Rising Academy students shine in national exams

Sierra Leone's National Primary School Examination (NPSE) results published last week saw Rising students register some of the strongest results in the country.

Rising students achieved an average aggregate score of 303.5, the fifth highest average score out of the 4,635 schools in the country, according to the official report from the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education (MBSSE).

57 Rising students sat the exam from Rising's four campuses and all passed. The total number of passes is higher than any other school in the top 10.

This 100% pass rate for Rising compares to 81.2% nationwide and 88.2% for other private schools, while Rising’s average aggregate score of 303.5 compares to a national average of 249.1 for all students and 264.0 for private school students.

Results were extremely consistent across Rising's four primary school campuses. If they were treated as separate schools rather than a single entity, they would fill 4 of the top 9 places in the school rankings.

We were also delighted to see continued evidence of gender equity. At Rising, girls out performed boys (average score of 304.0 vs 302.8 for boys), whereas nationally they did slightly worse than boys (248.7 vs 249.6)

Of course, our own Rising Academy Network of schools is only one part of what we do in Sierra Leone. We're also looking forward to seeing how the 25 schools we've been supporting through the government's Education Innovation Challenge programme have fared, as well as the more than 500 schools we're working with under our partnership with Freetown City Council and EducAid.

But for now, huge congratulations to the students for making us so proud, and thanks to our parents, teachers, school leaders and support staff for their hard work in supporting this achievement.

Growing our partnerships with government

On the subject of government partnerships, I'm delighted to announce that in the next academic year Rising will be adding a new partnership in Sierra Leone, innovating within two of our existing partnerships in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and entering into a partnership with the Government of Ghana for the first time. Taken together, these programmes will see us working in more than 800 schools with a quarter of a million students in the coming year.

In Sierra Leone, we've been chosen as one of the operators for a new Education Outcomes Fund programme that will see us working with 66 schools in the north and east of the country. We're also deepening our Freetown City Council partnership, implementing and evaluating our catch-up numeracy programme FasterMath in a subset of the schools.

In Ghana, we're joining forces with pioneering NGO School for Life Ghana to support out-of-school children and improve the quality of 170 of the country's most disadvantaged schools under another Education Outcomes Fund programme.

In Liberia, our longstanding partnership with the Government of Liberia under the LEAP programme looks set to be renewed for another 5 years. In addition to our existing support to 95 government schools through curriculum, teacher coaching and school data systems, we'll be working with Imagine Worldwide to explore the potential for blended learning via adaptive software on tablets to improve outcomes for students.

Rigour, experimentation and evidence are fundamental to our approach to these partnerships. We’re currently participating in three "gold standard" randomised controlled trials in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and three more will be starting in Sierra Leone and Ghana soon. For us, this is how we demonstrate to our government partners the impact we are having, identify what we need to improve and fine tune, and advance the global public good of an improved evidence base about what works.

Other news from around Rising

• We're coming to the end of the second term at RISE, the new school we launched in Ghana back in January (and our first in Ghana under the Rising banner). The initial feedback from parents and students has been really positive and we're excited to roll out further RISE campuses in the years ahead.

• Shabnam Aggarwal has joined Rising as our first Chief Technology Officer to lead our rapidly growing content and digital division. Shabnam has extensive experience of building, managing and shipping tech products, having formerly founded KleverKid, a venture backed edtech startup in India, and most recently as entrepreneur-in-residence at Dimagi, where she led their innovation lab.

• One of her early priorities will be the continued development of Rori, our virtual math tutor chatbot, which has been shortlisted for another major award - we hope to hear if we've been successful in September.

Thanks as ever for all your support. Don’t hesitate to drop me a line on email or follow us on social media.

Rising's CTO speaks on CNBC panel for MasterCard Foundation’s Young Africa Works initiative

When I do my work, when I look at what EdTech can accomplish, I think equality is the most important aspect to bringing people out of intergenerational poverty, to helping people access the opportunities they deserve.

— Shabnam Aggarwal, Chief Technology Officer
CNBC interview “Using Ed-Tech to Drive Learning for Displaced Youth”
for MasterCard Foundation’s Young Africa Works initiative

Rising's 2021 in Review

As a wise man once said, 'Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.' With 2021 drawing to a close, here are some highlights from a topsy-turvy but transformational year.

