What does democratic student leadership look like in a Kenyan school? What does support for active citizenship look in an Italian school? And how are they related? These are just some of the questions raised by virtual visits to the Lukenya Academy British Curriculum School in Kenya and the Istituto Comprensivo Boville Ernica in Italy.
Situated in Machakos County, Kenya, Lukenya Academy British Curriculum School is an international-system school that offers the IGCSE qualification. In their presentation, Lukenya schools takes pride in its deliberate ‘Uniquenesses’ in relation to other Kenyan schools:
They are a mixed-gender boarding school, which is quite rare in the country, and particularly notable in a clearly patriarchal society.
They explicitly seek to admit mixed ability students, unlike many private schools in Kenya, which are highly selective. Nonetheless, they have won several national prizes including in a Great places to School Competition, a competition for all private secondary schools. They note they won because of their academic performance and “value added” (the difference in performance between a pupil’s arrival and their graduation from Lukenya) but also point out they are “deliberately mixed ability and concentrate on helping every child, regardless of intake grades.”
They take an entirely democratic approach to student governance – pupils vote for their leaders who, through consultation, work to shape all aspects of school life from co-curriculars to academics.
The video created by Lukenya schools illustrates several of the school’s characteristics, including highlighting student voices and the roles of students in leadership and organization.
“It’s been challenging to run and coordinate a school of mixed students, both boys and girls, which is pretty rare in Kenya. However, leadership has been very fun. We believe in democracy; we believe in listening to people’s opinions. We don’t believe in making rules that other ones follow” – Shawn Omondi, student council leader
The engagement of students in arranging activities at Lukenya provides another striking example of student leadership. These activities include a wide range of sports and other co-curricular (e.g. extracurricular) activities like football for both boys and girls, basketball, swimming, cooking club, drama club, and environmental club.
After watching the video, the Italian professionals asked their Kenyan colleagues an interesting question: how do you reconcile the British curriculum with your traditional culture? Board member Mutheu Kasanga replied:
“The law does require that all the schools, from any curriculum, teach Civics and Local History. In addition, the British curriculum allows us to use what is available locally. For instance, when we are teaching a subject like business studies, all the key studies are local. So, in Lukenya we are using the local business around the school, to teach the students who come from these communities how to apply these international concepts into the local business.
Kenya is an English-speaking country, so we don’t have particular problems with English language, even though as an international school we do receive students from other countries, especially in the East African region, so we get French speakers as well and other languages.
In our school we are able to even go an extra mile and bring in aspects of our culture. Culture in Kenya is difficult, we have many small cultures within the country. Everybody speaks at least three languages in Kenya, along with English and Swahili there is another language. So, bringing “Kenyanness” into that, is made easier by the fact that the curriculum allows us to bring these elements within the curriculum: local history and using the local areas to bring all the projects that we require to bolster the curriculum.”
Istituto Comprensivo Boville Ernica, Italy
Boville Ernica is a small town in the centre of Italy, about 90 km from Rome. The Istituto Comprensivothere includes three school levels: preschool, primary and secondary school. Some of the keywords selected by the school to introduce itself are taking care of each other and promoting active citizenship. As principal Giacomo La Montagna and teacher Flavia Passi described it: “Taking Care means for us investing in time and space to achieve quality in social relationships in order to increase wellbeing and social exchanges and to improve learning. Teaching how to take care of each other and of our home planet is our challenge to build a better future. The strategical identity criterion of the Institute is the promotion of Active Citizenship.”
“Teaching how to take care of each other and of our home planet is our challenge to build a better future.” – Flavia Passi
The video presentation emphasizes these values, illustrating many “special events” organized during the school year such as the International day for the elimination of violence against women, the Global day for climate action, and the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. Some of the issues that the school is fighting for are deeply felt problems in Italian society, such as mafia culture or gender-based violence.
