Quality Education in Sierra Leone and Liberia

Grace is a Grade 8 student at one of Rising Academies’ schools in Sierra Leone. She wears a bow in her hair and speaks in a quiet, gravelly voice. When she gets nervous she laughs and runs her hand down her face like she’s trying to wipe away the nerves.

Grace is amazing because even though she has struggled throughout her school career, and even though her family couldn’t afford to send her to school at all for most of the last 4 years, she never gave up on her education.

Like many students in Sierra Leone, Grace struggles with reading. She went to primary school and took the leaving exam, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean a lot. She’s 17 years old, but reads at about the level of a 7 year old.

Girls like Grace are why Rising Academies was set up in the first place: to provide access to a quality education where the existing school system cannot. To make sure it is doing that, Rising takes impact evaluation very seriously. It is being independently evaluated by Oxford University, with the results published on its website.

But the problem with evaluation is that it’s too slow and too broad to really drive improvements in programme design. It’s like walking up a treacherous mountain path backwards. It allows you to say whether you were on track, but that’s not particularly useful if it turns out you weren’t.

When you’re trying to figure out how to help a girl like Grace, you want something that tells you how to improve your programme in something closer to real-time.

That’s why Rising has been collaborating with Results 4 Development (R4D) on a different approach, called a Learning Lab. The Learning Lab involved a 3 step process:

1. The first step was to spend some time with the R4D team really defining the problem to be solved, and identifying the parameters or design constraints of a potential solution. Given the challenges facing girls like Grace, Rising decided that the initial focus would be on supporting literacy among its weakest readers, and that any potential solution needed to be administratively simple, with a low marginal cost in terms of learning resources or staff time.
2. The second step was to move very quickly – within days, not weeks – into prototyping and testing some of the possible solutions on a small scale. One idea that was tested was around high frequency, light touch assessments that were so simple students could administer them to each other. Another involved a peer-to-peer reading club each morning before school, with a series of activities where stronger readers would support struggling readers.
3. The third phase, which has just started, is to put these innovations to the test. It’s not quite at the level of a full randomised controlled trial, but it does involve trying to generate some rigorous evidence about which interventions seem most promising, including by randomly assigning students to different treatment conditions within a number of our schools, with a view to being in a position to take some decisions on what to do next by early next year.

It’s too early to say exactly what the outcome will be, and ultimately the test of this is whether it improves the programme for girls like Grace. But the experience has already been very powerful in creating a different way of thinking about evidence and helping the organisation to approach the task of experimentation in a more systematic way than it had done previously.

Every Monday and Wednesday when Grace and her colleagues gather for their morning Community Meeting, they recite the Rising Academy creed. One of its lines is that “our first draft is never our final draft.” What goes for Grace, goes for Rising Academies as an organisation too. By learning more systematically what works, Grace’s story may just have a happy ending.

Grace is a scholarship student, generously supported by your past contributions. Now you can help others benefit too. From now until October 17^th, GlobalGivingUK is offering a 50% match on all donations to our scholarship fund. Click here to donate or find out more.

Part of being a new organisation is making mistakes and learning from them. This is a story about a mistake we made about shoes for our scholarship students. Footwear might seem an unlikely source of mistakes, but then again one of the other things about being a new organisation is that you don’t always know what’s going to cause you problems.

Here’s what happened. Students at Rising Academy Network schools pay a single inclusive fee that covers everything from tuition to learning materials to uniform. But the uniform doesn’t include footwear: it is up to individual students to decide what to put on their feet, and RAN doesn’t mind too much as long as students are in school and learning. When it came to designing our Scholarship Programme for students to attend a Rising school, we at the Solon Foundation applied the same logic: scholarships would cover nearly everything, but they wouldn’t include footwear. Because neither we nor the schools cared too much what type of shoes the students wore, we thought, the students (and their families) wouldn’t either. Turns out, we were wrong.

The first clue was when we awarded a scholarship to a student named Bonkie. Her family seemed so grateful, and yet for the first couple of days, Bonkie did not come to school. She only turned up at the start of the following week. We were confused. It was only later that we found out she and her family didn’t want her to go to school until she had the appropriate footwear, and so her father had cobbled together some money and gone all the way into town to buy her a pair of smart shoes.

Was it a mistake to think shoes don’t matter? Yes, and that’s something we will correct about our scholarship awards in future. But the bigger mistake was to think that we could know what mattered without listening to the students and families we support. That’s the real lesson we’ll try to remember in future.

Sometimes, though, even mistakes can produce pretty wonderful things. As we’ve explained before, students at Rising are taught the importance of our values, the 4Hs of ‘happy, hardworking, honest and helpful.’ In morning assemblies they remind each other that ‘We Are Rising’ and that ‘we work together, learn together, and succeed together.’

But there is a difference between saying the words and really meaning them. A few weeks ago, another scholarship student, Abass, learned just how much Rising students mean them.

Abass’s circumstances are even more difficult than Bonkie’s. His family set-up is unstable, and in a given week he will often stay under several different roofs. There is simply no way he would be attending a school like Rising without the support of our scholarship donors. As with Bonkie, however, Abass’s scholarship did not include footwear. Imagine his surprise then, when the students in his class – themselves far from well-off – decided to chip in to buy him a new pair of smart school shoes. Talk about putting your values into action.

By the time you read this, school will be over for another year. Come the start of the new school year in September, we expect to expand our scholarship programme, with 4 times as many students – and 8 times as many shoes. We simply couldn’t do it without your support, so thank you.