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 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.

What. A. Year.

If your inbox if anything like mine, it’s probably filling up with emails from organisations offering retrospectives of the last 12 months, and trying to reckon with what they mean for the future.

Well, here’s another one.

But we’ve tried to do something a little different with ours. For starters, we didn’t want to write it by ourselves: we commissioned freelance education writer Natasha Japanwala to write it for us.

Second, although for the most part it’s a story with a happy ending, it wasn’t obvious it would turn out that way, and we wanted Natasha to draw out the critical moments, especially in the early days of the pandemic, that set the course for what followed.

Third, we didn’t want it to be the story of an organisation but of the individuals - old hands and new recruits, senior leaders and junior staff - whose hustle, professionalism, dedication and ingenuity got us through the last year.

Finally, we didn’t want it to just be our story, because the story of Rising On Air also belongs to the many partners around the world who helped make it happen.

Here’s why I think it’s worth sharing. We founded Rising in Sierra Leone in 2014 just before the Ebola Crisis. When COVID-19 hit, a lot of people asked us for advice, assuming the experience of going through one pandemic would have left us better prepared for the second. For the most part, it didn’t. That I nearly got stuck on the other side of the world, thousands of miles from my wife and children, tells you everything about the quality of my foresight in February and March 2020.

But when the scale of the COVID-19 crisis became clear, the way our team rose to meet the challenge was quite something to behold. How and why they were able to do that that owes a lot to the culture we’ve built together over the last 7 years. It’s not perfect and we don’t always live up to our own high standards. But when we needed it, it helped us accomplish some pretty great things. That’s the story I want to pass onto future members of my team, and to anyone else who can take something from it. Natasha has done a very nice job of capturing it.

It’s a long read, but one I think you’ll enjoy.

Other news from Rising

Lots of cool stuff happening at Rising at the moment that I haven’t had the chance to share:

• Hello Rori. As Natasha notes in her piece, one spin-off from our work on Rising On Air that we’re very excited about is Rising On Air Interactive, or Rori for short. Rori will deliver personalised audio clips from the Rising On Air library to users based on their conversations with an AI-powered chatbot. We’re building it with our friends at Filament AI, and with support from Schmidt Futures and Citadel.

• New award for Rising On Air. On the back of being named to hundrED’s “Top 100 Global Innovations” last year, Rising On Air has also 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.

• New city-wide initiative 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 mentors who will work with clusters of all 550 of the city's municipal schools have been recruited and started work.

• Schools back in Ghana. Natasha’s piece rightly focuses on Rising On Air and so doesn’t cover the immense amount of work we’ve been doing since we acquired Omega Schools, Ghana’s largest low cost school network, in the peak of the pandemic in June. Schools in Ghana fully re-opened in January so we got the first chance to see how that work is paying off. Overall, enrolments are up nearly 10% year-on-year, reversing a trend that had seen enrolments fall 14% per annum in the four years pre-acquisition.

• New evaluation in Liberia. In Liberia, Rising has kicked off a new partnership with King Philanthropies. As part of its work with 95 rural government elementary schools under the LEAP PPP, Rising will be testing and rigorously evaluating a new accelerated learning programme called RisingFaster to help get struggling students up to grade level.

November 2020 Update

Rising On Air is a top 100 global innovation for 2021.

We're proud to announce that Rising On Air, the distance learning solution via radio which we developed in response to the covid crisis, has been named one of the top 100 global innovations 'changing the face of education in 2021' by hundrED. Every year, hundrED chooses the highest impact ideas from thousands it receives from organisations around the world, and this year Rising On Air was one of them. Rising On Air is a 20 week programme of language arts and maths lessons for five different age groups, designed for delivery over radio. It has been used by more than 35 partners across 25 countries, translated into a dozen languages, and reached more than 12 million children during the pandemic. Huge congratulations to the Rising team and to our partners around the world who all worked so hard on this for this recognition.

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Back to school

As schools in our region slowly return to something approaching normality - schools in Sierra Leone reopened last month; schools in Liberia and Ghana are partially open and will re-open fully in the next couple of months - we're excited to be launching a new collaboration with ID Insight. The focus is on understanding and tackling barriers to school re-enrollment for girls across our three operating countries post-covid. 

Along with the RCT of our covid response in Sierra Leone being led by the team at CGD, we're excited to be building the global evidence basis about educational responses to covid and its aftermath.

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Two upcoming events for your diary

On Thursday November 19th at 930am EST Rising's George Cowell is joining Dr Amel Karboul, CEO of the Education Outcomes Fund, along with leaders and experts from the Government of Liberia, the World Bank and the UN for a Brookings Institution panel on "Public-Private Partnerships in Education at a Time of Crisis: Lessons from Liberia and around the globe".

On Monday November 23rd at 2pm GMT, I'm joining Jacqueline Novogratz, bestselling author, impact investing pioneer and founder and CEO of Acumen Fund for a conversation about "Quality education for a quality life", hosted by Iqbal Khan from UBS as part of their 'Unfiltered' series.

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And finally...

Last month we graduated our first ever class of senior high school students. It was a big milestone for us. This was the cohort that six years ago found the start of their secondary schooling disrupted by Ebola. This year, the end of their secondary schooling was disrupted by Covid.

This is a special group of students, and I took to Twitter to tell the story of one of them.