NSA Education Experiment #1106!

Organisations either grow or decline, but they never stand still. This was one of the first principles I ever learned as a young organisational psychologist and I was never sure whether the original quote came from someone in the Isaac Newton mould (a scientific truth) or from the Buddha himself (one of the Noble Truths). In the end it didn't matter, because it's true; all organisations MUST grow or in fact they will decline, and this is the principle we have applied to NSA from Day One in 2007. Growth is as much about intellectual development as increases in income, resources, and influence, and this is why I must often drive colleagues to the point of insanity by constantly instituting "experiments" in schools, on courses, at events, just to see what will happen and whether we can develop "a better way" or a "new/additional way" of doing something.

We currently have two such experiments underway in Kathmandu, which if successful could make educationalists really sit up in Nepal. Both are being conducted by Babita in two of our partner schools and involve the topics of Phonics and P4C. When she was in the UK recently Babita received a lot of specialist training in these two areas and we are currently running a 12 weeks pilot programme where Babita teaches these two topics for half a day in each school every day.Class 1 & 2 are receiving Phonics lessons to learn to read and speak English, and Classes 3-6 are receiving P4C sessions (renamed by us to V4C,Values For Children). We have conducted perception tests on Classes 3-6 in each school using MALS and QEQ and will retest after 3 months to see if there is any change in the child's perception of their education, the school, their teachers and so on. Separately Babita will continuously assess the children in Class 1 & 2 for progress through Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the UKs Letters & Sounds syllabus. 

Will we see any difference in test scores? Will the children's English speaking ability improve? Will children's behaviour change influenced by regular values-based lessons? We certainly hope so, but this is the sort of experiment we MUST conduct before we have the right to train Nepalese teachers in any depth in these topics. We need evidence we can present to the Ministry of Education if we are to grow to our next stage of development, evidence we take for granted in the UK, but this is not acceptable if you are trying to influence a whole country to change!

We cannot leave this article without acknowledging who set us down this path, and we are very grateful to Dr Sue Palmer at The Phonics Academy for her development of our knowledge and thinking about phonics, to Lizzy Lewis at SAPERE for her encouragement to use P4C in the first place, and finally to Jason Buckley, The Philosophy Man, who patiently trained yours truly in the basics of the P4C technique. We would encourage anyone interested in these subjects to visit their respective websites:

The Phonics Academy  

SAPERE

The Philosophy Man

"The key to quality education..............."

The letter from Barry Hitchcock, Nepal Director at Asia Development Bank has prompted much discussion amongst Trustees and supporters, and one comment is worthy of a full posting. Janice Brockbank is Educational Advisor to NSA and has been much involved in the creation of our teacher training Academy and the provision of volunteer teachers to work and run training programmes in Kathmandu. In essence we are all stakeholders with an interest in developing Nepal's education system and therefore we all hold a piece of the jigsaw which is vital to making up the whole picture. 

Janice says:

"This note is directed towards Mr Hitchcock whose response to NSA demonstrates genuine openess to listen to all who have a desire to improve education in Nepal. 

It is encouraging that ADB recognises that the largest of philanthropic organisations may not necessarily have all the necessary information to create the essential impact required. Support has been supplied in many forms historically with no significant impact so 'doing more of the same' is unlikely to work.

NSA has created a blue print for quality education that is not currently addressed in SSRP. NSAs Academy training programme targets the heart of quality learning which requires skilful and motivated teachers. Bricks and mortar and statistics of increased attendance look impressive providing evidence and data that is simple to collect but it is the interaction between effective teaching and children that will raise standards and the quality of education for the future citizens of Nepal.

Dr Brian and Champa Metters have established a practical, innovative training programme providing a key to open the door to quality education. It is not too great a statement to suggest that NSAs Academy 'blueprint' has the potential to transform learning for children and young people in Nepal should its principles be adopted and supported by Nepal's Ministry of Education and rolled out nationwide." 

We will be following up with our own response to Mr Hitchcock in a few days time.

A positive response from Asia Development Bank

We have had a reply today to the email sent to Asian Development Bank and it is copied in it's entirety below. The letter is from Barry Hitchcock, the Nepal ADB Director, and before we offer a follow up response we would welcome comments from our readers, either sent direct to us or as Comments on the Blog below.

