Chief Education Development Officer
Gary Husler
Gary designs and leads LeapEd’s education programmes, from foundational literacy and numeracy to whole-school transformation, financial literacy, and digital literacy. His approach rests on three things: diagnosing exactly where learners are stuck, upskilling the teachers who can move them on, and using behavioural science so that change lasts.
Two results show what that looks like. In LeapEd’s foundational literacy programme across more than 250 Malaysian primary schools, the share of struggling readers who could not read a single word of a short passage fell from 48% to 22%, which is 1,790 children who can now read it. In a national financial literacy initiative for rural families, students’ willingness to put money into a suspicious “zero risk” offer fell from 61% to 19%.
He also contributes to LeapEd’s impact work with corporate foundations and CSR partners, helping funders see what their investment achieves through rigorous impact reporting, monitoring and evaluation, and social return on investment (SROI). Gary is an active speaker at education conferences in Malaysia, on education technology, literacy, teacher training and upskilling, and professional learning in schools.
Gary has worked in Malaysian education for 19 years. He began as an English teacher with the British Council in 2007, trained English teachers nationwide for the Ministry of Education’s Native Speaker Programme, led training at Mango Training, and headed the English language programme at INTI International University, where he sat on the university senate. He joined LeapEd in 2018 as a programme designer, led the LeapEd Academy from 2020 to 2023, and became Chief Education Development Officer in 2023. He holds a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics (TESOL) from Northumbria University.