International day for the elimination of violence against women, student works, IC Boville Ernica
Chess lessons to improve logical thinking, concentration, and memory at IC Boville Ernica
Secondary school orchestra, IC Boville Ernica
After watching the video, many of the participants in the ICSEI session wondered how the school manages to combine so many extracurricular activities with the curricular programs of the different subjects. Flavia Passi explained that a new curricular reform In Italy has introduced Civic Education as a subject that is taught by every teacher in their lessons:
“Each subject contributes to these important issues. For instance, environmental education and sustainability, some of the goals of the 2030 Agenda, are strictly connected to Science or Geography. Education to legality, the knowledge of political, social and economic organization, individual rights, are not only the principles on which our constitutional law is based, but they are related to historical and literary debates. Civic education is based on three main themes: the knowledge of the Italian Republican Constitution, Sustainable Development, and Digital Citizenship. These themes are transversely developed from different points of view, in order to create connections between disciplinary knowledge and real-life experiences.”
Passi concluded with a description of the key challenges at Istituto Comprensivo today that serve as a call to action to schools all around the world:
“Our challenge in relation to this matter is finding always new education methods to educate our children in having positive relationships with others, in respecting the rules of a democratic society, being aware of their rights, duties and responsibilities, knowing how to confront peacefully, and taking care of themselves, of their community, and their home planet.”
Strong school leadership impacts student outcomes, and this relationship is more important during a crisis. School leadership training can be cost-effective if it is delivered using best practices. However, there are limited programs focused on working with school leaders in lower and middle income countries (LMICs). As a result, the evidence base on this issue is sparse relative to the central role that school leaders play in a school’s functioning.
My organization, Global School Leaders (GSL), aims to play a catalytic role in developing evidence on school leadership in LMICs. In order to do this, we have been scaling school leadership training programs while strengthening our monitoring, evaluation, and research systems to contribute to the larger ecosystem of learning on this issue. We have worked with over 3,500 school leaders, impacting approximately 920,000 students. Our primary countries of focus are India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Kenya. During COVID, we have expanded to work in Peru, the Philippines, Uganda and Nigeria.
Why survey school leaders?
In 2020, we conducted a thorough review of the evidence on school leadership in LMICs. One of the key questions that emerged from that review is: “What are the key leadership practices that impact student learning for students from marginalized backgrounds?”
In order to deepen our understanding of this question, we have developed a set of High-Leverage Leadership Actions (HLLA) that synthesizes key leadership practices identified by our review and our experience training school leaders. We then developed a consultative process with a group of 10 education leadership researchers, our Academic Advisory Council, whose work is rooted in LMICs, to further refine this list.
These focus areas are not intended to be a complete framework of practices for school leaders. Instead, they serve as actions that 1) impact student outcomes and teacher performance 2) are trainable 3) are relevant across contexts. The six High-Leverage Leadership Actions we have identified are:
Create a positive school culture that reflects high expectations
Build teacher skill through observation & feedback
Understand effective teaching practices
Set school goals, create plans, and monitor progress
Promote teacher leadership
Disrupt inequitable patterns
In order to understand the quality of school leader practice in HLLA areas and the amount of time school leaders give to HLLA areas, we developed a set of school leader, teacher, and student surveys.
We piloted this survey toward the end of 2020 with our partners from India, Kenya, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Each of our four partners identified one school leader training program that started in early 2020. From this group of 180 schools, we randomly selected 10 schools from each partner. From each selected school, we surveyed the school leader, 5 teachers, and 20 students in grades 5 or 8. Our sample was thus 40 school leaders, 200 teachers, and 200 students. We ended up collecting data from 34 School Leaders, 116 teachers, and 145 students. The biggest gap in data collection was that our India partner was unable to collect teacher or student data.
What did you learn from the survey?
Overall, three findings from the study stood out:
1. The belief that all students can learn, and that teachers are critical in this process, is not universal.
In our sample survey, we saw that the percentage of teachers who believe that “all students can learn” is lower than the percentage of school leaders who believe the same. While 74% of our school leaders believe that all students can learn regardless of familial background or educational experience, only 48% of teachers agree.
While 74% of our school leaders believe that all students can learn regardless of familial background or educational experience, only 48% of teachers agree.
2. School leaders are providing teachers with limited opportunities to grow professionally.
Less than 40% of teachers reported receiving monthly short observations of at least 5 minutes from their school leader. Further, only 12% of school leaders reported conducting monthly observations of 30 or more minutes. Less than 50% of teachers reported their school leaders doing monthly in-service activities related to improving teacher skills and only 16% of teachers stated that they had opportunities to learn from their colleagues.