"Thank you very much for your email and we appreciate your concern about the quality of education in Nepal. We do acknowledge that while the education reforms in Nepal have been very successful in improving access and equity, the progress in improving quality has been slower than anticipated. As a result, we are making greater efforts to improve the quality of education. Our new program, School Sector Program (SSP) has been designed to support the Government of Nepal's 7 -year (FY2Q1Q-FY2016) School Sector Reform Program (SSRP) which includes a strong component of need based teachers training programs. Currently the SSRP is supported by ADB and 8 other development partners (Australia, Denmark, European Union, Finland, Nonvay, UNICEF, United Kingdom and World Bank) using a sector-wide approach.
Building on the achievements of the Education for All Program (2004-2009), the SSRP aims to (i) expand access and equity, (ii) improve quality and relevance, and (iii) strengthen the institutional capacity of the entire school education system. As part of the SSRP implementation, the government and development partners have been working collaboratively with different stakeholders such as the associalion of international non-governmental organizations (AlN) and the national federation of non government organizations. Representatrves from these institutions have been participating in our joint consultation missions, annual and quarterly reviews, sharing their concerns and providing  important feedbacks. Further, the members of AIN have also attended regular meetings of development partners. In the upcoming Joint Consultation Mission (1 'l-13 December 2011), the representative from AIN will provide their observations on the implementation of SSRP on 13 December 201 1 at the Ministry of Education. We have been, and will continue to accept insights from non-state and other stakeholders in order to further the quality of education reforms.
ADB welcomes the concerns raised by the stakeholders so that we can all work in partnership towards improving the quality of education in Nepal. ADB is currently the focal point for the development partners. We look foruard to your suggested meeting with us so that we can discuss your concerns and your involvement for improving quality of education in Nepal.
With kind regards,
Barry Hitchcock"

Our own immediate comments are first that we are very grateful for a reply, something we rarely get from our own DFID, second we find the reply to be positive in nature, and third we look forward ourselves to meeting with ADB in the near future.

The usual response?

It is now over a week since we blogged about the large grant from ADB to Nepal's government to spend on education projects and we followed it up by writing to Barry Hitchcock, the Nepal Director of ADB .......... twice. And guess what? No response, just like our own DFID!

So we thought you might like to see what we wrote to him, and if you were so inclined maybe to write to him too by visiting the ADB Nepal website and using the form to contact him here ADB Contact.

Send us a copy too.

"Dear Barry,

I am writing to thank and congratulate you on your recent grant to the Nepal government of $65 million of which $500k is a technical grant towards developing the education system. As a group of people working towards the same goal we are encouraged by ADB's obvious care and concern for Nepal and the education of its children.

We are not so encouraged however by the way the way the government intends to spend the money. It seems to us that they are perpetuating the "same old way" of pouring vast sums into building schools (often in remote areas only), policy development, monitoring and other ethereal tasks that have no direct and immediate benefit. 

In many ways this is like the endless constitution creation that has been going on for several years, occupying the lawmakers time when they should be working on electricity supply, water supply, roads & traffic problems, job creation and of course ..... education development. It is the complete lack of any "customer focused" thinking on their part that infuriates us as we ourselves attempt to train/retrain 400 teachers in Kathmandu every year in some key concepts of quality education and child centred learning techniques at primary school level. Since inception 5 years ago we have developed 7 inner city schools via a programme of School Leadership, Material Aid, Teacher Training to the extent that we have measured evidence of growth and improvement. In fact the proof has been so overwhelming that we are now setting up a teacher training Academy based on UK teaching techniques which we will deliver free to 400 community and government teachers a year, with 300 of these returning annually for advanced training.

Why am I telling you this? NOT because I am seeking money or funding, but because sooner or later the government has to accept that it has NO clear definition of quality education and that however it is defined it will never be achieved by building schools or developing policies and monitoring frameworks. It is teachers who will deliver the goods, trained teachers who have the right techniques (at primary level) and the motivation and tools to deliver them. We have tried to involve our own country's DFID in a dialogue on this as well as the Ministry of Education but it seems our results don't speak loudly enough compared with the size of our wallets! Can we influence ADB to speak with a similar voice (because your wallet is bigger than ours!), can we interest ADB even in meeting with us to discuss the issue?

Regards"