution.
But it’s clear that there are small innovations that can lead to big changes. One of the things that I found recently in research we did on mid-level education governance in low- and middle-income countries is that many, mid-tier folks like district, province, or municipal officials in very low-income countries do not have the money or the bandwidth to engage in scaling innovations—at least as I’m defining them.
But then, when we asked them what they’re doing in their present work, they told us about tiny little tweaks or modifications that they are bringing to multiple locations. I would call that scaling innovations. And so I think there’s something to be said for these low-cost or no-cost responsive changes to identify challenges in an education system that themselves can become sustainable and can lead to impact and may set in motion other kinds of changes. So, we shouldn’t discount the power of small innovations.
System Level Scaling
Now, you asked about scaling at the larger system level or country level and I think that there are some programs that have been able to successfully scale across countries in ways that have led to dramatic systems change. And I’ll put Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) as one of those.
The International Baccalaureate Program is another innovation that has scaled. It started in 1968 originally as a curriculum for global elites to focus on interdisciplinary, inquiry-based instruction, rigorous academics, and the kind of flexibility that allowed each location to adapt the program for its own needs but still within a set framework. And then in 2017 it shifted to include middle class and lower middle-class locations. And it’s now in something like 1,000 locations. That’s a program that has scaled across the world and whose impact has been impressive.
There’s a really interesting report that came out in 2022 by Amanda Datnow and her colleagues (Transforming education for holistic student development). What the research did was focus on systems change as primarily about centering holistic student development. They referenced Chile, Ireland, and British Columbia and Canada.
But, other country systems that have engaged in the integration of scaling and systems change in successful ways would include Vietnam, Singapore, and Delhi, India.
What seems to work is that you get the government and a bunch of NGOs who are on the same page and willing to work together. There’s also some kind of that serial monogamy funding situation present. And there is the courageous leadership that is patient enough to know that it takes 20 years. There is a recognition that you need to build it on the unique contours of the location i.e. what works in one place doesn’t work in another place.
Vietnam over the last 20 or so years is a good example. They had a relatively weak economy but a strong teaching force, a culture and history that privileges education and an authoritarian political system. So, they centred their reforms around student assessment models – placing kids at the centre of the reforms.
The result was a complex education systems change designed around student assessment and teaching quality, knowing they’d got buy-in, knowing they’d got education as a cultural high priority, knowing they’d got a strong teaching workforce, knowing they’d got a relatively coherent policy context - and you get it right, and they did.
Now, what’s happened, as I understand it—but I might be wrong—is they’re now becoming a victim of their own success. They’re doing so well economically that the best and the brightest who come out of college don’t necessarily want to be teachers. They want to go into digital technology or wherever the money is.
So, teaching is suffering. But also, there’s a backlash because there was such a strong focus on academic achievement at the expense of social emotional learning. So, outcomes and test scores went up but stress and anxiety among learners did so too.
Overall Lessons
So, what are the lessons from these several countries that I’m talking about?
It would be that the governments were on board and willing to commit to a multi-year, even a multi-decade direction without changing at every election.
There was broad stakeholder support inside and outside government.
The efforts were built on the specific and unique cultural and historical needs and assets of the location, and teachers and children’s learning were put at the centre of the equation, meaning that the catalyzing innovations around which the systems change occurred had fertile ground to grow in.
Further Reading
A visual guide to rethinking pathways to scale in education (The Brookings Institution)
3 reflection briefs for scaling impact in education around the world (The Brookings Institution)
Unlocking the potential of middle-tier education governance for scaling impact in low- and middle-income countries (The Brookings Institution)
Millions Learning (The Brookings Institution)
Learning at Scale (RTI)
Journeys to Scale: Accompanying the Finalists of the Innovations in Education Initiative (R4D)
The Education Scaling Navigator - A Tool for Understanding Scaling Frameworks (Hundred.org)
Implement at Scale (Hundred.org)
The Myths of Scaling-up (Mary Burns)