Less than 50% of teachers reported their school leaders doing monthly in-service activities related to improving teacher skills
3. School leaders use little data for decision making.
In our sample, less than 20% of school leaders reported using learning data to make curriculum changes, and only around 25% reported using data to incentivize teachers. Even though student absenteeism was identified by both teachers and parents as the biggest hurdle to student learning in their schools, only 62% of school leaders reported tracking student attendance. While almost all the school leaders reported having a school improvement plan that included student learning targets, in a majority of cases, these are not updated or reviewed regularly.
Less than 20% of school leaders reported using learning data to make curriculum changes, and only around 25% reported using data to incentivize teachers
Moving forward, we plan to conduct yearly follow up with this group of schools to see how their practice changes over time. We also will continue to test and refine our understanding of key actions leaders need to perform to impact students and improve our ability to measure these actions. We believe that understanding the detailed actions and choices school leaders make can have a substantial and sustained impact over the quality of education students receive.
Deborah Kimathi: Kenya announced its first case of COVID19 on March 13th, and on March 15th the government announced national school closures, and social distancing measures that included working from home for those in non-essential services. I spent the next morning in the Dignitas office, setting up our team of 15 for remote working, with no idea of what that would really look like (for a team who are typically 80% in the community delivering training and coaching to our 140 School Partners) or how long it might last for. Now, 11 weeks the team are all still working from home, and being incredibly fruitful despite the challenges.
Ever since, my family and I have been working from home in Nairobi, schooling from home, shopping from home, socializing from home, and everything-else-from-home! My husband and I are both still working full time (or more than), and managing our three children. Our childcare ceased on the same day, so that our nanny could also follow the government’s guidelines. Our oldest two (7 and 9 years old, one lockdown birthday later) are doing some home learning (not their school prescribed program which was 6 hours per day of poorly managed Google Hangouts), and our 3 year old, who was due to start nursery this term, is generally having way too much screen time. My working day currently starts at 5am, and goes until around 10pm, with a variety of interruptions.
IEN: What’s happening with education/learning in your community?
DK: One word comes to mind – inequality. I have two very different ongoing conversations when it comes to education. The first is with my children’s friends’ parents, mostly struggling with schedules, the need for each child to have a device or laptop, how to turn baking into a science lesson, and where to source real butter for said cake. The other, and the more urgent conversation, is with our School Partners and friends, largely in Nairobi’s urban informal settlements. Here, the struggle is not for comfort, the struggle is for survival. COVID19 has brought with it severe social, health and economic hardship, and these hit the poorest communities the hardest. In these communities, more than 60% of families were unable to access public education pre-COVID19, as a result of poverty and systemic exclusion. Marginalised by poverty, these are the same families excluded from a myriad of essential health and education services now, and often fighting a daily, violent war with police in their struggle to exist.
The more urgent conversation, is with our School Partners and friends, largely in Nairobi’s urban informal settlements. Here, the struggle is not for comfort, the struggle is for survival. COVID19 has brought with it severe social, health and economic hardship, and these hit the poorest communities the hardest.
The significant challenge of inequality is, as a result, exacerbated in the most violent way, only bringing harm to children, families, and society as a whole. This raises critical, urgent questions of ‘What happens next?’ When schools reopen, will those who’ve participated in online or home learning be ‘ahead’ of others? How will schools assess progress and promote students to the new school year? How many girls will be married or pregnant, never to return to school? How many families will end up on the street, their children never to return to school? How many children will have died from starvation? How many children will be so scarred by the trauma, violence and anxiety of this season that learning never really resumes?
The significant challenge of inequality is, as a result, exacerbated in the most violent way, only bringing harm to children, families, and society as a whole.
A young learner proudly carries his school books outside a typical partner school. Photo: Dignitas
IEN: What do you/your community need help with?
DK: Dignitas is working tirelessly to protect and promote the learning and well-being of children living in poverty. Whilst everything else is disrupted, our vision to ensure all children have the opportunity to thrive and succeed remains core to our COVID19 response.
