A news report from Kathmandu in the last 24 hours has detailed a massive grant from the Asian Development Bank to fund improvements to Nepal's crumbling education system. The initial paragraph from the report is as follows:
"The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has approved a policy-based grant for the School Sector Program which supports the Government of Nepal’s ongoing education reform initiatives with stronger focus on gender, social inclusion, and quality.
The ADB Board of Directors has approved grant finance totaling $65 million from the Asian Development Fund and Technical Assistance Special Fund grant of $500,000 for the program, according to a release issued by ADB on Thursday."
The good news is the size of the grant and its focus on education. Any grant funding of this magnitude speaks volumes for the organisation making the grant and its obvious care for Nepal and the education of its children.
The bad news is that once again the focus seems wide of the mark with the report mentioning "school buildings, textbooks, quality, policy reforms, incentives, safety issues, management and governance." There is also a wonderful statement in the report which says "It will also strengthen institutional capacity of the government agencies to implement the program effectively, mitigate fiduciary risks, and strengthen monitoring and evaluation systems."
As our supporters and regular readers know we have advocated for 5 long years that the way to develop "Quality Education" in Nepal is to first define it as a set of ingredients and methods (a bit like a recipe making a chicken curry!), then to source and develop these components systematically over a defined time period. We have yet to find such a recipe in Nepal, and educationalists, ministerial officials, teachers, and NGOs, sprinkle their reports and utterances with this term, but nobody can ever answer the question "what IS quality education, how do you define it, what are the components?"
The report also mentions the School Sector Reform Plan (SSRP) launched at the end of 2009 which attempted to specify what needed to be done to improve the system in the various sectors. We work in the Primary sector, and constantly meet Heads and teachers from government and community schools in Kathmandu who have never heard of the SSRP and are amazed when we tell them of its content. In fact it was our reading of the SSRP two years ago that highlighted its deficiencies and led us to develop a definition of Quality Education for our own development work with 7 schools. The definition has been used to guide our work to improve these schools which have shown remarkable growth in all the variables you would expect such as enrolment rates, completion rates, exam passes.
However it is in the area of teacher training that we have our biggest gripe. Nowhere in the ADB report is there any mention of learning processes, teaching techniques, child centredness, formative assessment strategies, teacher capability, continuous teacher development. In fact we have seen that THIS is the key to it all, to hell with the buildings, the governance, fiduciary risks, monitoring systems. To hell with policies, institutional capacity. The real issue is CAPABILITY. The capability of the teachers to deliver quality education in a child centred way (at Primary level) to the children of Nepal. We are doing it for 400 teachers a year on a budget of £25,000. Give me the $65 million and I will develop the best teacher training and implement it in the whole of Asia!!
If you want to read the full report go here ADB Report
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