El Director LIBRE — AI-Assisted Time-Management Method for School Principals (Peru)

'El Director LIBRE' (Localiza, Implementa, Busca, Refuerza, Expande) is a five-step method paired with a free AI agent ('DirectorLIBRE Assistant') that the World Bank's Development Research Group co-designed with more than 100 school principals from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru, to automate routine administrative paperwork such as report-writing and evaluation analysis.

The method responds to a 2024 survey of 5,000 school leaders (PULS study) finding that Latin American principals spend about 76% of their time on non-pedagogical administrative tasks and only 24% on pedagogical leadership, even though pedagogical leadership is associated with roughly three times the impact on student learning; the aim is to free principal time for instructional leadership.

Co-creating principals reported cutting report-writing time from about 90 minutes to 20 minutes and evaluation-analysis time from two hours to under 30 minutes, with 85% rating the tools as very useful. The method was subsequently used to train more than 6,000 Peruvian school leaders as part of a broader World Bank-Peru education AI programme (with Anthropic, Microsoft and Peru's Ministry of Education), which separately ran a randomized controlled trial showing AI-assisted classroom-observation scoring matched trained human observers.

The efficiency and satisfaction figures are self-reported by the principals who co-designed the method during the pilot process, not an independent randomized evaluation of the tool itself, and no data yet show whether the time freed from paperwork translates into measured gains in student learning.