January

• Rising beat out competition from more than 1,000 other entries to be named a winner of the Schmidt Futures Tools Competition. Our winning concept was to deliver personalised Rising On Air audio content to learners on phones via an AI-powered chatbot called Rori.

• After 4 straight years of shrinking enrolments, Omega Schools in Ghana re-opened for the new school year with enrolment up 5% on the pre-Covid figure.

• Rising's Elsiemae "Mel" Buckle was named a "COVID-19 Heroine" by the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center.

February

• In Sierra Leone, Rising’s new School Leader Support Programme, a partnership between Rising, Educaid, and Freetown City Council, was officially launched by the Mayor of Freetown. The two year pilot initiative is focusing on school leadership and raising standards in all 550 municipal schools in the city, which serve some 175,000 students.

• On the back of being named to hundrED’s “Top 100 Global Innovations” last year, Rising On Air won in the Literacy category at the Annual Awards of the mEducation Alliance ("Mobiles for Education"). The awards seek to acknowledge exemplary edtech activities, with a particular focus on lower-resource developing country contexts.

March

• In Liberia, Rising kicked off a new partnership with King Philanthropies. As part of our work with government schools under the Liberia Education Advancement Program (LEAP), Rising is testing and rigorously evaluating a new accelerated learning programme called FasterReading to help get struggling students up to grade level in literacy.

• This year also marked the five year anniversary of the LEAP Program. From small beginnings in 2016 operating 5 rural government elementary schools, Rising now operates 95 schools across 10 counties. We're honoured to have had the opportunity to support the Ministry of Education in its reform efforts these past 5 years.

April

• We published One Year On, the inside story of our pandemic response. When the scale of the COVID-19 crisis became clear, the way our team rose to meet the challenge was quite something to behold. This piece does a very nice job of telling that story.

• Our AI-powered chatbot Rori followed its success in the Schmidt Futures Tools Competition by scooping the Grand Innovation Prize at the Jacobs Foundation / MIT Solveathon.

May

• Former Omega student Tyrone Marghuy won his high court battle against Achimota School. Tyrone, 15, attended Omega for junior high school and scored the maximum possible mark in his BECE terminal exams, entitling him to his pick of top schools for senior high. He chose Achimota, founded in 1927 and historically one of the most prestigious schools in the country. There was just one problem: as a Rastafarian, Tyrone has dreadlocks, but school policy required all students to wear their hair short. The school refused his admission unless he cut it, sparking a national debate which gripped Ghana's social and broadcast media for weeks. He took the case to court and was successful in overturning the school's decision.

June

• in Sierra Leone we delivered two days of training on safeguarding and school standards to close to 500 School Leaders representing the heads of nearly all the municipal schools in Sierra Leone's capital.

• On behalf of the wider Omega family, students at Omega School Asempa joined citizens from across Ghana in a National Tree Planting exercise, part of the Greening Ghana Project. Nationwide an estimated 7 million trees were planted during the exercise, helping to replenish vegetation lost to deforestation and urbanisation.

July

• Rising was included in B Corp’s "Best for the World 2021" list in the Customer category. B Corps are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose.

August

• All sixty-two of the Rising students who sat the National Primary School Examination (NPSE) in Sierra Leone passed. Their achievement was all the more remarkable given that they were kept out of school for 6 months last year because of the pandemic. 57 students (94% of the total) achieved an aggregate score of 289 and above, compared to 10% of students nationally. 10 students (16% of the total) achieved aggregate scores of 313 and above, compared to 1% nationally.

• In its official report announcing the results, the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education also paid tribute to partners (like Rising) who had contributed to radio teaching programmes locally and nationally during and after the pandemic-induced school closures, noting that "without their effort overall performance may not have been as good."

• In Ghana, construction works began on our new RISE school, scheduled to open in January. Meanwhile our Managing Director in Ghana, Alain Guy Tanefo, did a fantastic job talking about lessons learned from his 6 years at the helm of our Omega Schools network as a guest on Jenny Anderson's Learnit podcast. Have a listen here.

