Yearly Archives: 2015

Extending Choices and Access for the Poorest to Low Cost Private Schools in India and Africa

Posted on by
Reply

Dr Pauline Dixon from E.G West Centre, Newcastle’s School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, draws our attention to international aid in the latest Idea for an Incoming Government hosted by the Social Renewal blog. In particular, she argues that the evidence supports financial contribution towards low-cost private schools in slums of the developing world.

Pauline-Dixon

What is the problem?

A large body of research published since 2000 has documented the significant and growing contributions of low-cost private schools in slums and villages of developing countries around the world. In India, Pakistan and Africa these schools have been shown to have better facilities, teacher attendance and activity as well as higher student achievements than government schools. And this is all achieved at a fraction of the teacher costs. Low cost private schools are already contributing to quality “education for all”.

However, even though many poor people are able to access low cost private schools costing £4-£5 per month, others are so poor that they are unable to afford the fees. Ifinternational aid were to be given at the grassroots level in the form of targeted vouchers and/or conditional or unconditional cash transfers, then this would assist the poorest to access a better education for their children.

International aid regarding schooling in the developing world needs to focus on quality“Education for All” and not just getting children into ‘schools’ that may be ineffective. Aid agencies should start to consider assisting the poorest parents in gaining access to the better quality and more effective and efficient low cost private schools that already exist in city slums as well as rural areas in Africa and India. Parents voting with their feet away from state education that is failing their children have set an agenda that international aid agencies need to appreciate and acknowledge.

The solution

An education voucher may be a coupon or a cheque that a government or philanthropist provides to parents for them to spend with an education provider of their choice. They may be used as part or whole payment for schooling, which could be in the state or private sector – but typically an approved school participating in the voucher programme. It is possible therefore, through the use of aid vouchers, for funds to reach the poorest at the grassroots level, minimising waste, corruption and theft whilst focusing on efficiency and effectiveness. It is now time that such alternative means of allocating international aid be given a true hearing.

Some, such as Joseph Hanlon et al., also suggest that just giving money to the poor is the best solution to ending poverty. Hanlon et al provide evidence from cash transfer programmes around the world, setting out a case to show that cash transfers given direct to the poor are efficient because recipients use the money in a way that best suits their needs. Cash transfers can be unconditional (no conditions attached for gaining the cash) or conditional (the recipients are required to do something to get the cash transfer). Mothers usually receive the transfer and, in addition, some programmes give money to the student. They can have a broad target or a narrow target providing a very small or large proportion of household income. Typically, conditional cash transfers (CCTs) request those in receipt of the cash to make specific investments in their children’s education and health. The two largest CCTs are in Brazil and Mexico – Bolsa Família and Oportunidades respectively. Chile and Turkey’s CCT programmes focus on the extreme poor and socially excluded, and in Bangladesh and Cambodia CCTs aim at reducing gender disparities in education.

The conditions of the CCTs generally require parents to make investments in their children’s human capital in the form of healthcare and education. The education conditions have typically until now focused on government school enrolment. That is, the child’s school attendance requirements are set at between 80 and 85%. Focus could now be on the low cost private schools’ sector, which would be part of the ‘condition’ of the transfer. The child would need to access a school of ‘quality’ that would increase their attainment and ability, and not merely prove ‘attendance’.

The evidence

In India, randomised control trials have illustrated the advantages of directing funds to the poor through an alternative provider and management sector. The ARK (Absolute Return for Kids) Delhi voucher programme funded by a London based charity has been shown to provide access to the poorest as well as to benefit girls from the poorest families in society. Some of the poorest children in the slums of Delhi started school in 2011 using ARK vouchers. They are attending schools of their own choice. At the end of year one of the voucher scheme, children in both control and treatment groups were tested again in the standardised tests. The results show that there is a positive and statistically significant impact of the voucher programme on math achievement. The voucher adds up to about £100 per year and includes the payment for fees, books, uniform and meals.

The Punjab Education Foundation (PEF) has been running the Education Voucher Scheme (EVS) in Lahore since 2006. In 2011 a total of 40,000 vouchers were offered in 17 districts including Lahore.  Over half of the voucher recipients are girls. The aim of the scheme is to allow the poorest of the poor to have equal access to quality education. The LEAPS project found that children in low cost private schools in Pakistan were 1.5-2.5 years ahead of children in government schools.