In an effort to reach and protect these children, we immediately thought of our amazing community of School Leaders and Teacher Leaders. Dignitas has trained over 1,000 educators, and have another 450 educators enrolled for 2020. These School Leaders have already benefited from Dignitas training and coaching and they are also leaders who are rooted in, and passionate about the needs of their communities. Our partnership lays an ideal foundation for them to be further equipped to respond in these times of crisis as community champions of well-being and learning. Dignitas is remotely training and coaching these educators as Community Champions who can work in household clusters to protect and promote children’s learning and well-being.
Dignitas is working tirelessly to protect and promote the learning and well-being of children living in poverty. Whilst everything else is disrupted, our vision to ensure all children have the opportunity to thrive and succeed remains core to our COVID19 response.
To make this possible, we need help in curating more digital content for these educators, the educators need tablets to access and share learning content, families need basic devices or radios to benefit from the government’s education broadcasts, we need to design and print home learning packs for children, and we need to help families with food! The list is long, and we’ve been excited to collaborate with some amazing partners like Safaricom Foundation, Team4Tech, Cosaraf Foundation and Synthetic so far, but the need is huge!
A young girl, now at home, facing an uncertain future. Photo: Dignitas
IEN: What resources/links/supports have you found most useful?
DK: I’ve really appreciated being part of some great networks – WISE, Global School Leaders, RELI,Global Schools Forum and others who have curated relevant content and tools, and offered consistent, valuable support. The opportunity to share and learn with peers has helped me to stay focused, inspired and fruitful in this season.
Friends and donors who are authentic partners in our work! Can donor relationships be unhealthy, and have skewed power dynamics? Yes. However, they can also be wonderful places of strategic collaboration, bringing together passionate, committed teams of people and resources to respond to community need in a wise and compassionate way. We’re fortunate to largely experience the latter, and they’ve been amazing thought and action partners for this season.
IEN: What are you reading, watching, listening to that you would recommend to others?
DK: I’m mostly listening to podcasts and recordings of webinars that I’ve missed in the busy-ness! WISE and Africa.com have had great content, relevant to our context, and not afraid to ask the hard questions. In terms of reading, material from Harvard Graduate School of Education and Brookings Institute have offered interesting insight. However, I think my most valuable learning experience in this season has been listening to others – peers in the Kenyan and Global education sector, and the communities in which we work.
IEN: What have you found most inspiring?
DK: People! People who are so intentional in bringing hope and light to others. People giving so generously of their time and expertise. People who don’t have much, always willing to give the most.
This week’s post features an e-mail interview withDeborah Kimathi, the Executive Director of Dignitas, an education development organisation in Kenya. Dignitas uses an innovative training and coaching approach to empower schools and educators in marginalized communities to transform students’ opportunities. Deborah is also a Trustee of UK Charity Raising Futures Kenya, and Country Lead of the Kenya chapter of Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELI) which brings together more than 70 education actors from across the region.
This is the fifth in a series that includes posts from Chile, from Japan, from the Netherlands and from Scotland. The “A view from…” series editors are IEN’s Thomas Hatch and Karen Edge, Reader/Associate Professor in Educational Leadership at University College London’s Institute of Education.
IEN: What’s happening with you and your family?
Deborah Kimathi: Kenya announced its first case of COVID19 on March 13th, and on March 15th the government announced national school closures, and social distancing measures that included working from home for those in non-essential services. I spent the next morning in the Dignitas office, setting up our team of 15 for remote working, with no idea of what that would really look like (for a team who are typically 80% in the community delivering training and coaching to our 140 School Partners) or how long it might last for. Now, 11 weeks the team are all still working from home, and being incredibly fruitful despite the challenges.
Ever since, my family and I have been working from home in Nairobi, schooling from home, shopping from home, socializing from home, and everything-else-from-home! My husband and I are both still working full time (or more than), and managing our three children. Our childcare ceased on the same day, so that our nanny could also follow the government’s guidelines. Our oldest two (7 and 9 years old, one lockdown birthday later) are doing some home learning (not their school prescribed program which was 6 hours per day of poorly managed Google Hangouts), and our 3 year old, who was due to start nursery this term, is generally having way too much screen time. My working day currently starts at 5am, and goes until around 10pm, with a variety of interruptions.
IEN: What’s happening with education/learning in your community?