September

• In partnership with IDInsight and Echidna Giving, we published the second and final report from a study exploring students' experience of remote learning and the barriers they faced during the COVID-19 school closures and their subsequent return to school. The report found an encouragingly high propensity to re-enrol in school once it re-opened but that the daily time spent on educational activities during the closures had been 90% below its pre-pandemic level, highlighting the degree of catch-up required.

• Researchers at CGD published the final report of an experiment we conducted with them during the pandemic to test whether SMS nudges and one-to-one teacher phone calls might help students get more out the radio lessons. Confirming our own internal data, the researchers concluded that they hadn't. One of the things we like to say at Rising is that "however well we do, we always strive to do better" and so, while disappointing, the study has given us plenty of food for thought, and we're excited to have the chance to apply some of these lessons to some new work on tutoring we're planning for next year. Watch this space.

October

• As part of our ongoing experimentation with new ways of delivering our content (as well as preparing for future school disruptions), Rising tested and evaluated using Interactive Voice Response (IVR) via phone to provide additional numeracy content to students in our Omega schools in Ghana as well as supplementary teacher coaching content. Although we didn’t see any additional benefit in learning for those students who participated in the student intervention, we did see improvements for teachers who participated in the teacher intervention.

November

• Our Rori chatbot was named a "Breakthrough of the Year" in the learning category by Germany's Falling Walls. Rising's George Cowell travelled to Berlin to collect the award. You can watch his speech explaining what Rori is and why we built it here.

• We agreed with fellow LEAP provider UMOVEMENT to implement our 'Learning Check' student assessment with the 5,000 pupils they support. This was one of a number of new partnerships we kicked off with other actors in the education ecosystem as we increasingly look to make the operating system that has powered our own schools available to others.

December

• A landmark publication from UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring Report has urged governments to recognise the contribution of non-state actors in education and "to see all education institutions, students and teachers as part of a single system". The impact of Rising's work in Sierra Leone gets a shout-out in the report.

• Finally in Liberia, we undertook our largest teacher training initiative to date, training more than 800 teachers at simultaneous events in more than a dozen locations across Liberia. In total we estimate that cumulatively more than five and a half thousand teachers have now received training in Rising's teaching methods since we launched 8 years ago.

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What's In Store For 2022?

There's so much happening in 2022 that we can't wait to tell you about. Here are a few things to whet your appetite:

• We've appointed our first Chief Technology Officer to lead our burgeoning content and digital business.

• We're expecting to confirm several exciting new government partnership programmes.

• We'll be launching our new RISE school in Ghana in January.

• AND we're planning to complete our expansion to a fourth country later in 2022.

Rising students excel in primary school exams

All sixty-two of the Rising students who sat this year’s National Primary School Examination (NPSE) in Sierra Leone have passed. This 100% pass rate compares to a national average of 77.6%.

The students’ achievement is all the more remarkable given that they were kept out of school for 6 months last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Not only did they pass, but many achieved outstanding aggregate scores. 57 students (94% of the total) achieved an aggregate score of 289 and above, compared to 10% of students nationally. 10 students (16% of the total) achieved aggregate scores of 313 and above, compared to 1% nationally.

The students, from all four of our primary schools in Sierra Leone, are the first Rising students to sit these exams since we began offering the primary grades. They will now be able to progress to the Junior Secondary phase and with scores like these should have their pick of schools - though naturally we hope they’ll all stay with Rising!

In its official report announcing the results, the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education also paid tribute to partners (like Rising) who had contributed to radio teaching programmes locally and nationally during and after the pandemic-induced school closures, noting that "without their effort overall performance may not have been as good."

Congratulations to the students, their teachers and school leaders, as well as to our head office team, for this accomplishment. We’re so proud of them and delighted that all their hard work in such difficult circumstances has paid off.

Using Podcasts to Make Audio Lessons More Accessible

Rising On Air — our free distance learning solution that redesigns our proven, high-quality, structured curriculum content for delivery via radio and SMS — has reached over 10 million children in 25 countries. The scale of that reach creates opportunities to continue adapting both our curriculum content and the way we deliver it to students in some of the most remote parts of the world. 

When schools closed across Liberia on March 16, radio was our go-to platform to bring audio lessons to students — in both Liberia and Sierra Leone, only 1 out of 8 people have access to the internet, making online learning impossible. Radio is much more ubiquitous, reaching 70% of the population in both countries, according to our estimates. 

