Dear friends
I’m ending 2023 thinking a lot about the work of improving schools: what makes it so hard but ultimately so fulfilling.
This past week, there have been moving tributes to Sir Tim Brighouse, the pioneering British education reformer who did so much to raise education standards in London, Birmingham and other parts of England. This paragraph in a wonderful profile by the Financial Times’ Christopher Cook stood out:
“Brighouse’s incredible skill set was to use his remarkable empathy and charisma to make sure teachers did not see [more rigorous accountability measures] as a threat or insult. Instead, he made educational improvement into a collective challenge to which they would want to rise together.”
Earlier in the week, I’d been reading a provocative recent essay by Lee Crawfurd at the Center for Global Development, arguing that governments in low and middle income countries should focus on expanding access to schooling, not improving its quality. Expanding access is something governments in many different places have shown they can do well, yet when it comes to improving learning outcomes the picture is dismal. We’re past the halfway mark to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and international agencies can’t even agree how learning outcomes should be measured, and so are about to give up trying. Do what is doable, Lee argues, and just get students into school rather than worry about raising the standards of teaching and learning they find when they get there.
I’ve visited more than 30 schools in the last three months, and let me be honest: there have been times during those visits where it’s hard not to agree with that argument. Times when the basics - the essential preconditions - seem so far from being met in a school that it’s hard to know where to start.
Occasionally that’s been about physical infrastructure. At one school I visited in rural Sierra Leone, children could go to the toilet in a pristine new brickwork toilet block paid for (and stamped with the logo of) a major development agency. But their lessons were taught in a shack, with several hundred children divided into cramped ‘classrooms’ with torn shards of rusted metal protruding from the corrugated iron walls and no light, waterproofing, soundproofing or ventilation. When it rained (which it does in Sierra Leone, a lot), attendance fell close to zero.
More often it’s been about people and systems. At one school in Northern Ghana, we turned up to find that 6 of their 13 teachers had been reassigned to other schools and not replaced. Rather than asking for help or improvising a response to this challenging situation - combining classes, bringing in temporary volunteers to cover, switching to a double shift, anything - the headteacher seemed resigned to let students in the grades affected just sit in their classrooms, completely unsupervised, hour after hour, day after day. In Rwanda, I watched a Grade 1 teacher struggle to teach his class about letter sounds in English that he clearly wasn’t sure of himself - unsurprising when it was his third language and one which until recently he wouldn’t have been expected to teach in.
But in the end, I’m an optimist. And on every one of these visits, I’ve found cause for that optimism. For example, the teachers at that school in Sierra Leone were actually doing a remarkably good job, putting the training and the teacher and student curriculum materials we’d provided them with to effective use and keeping students engaged and learning even when the physical environment was so sub-standard. And because the community and the PTA could see the changes that were happening in their children’s learning, they saw more value in attending to the building, and have since fixed up the current structure and got started on a new permanent one.
In Northern Ghana, what impressed me about Mohammed Mumuni, headteacher at Diare Radia Primary School, was his unwillingness to accept the status quo. Mohammed is from the local community and left a post at another school because he wanted to contribute back home. He’s constantly problem-solving and finding ways to enhance the educational experience of his students. Even as we sat talking at a table in a shady spot in his school compound, he was busy creating a beautiful and intricate A2 map of Ghana ready to display in one of his classrooms. He told me about the impact our literacy and numeracy programme is having on his students - and their families. Parents have been thanking him that their children are now able to read messages for them or find contacts on their phone.
In Rwanda, we were thrilled that after just a few months of implementation, schools participating in our Elimu Soko partnership demonstrated strong gains in both literacy and numeracy. But as I’ve spent more time there, what I’ve realized is even more remarkable is that so much of this change has been driven by the system itself: by teachers finding that the data we’re asking them for is not just easy to report but actually useful and actionable, by school leaders finding that the content on our teacher coaching app gives their weekly “communities of practice” meetings a purpose and structure they’d been missing, and by district education officials finding that our curriculum, coaching and data systems provide a useful anchor and focus for their own engagement with schools.
We know more and more about what works in global education. But the only way to make that knowledge count is to try to understand and connect with the students, teachers, school leaders, parents, communities, and governments whose behaviours determine what schools do and the kinds of educational outcomes they produce. That was the lesson Sir Tim Brighouse taught education reformers in England, but it’s a lesson that applies just as much elsewhere.
Rwanda’s dynamic young Minister of Education Hon. Gaspard Twagirayezu and the creator of the Elimu Soko partnership puts it well:
There is still a very long way to go, but we have done a good job in enrollment in primary schools. So, the big question is if kids are now able to go to school but what type of education do they get and when they go to school, what do they get there?
When they go to school, what do they get there: that’s the question we rededicate ourselves to at Rising as we go into the new year. And not just any new year, but our 10th. This time a decade ago I was preparing to quit my job and start a purpose driven education company in Sierra Leone. It would be fair to say I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. But I can honestly say I’ve never regretted it for a second. Watch this space in the new year for how we plan to celebrate #Rising@10.
For now, thanks for all your support this year, and best wishes for 2024.