DK: One word comes to mind – inequality. I have two very different ongoing conversations when it comes to education. The first is with my children’s friends’ parents, mostly struggling with schedules, the need for each child to have a device or laptop, how to turn baking into a science lesson, and where to source real butter for said cake. The other, and the more urgent conversation, is with our School Partners and friends, largely in Nairobi’s urban informal settlements. Here, the struggle is not for comfort, the struggle is for survival. COVID19 has brought with it severe social, health and economic hardship, and these hit the poorest communities the hardest. In these communities, more than 60% of families were unable to access public education pre-COVID19, as a result of poverty and systemic exclusion. Marginalised by poverty, these are the same families excluded from a myriad of essential health and education services now, and often fighting a daily, violent war with police in their struggle to exist.
The more urgent conversation, is with our School Partners and friends, largely in Nairobi’s urban informal settlements. Here, the struggle is not for comfort, the struggle is for survival. COVID19 has brought with it severe social, health and economic hardship, and these hit the poorest communities the hardest.
The significant challenge of inequality is, as a result, exacerbated in the most violent way, only bringing harm to children, families, and society as a whole. This raises critical, urgent questions of ‘What happens next?’ When schools reopen, will those who’ve participated in online or home learning be ‘ahead’ of others? How will schools assess progress and promote students to the new school year? How many girls will be married or pregnant, never to return to school? How many families will end up on the street, their children never to return to school? How many children will have died from starvation? How many children will be so scarred by the trauma, violence and anxiety of this season that learning never really resumes?
The significant challenge of inequality is, as a result, exacerbated in the most violent way, only bringing harm to children, families, and society as a whole.
A young learner proudly carries his school books outside a typical partner school. Photo: Dignitas
IEN: What do you/your community need help with?
DK: Dignitas is working tirelessly to protect and promote the learning and well-being of children living in poverty. Whilst everything else is disrupted, our vision to ensure all children have the opportunity to thrive and succeed remains core to our COVID19 response.
In an effort to reach and protect these children, we immediately thought of our amazing community of School Leaders and Teacher Leaders. Dignitas has trained over 1,000 educators, and have another 450 educators enrolled for 2020. These School Leaders have already benefited from Dignitas training and coaching and they are also leaders who are rooted in, and passionate about the needs of their communities. Our partnership lays an ideal foundation for them to be further equipped to respond in these times of crisis as community champions of well-being and learning. Dignitas is remotely training and coaching these educators as Community Champions who can work in household clusters to protect and promote children’s learning and well-being.
Dignitas is working tirelessly to protect and promote the learning and well-being of children living in poverty. Whilst everything else is disrupted, our vision to ensure all children have the opportunity to thrive and succeed remains core to our COVID19 response.
To make this possible, we need help in curating more digital content for these educators, the educators need tablets to access and share learning content, families need basic devices or radios to benefit from the government’s education broadcasts, we need to design and print home learning packs for children, and we need to help families with food! The list is long, and we’ve been excited to collaborate with some amazing partners like Safaricom Foundation, Team4Tech, Cosaraf Foundation and Synthetic so far, but the need is huge!
A young girl, now at home, facing an uncertain future. Photo: Dignitas
IEN: What resources/links/supports have you found most useful?
DK: I’ve really appreciated being part of some great networks – WISE, Global School Leaders, RELI,Global Schools Forum and others who have curated relevant content and tools, and offered consistent, valuable support. The opportunity to share and learn with peers has helped me to stay focused, inspired and fruitful in this season.
Friends and donors who are authentic partners in our work! Can donor relationships be unhealthy, and have skewed power dynamics? Yes. However, they can also be wonderful places of strategic collaboration, bringing together passionate, committed teams of people and resources to respond to community need in a wise and compassionate way. We’re fortunate to largely experience the latter, and they’ve been amazing thought and action partners for this season.
IEN: What are you reading, watching, listening to that you would recommend to others?
DK: I’m mostly listening to podcasts and recordings of webinars that I’ve missed in the busy-ness! WISE and Africa.com have had great content, relevant to our context, and not afraid to ask the hard questions. In terms of reading, material from Harvard Graduate School of Education and Brookings Institute have offered interesting insight. However, I think my most valuable learning experience in this season has been listening to others – peers in the Kenyan and Global education sector, and the communities in which we work.
IEN: What have you found most inspiring?