By sharing our audio lessons via the new Rising On Air podcast, we hope to enhance our initial efforts by making our curriculum available in a more flexible format that allows students to catch up with lessons if they miss a broadcast. We also hope to better serve students with learning disabilities, as podcasts can be played back multiple times and at variable speeds. 

We are sharing our audio lessons via a podcast after thinking about the Tecno phones most Liberians own. Since podcasts require just one download, after which they can be played offline, they are accessible to students who can afford only limited data and live in rural areas where network signals are unreliable. 

Our audio lessons are compatible with any standard podcasting app, though we recommend installing the open source AntennaPod app from the Google Play Store, as it does not require much memory to run, and is therefore ideal for low memory phones like Tecno. The availability of apps like AntennaPod allowed us to transfer our lessons to a podcasting format without investing in building out our own infrastructure. 

We also hope this feature will benefit our partners and others looking to adapt our lessons by making it easy to listen to how we have transformed our scripts into audio lessons. The scripts available to download on our website are culturally generic — we wanted to demonstrate how to tailor these for different contexts, by adding local background music or providing culturally relevant examples. 

However, we are aware that the way we have customized the audio lessons currently on the podcast will not necessarily resonate with students who are not based in Liberia and Sierra Leone. For this reason, we’ve been looking at opportunities, working with our partners at the EdTech Hub, to create a series of more universal podcasts so that the audio content is more culturally appropriate for a global audience. 

In the meantime, we are interested in collaborating with our global partners to include their adapted audio lessons on our podcast portal, after screening and evaluating all lessons to assure quality. Though we launched Rising On Air to reach students during the COVID-19 pandemic, delivering lessons via radio and podcasts is an evergreen solution that should persist beyond this emergency.

إطلاق بوابة رايزنغ عالهوا بالعربية

راجين الوصول إلى المزيد من الطلبة، أطلقنا بوابة اللغة العربية، حيث تتوفر نصوصنا الإذاعية للتعلم عن بعد. يأتي هذا بعد نجاح بوابتنا الفرنسية، التي وصلت إلى الطلاب في بنين، وبوركينا فاسو، وتشاد، وجمهورية الكونغو الديمقراطية، وغينيا. تعتبر اللغتان العربية والفرنسية من بين اللغات الأكثر انتشارًا في إفريقيا: بالإضافة إلى الدروس المترجمة إلى هذه اللغات، أنشأنا بوابات منفصلة لتقديم تجربة مستخدم مخصصة للشركاء الناطقين باللغة العربية والفرنسية.

يتولى فريق مكون من ١١ مترجمًا متمركزين في جميع أنحاء العالم والعالم العربي من المملكة العربية السعودية إلى لبنان، بقيادة مديرة المشروع سمية عبد الرزاق، مسؤولية ترجمة ألف حصة دراسية تغطي القراءة والكتابة، وفنون اللغة، والحساب في خمسة مستويات مختلفة من مرحلة الطفولة المبكرة إلى المدرسة الثانوية. تشمل الدروس كذلك رسائل الصحة والسلامة. بالإضافة إلى دروسنا، ستتوفر أيضًا برامج التطوير المهني، و نصوص مكالمات المعلمين للتقوية باللغة العربية.

تقول عبد الرزاق: "نحن لا نترجم الدروس فقط". تختلف طريقة تدريس الصوتيات والقواعد باللغتين الإنجليزية والعربية، وكذلك الترتيب الذي تُقرأ به الأرقام - يحتاج المترجمون إلى الانتباه إلى النصوص للتأكد من إعادة صياغة التعليمات. على سبيل المثال، عندما ترشد البرامج النصية الطلاب إلى رسم الأرقام، يجب إعادة كتابة التوجيهات بحيث يتم توجيه الطلاب لرسم الأرقام كما هي في الأرقام العربية الشرقية.

لم تقتصر صعوبة الترجمة على نصوصنا فقط، بل كان علينا التعامل مع عدة تحديات تقنية من أجل تقديم المحتوى العربي على موقعنا، فمن المعروف أن معظم منصات تطوير الويب مصممة لمستخدمي اللغة الإنجليزية. عندما تتضاعف الفجوة الرقمية بحواجز اللغة، تتفاقم أوجه عدم المساواة. أملنا في إطلاق البوابة العربية هو أن يتمكن غير الناطقين باللغة الإنجليزية من تصفح موقعنا وتكييف البرامج النصية مع احتياجاتهم.