In Columbia, the Programa de Ampliacion de Cobertura de la Educacion Secundaria (PACES), was set up 20 years ago and provided vouchers to help 125,000 children from low-income families. Researchers tracked the children over the years. They also tracked a similar number of families who had applied for, but were not allocated vouchers due to limited numbers. The results show:

  • Parents who were given vouchers opted to send their children to private schools and not keep them in the state system
  • The children stayed on until 8th grade (about 13 years old), were less likely to take paid work during school time (therefore concentrated on their studies) and they scored higher in achievement tests than their peers attending government schools.
  • The number of youngsters graduating from high school rose by five to seven per cent and they were more likely to try for university.

Looking at the evidence regarding cash transfers, this shows that they are not only affordable for donors and governments, but provide immediate hardship and poverty reduction for those in receipt of the transfer. They facilitate economic and social development, initiating the potential to reduce long-term poverty. Providing those at the grass roots with a monetary payment, which is regular, assured, practical to administer, fair and politically ‘acceptable’, allows the poor to be in control and in charge of their own development.

References:

Watch Dr Pauline Dixon’s TED Talk on how private schools are serving the poorest in Asia and Africa and why, how and whom they are run and supported by:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzv4nBoXoZc

Taken from the Newcastle University Institute for Social Renewal blog

Written by Dr Pauline Dixon, Reader in Education & International Dev

PROJECT TEACH: Applying Intelligence to Teacher Education

Posted on by
Reply

As part of our ‘Ideas for an Incoming Government’ series, Rachel Lofthouse from the Research Centre for Learning and Teaching (CfLaT)within the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University,writes about the pressing need for supportive improvements to the currentteacher training infrastructure.

What is the problem?

A change is needed in our education system. Rapid policy developments prioritise the role of schools as providers of workplace learning, affecting the experiences of and infrastructure for teacher training. Even those professionals who support ‘on the job’ training for teachers appreciate that meeting the learning and social needs of children and young people has to be every school’s priority. In the current system new teachers are immediately exposed to the performative culture of schools, having their individual successes and failures measured and graded from the moment they arrive.

In some cases this creates significant anxiety. Student teachers may not be encouraged to innovate and instead they simply learn how to survive. Instead of new teachers being a source of inspiration and innovation, they adopt normative practices, and their potential and energy is not garnered for their individual benefit or that of the schools.  In the worst cases, instead of building the necessary professional capacity to work flexibly to meet ever changing demands of the job, they become less resilient to the stresses of the job.

The solution

Student teachers should be educated not only individually but also in teams, tackling real-life workplace challenges through projects based on research, development and practice. The teams would be supported by co-coaches (experienced teachers and academic tutors working together) who enable their team to develop collaborative, empowering and supportive relationships, as well as the knowledge and skills required for them to tackle the genuine challenges of teaching.  The responsibility for the professional learning of all student teachers in a team becomes a collective one; each team is aiming for the best possible outcomes in terms of professional learning, pupil outcomes, and school development.

Through PROJECT-TEACH, intelligent thinking would be applied to teacher training, drawing on the principles of successful learning organisations, coaching and project-based learning:

  • Post-graduate student teachers would form project teams hosted by, and learning on behalf of, an alliance of schools, supported by ‘co-coaches’ – providing combined professional and academic expertise and drawing on principles of servant leadership. The motto of this approach is to ‘gather intelligence and use it intelligently’.
  • The project teams would work through a number of core projects spanning the school year, based on the principles of ‘project-based learning’.  Each project would include the need to teach, and as the year progressed this would be over more sustained periods and include working with learners across the relevant age range and with complex needs.  This teaching comes as a culmination of research and development, making it more evidence-based and allowing for systematic evaluation of outcomes. Student teachers would be registered as post-graduate students, and gain academic awards as well as evidence of meeting professional standards as a result of PROJECT-TEACH.
  • Learning is a social process, and PROJECT-TEACH would enable new teachers to develop skills and knowledge through collaboration on authentic and rich learning tasks set in the context of the workplace. The project briefs would be planned by drawing on the combined expertise of the professional and academic co-coaches who would design them to meet the ambitions of the host schools as well as to take account of the development stage of the new teachers. New teachers would meet the Teacher Standards through coherent development opportunities rather than through atomised practice.  The ‘standards’ would develop significance in terms of long-term occupational capacity, rather than simply as a checklist of time and context limited competencies.