DK: People! People who are so intentional in bringing hope and light to others. People giving so generously of their time and expertise. People who don’t have much, always willing to give the most.
How are school leaders responding to the coronavirus outbreak? This week’s post describes the responses to school closures of members of Global School Leaders (GSL). GSL provides preparation and professional development programs for school leaders in India, Malalysia, Indonesia, and Kenya. Sameer Sampat and Azad Oommen launched GSL to build on and expand work they and their colleagues began at the India School Leadership Institute (ISLI) in 2013. Sampat discussed the initial evolution of ISLI in an IEN interview in 2016. An interview with Sampat about the work of Global School Leaders and the challenges and possibilities for seeding leadership preparation programs around the world will be published in IEN later this spring. This post appeared originally on Medium
School leaders can respond to GSL’s global survey about their responses to the outbreak in their communities: https://t.co/NEQNCgxu6l
As the COVID-19 crisis deepens and spreads, a strong response by school leaders (SLs) is urgent to mitigate against the disruption faced by children who may be out of school for the foreseeable future. SLs are uniquely positioned to have the respect and personal relationships to guide families on how to support their children at home during this unprecedented, fast-moving challenge.
In our program partner regions in India, Indonesia, Kenya, and Malaysia, schools are shut and public gatherings, including training workshops, are banned. We are bringing our four partner organizations together to provide motivation and thought-partnership as we face this unprecedented crisis. Our partners’ response to taking responsibility within their communities is inspiring.
This blog shares the actions taken by our team and partners to support SLs through this crisis. We hope it sparks ideas that other SLs can localize for use in their own communities. We are still finding ways that our SLs and partner organizations can meaningfully build collective action to support those most in need. If reading this blog sparks any thoughts, suggestions, or feedback, we would love to hear from you.
GSL Response Framework
As GSL, we are focused on supporting playing a leadership role by motivating and supporting our partners to take a collective response. Two primary thoughts are centering us:
We must keep the physical and mental well-being of our leaders, teachers, and students at the top of our actions
This moment highlights the critical leadership role our SLs must rise to in service of their schools and communities. To that end, we must first and foremost model the same care and urgency that we hope to see from our SLs.
We are working with our partners to address the needs of our SLs so that they, in turn, can ensure that every child is cared for and their basic needs are met. Parents see the SLs as community leaders, but SLs are dealing with an unprecedented situation.
Partners are now working through a three-step initial response and sharing updates on weekly network calls. We drafted this tool to codify a framework for action that collects the thoughts we’ve heard from our partners:
Set-Up Communication Channels: Partners are checking in on, finding resources to support, and motivating SLs to ensure that they have the energy and ability to serve their communities, despite the personal challenges they may be facing.
Understanding Community Needs: Based on the information that is emerging from the communication chain, partners are facilitating responses to community needs. Partners are collecting data and sharing regular updates on the assets/ needs of the communities.
Inspiring with Stories of Hope: Partners are surfacing and documenting stories about how SLs are finding ways to respond to provide insight and motivation for others, both in our networks and beyond.
Partner Progress and Resources
Over the past week, our partners have been putting together multiple efforts to support their SLs and communities. Here are a few highlights with attached resources:
Skill-building with SLs on relevant Leading Learning competencies — engaging parents, dealing with trauma, leveraging online and radio learning tools
Clusters of Support — ways to bring groups of schools together to distribute resources and check-in on well-being
Inspirasi (Indonesia)
Creating a call for SLs to share short video clips of how they’re responding to the crisis
Developing a webinar on “School Leadership in Crisis” that will feature a panel of Ministry of Education and Culture officials, local academics, and practitioners
Will be delivering their planned last workshop of the academic year via Zoom in mid-April
Alokit (India)
Setting up weekly small group calls with SLs from the ISLI program in Delhi and Hyderabad that Alokit co-founders worked with personally to understand their needs. See their notes.
Next Steps
As next steps, we are building resources that address the following questions that have emerged from the work being done by our partners:
Are there conversation templates for how teachers should be using their time speaking with families during this crisis?
What are some pre-skills we can be working on with SLs to motivate them to more fully interact with teachers and their communities if they aren’t doing so on their own accord?
What kinds of data should partners be collecting? What is the impact we want to be able to have at the end of this and what is the data we need to be collecting now in order to ensure that we’ve done this?
