Quality Education
on Phil Bradfield (The Gambia), 22/Jun/2010 16:42, 34 days ago
(Written 18/06/2010 17:00, My House, Janjanbureh)Every year, the UK government gives£1 billion in aid to try to improve education in the developing world. According to a report on the World Service (love the BBC!) just now, the UK’s National Audit Office has produced a report which concludes that this money is not producing adequate results; they say that although good progresshas been made on improving access to basic education, many children are still dropping out of school and little improvement has been seen in the quality of education.From where I’m sitting, that pretty much sums up the situation in The Gambia right now. Andrew, one of the Senior Education Officers at RED5, sometimes talks about how of the three goals set out in the country’s education policy (accessible education, relevant education and quality education), the first twoare progressing but the third is a real challenge.So why? What is lacking in The Gambia? Well, money is an obvious answer. The schools here simply do not have much in the way of resources, be they textbooks, computers, or even sticks of chalk. But you can do a lot with limited resources, especially in primary schools: VSOs and Peace Corps Volunteers have done a lot of work here on training teachers to produce teaching resources from cheap or even free materials. It is certainly a lot harder to teach when you don’t have money for school trips, laptops and interactive whiteboards, but it’s not impossible, as some of the schools round here show.But, my understanding is that although there are some very good examples of schools (and teachers) doing really well with virtually nothing, there are at least as many schools and teachers whose standards are still shockingly poor. Which brings me to what I think is a key problem in trying to achieve quality education here. The Gambian education system has been very poor for a long time, and guess who came out of this poor-quality education? Yep, that’s right... the people who are now teachers themselves. This is why, for example, you can give a workshop to a group of teachers and discover that, on average, they have a reading age of less than eight.There’s a lot of talk about the quality of teacher training here, but even with the best training in the world, you’d still be hamstrung by the fact that the trainee teachers simply don’t have high aptitudes in the basics, such as reading, writing and simple maths. And because of this, many teachers lack the confidence or ability to give their students a better education than what they themselves had.Make no mistake, I think the quality is probably improving, but my point is that it can only be a gradual, cyclical process: good teacher training will improve the teachers’ abilities, which will give the students a better education, which will mean that when those students come for teacher training, they will be capable of more than their own teachers were, because they will have a better grasp of the basics. And with better training they’ll be able to produce better students... and so on.The problem with this is that, if we want to make any dent at all in the gap between, for example, Gambia and the UK, then Gambian education not only needs to improve, it needs to improve faster than British education is doing. And yet the developed world has all these extra resources (the internet and other communication improvements, more modern working techniques etc) which give them the advantage. Looked at in this way, it’s really hard to see how countries like The Gambia could ever hope to narrow the gap to the developed world, let alone close it fully.As you might have guessed, I don’t have any answers to these problems. I think that, if anything, I’m probably too closely involved in it to have a good overall picture of education in this country. But I really hope that somewhere, whether it be in the corridors of Whitehall or on the streets of Serrekunda, someone has the brainwave which will transform Gambian education. And I also hope that they get the resources that their idea will inevitably need; the rumours going around here are that the new government is likely to cut DfID’s funding (if anyone can give any more details on that, I’d be grateful!), and today’s NAO report does nothing to make that any less likely. So, Mr Cameron... who are you listening to?