PROJECT-TEACH sits firmly in the current Department for Education policy of creating a ‘Self-improving school led system’, in that it would be ‘evidence based, data rich, sustainable, focused, attract and retain talent and create a collective moral purpose’.  It does however challenge some of the current practices of teacher education.  While the Carter Review of Initial Teacher Training (DfE, 2015) recognised that the ‘challenge for the nation is to maintain a supply of outstanding teachers so that every child has the opportunity to be taught by inspirational, skilled teachers throughout their time in school’ (p.3), it lacked imagination in its proposals for re-creating teacher education.  PROJECT-TEACH can be afforded within current budgets; student teachers pay their training fee, and gain DfE bursaries according to prior qualification.  It is a matter of ensuring that the resource is deployed differently to support the approach and ensure excellent outcomes.

The evidence 

  • Billett (2011) identifies three dimensions to workplace learning; the practice curriculum, the practice pedagogies, and the personal epistemologies.  PROJECT-TEACH would act on each dimension by developing a curriculum based on project-based learning and by addressing the student teachers’ learning needs through more open engagement with authentic complex tasks.
  • Student teachers would be supported by expert co-coaches drawing on the principles of effective teacher coaching (Lofthouse et.al, 2010) and servant leadership through which they prioritise the needs of the student teachers as their main professional role. . This would counter the impacts of the pervasive performativity culture (Ball, 2003) and detrimental practices of judge mentoring (Hobson & Malderez, 2013) in which judgements made by experienced teachers are rapidly revealed to the novice student teachers undermining the potential of mentoring processes to support development.
  • PROJECT-TEACH would develop new teachers’ resilience by enabling them to develop positive collective teacher efficacy and beliefs, which can help to mitigate the deleterious effects associated with socio-economic deprivation (Gibbs & Powell, 2012) and as such would help to address the problems in teacher supply and retention in England.
  • PROJECT-TEACH would support schools to become learning organisations where staff and students ‘continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free’ (http://infed.org/mobi/peter-senge-and-the-learning-organization/).
  • PROJECT-TEACH would build a ‘culture of trust (and challenge) in schools to enable professional learning of teachers to prosper’ which was recognised as key by the 2015 Sutton Trust’s ‘Developing Teachers report and thus encourage the essential components of professional learning of ‘creativity, innovation and a degree of risk-taking’ (Major, 2015).

We need to put energy and vitality back into educating (not simply training) new teachers, ensuring that those that enter the profession gain relevant expertise but also the experience and insight to fulfil their potential role to transform schools for the next generation, not simply replicate the working practices of yesterday’s schools.

References:

  • Ball, S. J. (2003) The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215-228
  • Billett, S (2011) Workplace curriculum: practice and propositions, in F. Dorchy, D Gijbels. Theories of Learning for the Workplace, Routledge, London (pp.17-36)
  • DfE (2015) The Carter review of initial teacher training (ITT)
  • Gibbs, S., & Powell, B. (2012) Teacher Efficacy and Pupil Behaviour: the structure of teachers’ individual and collective efficacy beliefs and their relationship with numbers of children excluded from school. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 82(4), 564-584.
  • Hobson, A.J. (2013) Judgementoring and other threats to realizing the potential of school-based mentoring in teacher education, International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, Vol 2 [2] 89-108
  • Lofthouse, R., Leat, D and Towler, C., (2010)  Improving Teacher Coaching in Schools; A Practical Guide, CfBT Learning Trust
  • Lofthouse, R. & Thomas, U. (2014) Mentoring student teachers; a vulnerable workplace learning practice, International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education Vol. 3 (3) pp. 201 – 218
  • Lofthouse, R., Thomas, U. & Cole, S. (2011) Creativity and Enquiry in Action: a case study of cross-curricular approaches in teacher education. Teacher Education Advancement Network Journal, Vol. 2(1), pp.1-21.
  • Major, L.E. (2015)  Developing Teachers; Improving professional development for teachers, The Sutton Trust

Taken from the Newcastle University Institute of Social Renewal blog

Written by Dr Rachel Lofthouse, Head of Teacher Learning and Development (Education Section)