While our contexts are different, our partners are united by a fierce belief in the importance of school leadership in meeting the needs of learners and their communities. We are compiling a list of education-related resources — please feel free to look through these if they are helpful to you. We will be checking in with our partners regularly and will continue to update our community through this evolving situation.
This week, we conducted a scan of education news published in the past month from countries in Africa. These articles highlight efforts to increase access and quality of education through the implementation of national curricula and assessments and through initiatives focused on teacher recruitment, salaries, and training.
South Sudan recently launched its first national curriculum. Gurtong.net quoted Jonathan Veitch, UNICEF Country Representative, as saying…
“For now the curriculum is complete, textbooks must be designed and published, teachers need to be trained to implement this curriculum, and school managers, inspectors and supervisors require training to provide the required management and oversight….”
Reports from South Africa (recently ranked “almost dead last in math and science” on this year’s World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness report, as News24 noted) show that even with curriculum and assessments in place, educators need to see their worth in order for them to be useful for instruction. The Daily Maverick recently reported that both the teachers’ union and the Department of Basic Education agree that the current national assessments are not effective, and some teachers’ unions have already promised to “opt-out” of administering the current assessments.
Tensions between teachers and the national government in Kenya also reflect something of a “Catch-22.” In a recent World Bank report, concern was expressed that the quality of education in the country was alarmingly inadequate. On the one hand, many critics of the government, including many teachers, argue that the reasons include the government’s failure to comply with a court order to increase teacher salaries by 50-60%. In response, teachers are engaged in a formal, long-term strike to protest inadequate salary, which they would like to see rise to the levels of other professions. On the other hand, supporters of the government suggest that the teacher strikes are contributing to the problems because they result in irregular access to classrooms for most students. In a stalemate, the Education Ministry ordered schools to close as of September 21st.
According to All Africa, Cameroon’s Education Ministry is taking steps to try to “professionalize” teaching by bringing in Dutch consultants to help refine teacher training, as well as curriculum. According to Roeland Monasch, the CEO of the Dutch NGO Aflatoun, the solution is simple: “He assured that once teachers are well trained, students will do well in class.”
To provide links for our twitter feed, every week or ten days, we look for news, research, and other media reports on educational change and improvement from a particular part of the world (Africa and Middle East; Asia & the Pacific; Central & South America; The Nordic countries; Europe; or the UK and Canada). While it’s always hard to determine the “hot topics” through these “non-random” scans of traditional and new media, we’re going to start pulling together some of the links we find in these scans and posting them here a little more frequently. This time, the scan focuses on Africa and the Middle East, and over the past two weeks, we’ve noticed more stories about testing-related scandals than almost any other topic. Maybe it’s just exam season, but the stories have come from Egypt, South Africa, Algeria, Morocco, and Ghana:
Helicopters, scanners no match for Egypt’s exam cheats – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East http://buff.ly/1J8lT8Z
allAfrica.com: South Africa: Basic Education On Progress in Group Copying Investigations http://buff.ly/1GnglQZ
الشروق أون لاين Education Unions: “Protected and not afraid of punishment… those behind leaked exam topics on Facebook” http://buff.ly/1IoO6Ts
Exam Leaks Are a Threat to Morocco’s Education System. Morocco World News http://buff.ly/1H3yQ3I
BECE cancellation was a collective decision – Minister of Education | General News 2015-06-18 http://buff.ly/1Gnp59M
Unfortunately, extremism, in this case in Egypt and in Kenya, also continue to be in the news:
‘A trip to the farm’: Egypt canceled these school lessons to combat extremism | Al Bawaba http://buff.ly/1J8m9Fd
Education in Kenya Suffers at Hands of Shabab Extremists – The New York Times http://buff.ly/1J8vJI3
Kenya: Education crisis looms near border with Somalia as 2,000 teachers flee due to al-Shabaab attacks http://buff.ly/1J8vOLX
In addition to those stories, there were also frequent mentions of basic issues of rights and access to education in the Sudan and Algeria, education budgets and costs in Ghana and Ethiopia, teacher’s pay and teaching education in Uganda and Nigeria respectively. But no scan would be complete without a story or two on world rankings (Morocco) or educational performance (Nigeria):
International Education News 