يمكن استخدام نصوص الراديو العربية الخاصة بنا في أي مكان، من المغرب إلى العراق، نظرًا لأن اللغة العربية الفصحى هي اللغة الرسمية للنص المكتوب وتستخدم في التعليم في كل مدارس الشرق الأوسط وأفريقيا. على الرغم من أن دروسنا الإذاعية مصممة أصلًا للاستجابة لأزمة جائحة كورونا، من الممكن استخدامها لتقديم التعلم عن بعد للطلاب المتأثرين بأزمات أخرى أيضًا. تقول عبد الرزاق، التي نشأت في سوريا، "التعلم غير الرسمي مهم حقًا لمجتمعات النازحين واللاجئين، حيث يفوت الطلبة عادةً عدة سنوات من التعليم المدرسي". تسمح الدروس الإذاعية، في حين أنها حل مؤقت، بإحراز تقدم تدريجي للأطفال خارج المدرسة. "يعطيهم هذا الدافع للتعلم بأنفسهم، و للبقاء متفائلين."

يمكنكم الوصول إلى بوابة رايزنغ عالهوا العربية عبر الرابط التالي: https://www.risingacademies.com/onair-arabic

Launching Rising On Air in Arabic

To reach more students, we have launched an Arabic portal, where our distance learning radio scripts are available in translation. This follows the success of our French portal, which has reached students in Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Guinea. Both Arabic and French are among the most widely spoken languages in Africa: in addition to lessons translated into these languages, we created separate portals to deliver a tailored user experience to Arabic and French-speaking partners.

A team of 11 translators, led by a project manager Somaia Razzak, and based all over the world — ranging from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon — is responsible for translating 1000 lessons covering literacy, language arts, and numeracy at five different levels across K-12, from early childhood education to senior secondary school. The lessons also include health and safety messages. In addition to our lessons, our professional development and teacher tutorial call scripts will also be available in Arabic. 

“We are not just translating the lessons,” says Razzak. The way phonics and grammar are taught in English and Arabic are different, as is the format in which numbers are read — the translators need to pay attention to the scripts to make sure the instructions are rephrased. For example, when the scripts instruct students to draw out numbers, the directions have to be rewritten so that students are instructed to draw numbers as they are shaped in the Eastern Arabic numerals. 

The trickiness of translation was not limited to just our scripts. We had to troubleshoot in order to get the Arabic script onto our website, as most web development platforms are built for English-language users. When a digital divide is multiplied with language barriers, inequalities are exacerbated. Our hope in launching the Arabic portal is that non-English speakers can navigate our website and adapt the scripts to their needs.

Our Arabic radio scripts can be used anywhere, from Morocco to Iraq, since Modern Standard Arabic is the formal language of written text and is used in schools in the Middle East and Africa. While our radio lessons were designed to respond to the COVID-19 crisis, they can be used to bring distance learning to students affected by other crises as well. “Informal learning is really important for internally-displaced and refugee communities, where students miss several years of school education,” says Razzak, who grew up in Syria. Radio lessons, while a temporary solution, allow for incremental progress for out-of-school children. “It gives them the motivation to learn on their own, and a reason to remain hopeful.”

The Rising On Air Arabic Portal can be located here: https://risingacademies.com/onair-arabic
It was created through the generous support of the UBS Optimus Foundation.

Expanding our network in Liberia

Photo credit: Kyle Weaver

We're proud to announce that the Ministry of Education has invited Rising Academies to significantly expand its school network in Liberia. From September 2017, Rising Academies will be operating 29 government schools across 7 counties.

The move comes as part of an expansion of the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) program. To learn more about PSL, click here. The Ministry’s decision to award Rising more schools in the second year of PSL followed an in-depth review and screening process, including unannounced spot checks of PSL schools. Rising Academies was one of three providers to be awarded the top “A” rating for its strong performance in Year 1.

We're really proud of the progress our schools have made this year. If you want to learn more about how we've been rigorously tracking this progress and using data to inform our approach, check out our interim progress report here.

Our press release on the announcement of the Ministry's Year 2 plans is available here.