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"

Massive grant from Asian Development Bank

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

A handful of beans!

It's only a handful of beans, but the way they are being used makes them much more significant. We are continuing our training of teachers from the 7 schools we have been supporting for 5 years as part of the Consolidation phase of our work, and the picture shows how a group of teachers chose to set up a classroom exercise using beans, marker pens and some home made labels. The teachers were attending one of 4 workshops on Classroom Resources we ran last week in which they experienced a wide range of activities using simple resources to make their lessons more child centred. Maths bingo, number dominoes, flash cards, alphabet beans, number fans, phonemes fans and many more featured across the sessions of these highly practical workshops which we hope have motivated the teachers to apply them all, and more, in their schools.