EDUCATION-AFRICA: “Change the System to Fit the Child”

By Kristin Palitza Reprint | | Print |

Kristin Palitza

PAARL, South Africa, Mar 23 2010 (IPS) - Teachers in Africa need to be trained to teach pupils from multiple grades simultaneously because although this is a common form of instruction on the continent, many teachers are not educated to do this.

Multi-grade education – a method where a teacher instructs pupils of different ages in one classroom – is a reality in most African countries. But the quality of education has been poor because teachers’ vocational training is only focused on single grade instruction.

An Africa-wide initiative that encourages governments to make multi-grade education national policy, backed by sufficient educational budgets, adjusted curricula and teacher training, now wants to change this.

“In Africa, multi-grade education is not a new idea … but an economic choice based on social circumstances,” Virgilio Juvane, coordinator of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) working group on the teaching profession, told more than a hundred teachers and education department representatives at the Southern African Multi-Grade Education Conference in Paarl, in South Africa’s Western Cape province, on Mar. 22.

In South Africa, for example, 30 percent of primary school children, or three million pupils, attend rural schools where more than one grade is taught by a single teacher at the same time, according to researchers at the Centre for Multi-grade Education (CMGE).

“In remote areas in Zambia, Uganda, Lesotho or Namibia, without such schools, basic education would be virtually impossible,” Juvane said, because a large percentage of children live in remote areas and would have to travel far distances to the nearest mono-grade school.

Juvane and his colleagues hope multi-grade education will soon become national policy in many African countries. “There is a policy gap because many governments are still largely unaware of the benefits multi-grade education,” he said. “There is a perception that multi-grade teaching is an inferior and temporary stop-gap measure, to be replaced by ‘normal’ teaching as soon as possible.”

As a result, national education policies solely focus on mono-grade teaching, with teacher training and teaching resources, including curricula and textbooks, developed only for single-grade class structures. This leaves teachers who are faced with the reality of multi-grade classes at a loss.

To fill this gap, ADEA has been running numerous training workshops on multi-grade teaching since 2005 in 18 African countries. The workshops are inspired by a best practice model developed by the Escuela Nueva Foundation in Colombia, where multi-grade education has been integrated in the country’s national education policy. “Like in African countries, Columbia used to make progress in giving children better access to education, but the quality of education remained poor and dropout rates high,” explained the foundation’s CEO Vicky Colbert de Arboleda.

With the countrywide introduction of a multi-grade education system, which moved away from the traditional, frontal learning system towards a child-centred learning process, all this changed, she says.

Properly implemented, multi-grade learning means that one or two teachers work with small groups of pupils and thereby promote active, participative and collaborative learning. “The results are happy, motivated and confident children with improved academic and social skills,” said Colbert de Arboleda.

The Colombian example proves that it is possible to improve the quality of education in low-income settings, the Colbert de Arboleda claimed: “In some instances, we have found rural, multi-grade schools performing better than urban schools.”

If done right, multi-grade education might offer countries a real chance to reach Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 2, which aims for access to universal primary education by 2015.

In 2009, 32 million children of primary school-going age did not attend school in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco). Most of these children are girls who come from poor rural and urban areas, were either nomadic or disabled or belonged to post-conflict groups.

At the same time, 1.14 million new teachers need to be employed throughout sub-Saharan Africa if countries want to reach MDG 2.

“This need is daunting and poses enormous challenges to governments’ fiscal capacity,” said Juvane, “especially because it’s not only about providing education for all, but also about providing the best quality the country can afford.”

Multi-grade education could offer a solution, he says, because it allows for more small schools to operate in rural areas, which means that more children will be able to attend school, while less teachers need to be employed, as one teacher can instruct multiple grades at once.

In most African countries the gap between mono-grade education policies and multi-grade teaching remains a frustrating reality.

In sparsely populated Namibia, for example, 40 percent of schools do multi-grade teaching, because the country’s rural schools have few teachers and few material resources, Namibia’s curriculum is designed for mono-grade schools, confirmed Gisela Siririka, education officer at the National Institute for Educational Development.

This has severely reduced the quality of education in rural schools. “Namibia’s education policy doesn’t allow flexibility to adapt the curriculum, while our teachers don’t have the skills to produce their own materials. There is a missing link between policy and day-to-day education in schools,” said Siririka.

“We need to change the system to fit the child instead of expecting the child to fit the system,” she demanded.

Teachers in Botswana find themselves in a similar quandary, even though the National Commission on Education recommended the introduction of multi-grade education in 1993 to improve quality of and access to primary education.

“Government has not made available the necessary budget to transform the country’s education system accordingly,” said Billie Morongwa, senior education planner at the University of Exeter in Gaborone.

Despite the fact that a quarter of the country’s children do not attend school, government’s commitment to multi-grade education has been lip service so far, he told conference participants: “We need political commitment to truly increase educational quality.”