Quality Education in Sierra Leone and Liberia

Delayed but not deterred, on April 14th 2015, children in Sierra Leone finally went back to school. For two full school terms, their classrooms lay silent and empty. But with the Ebola epidemic finally abating, they are once again filled with voices.

“I am very excited about the reopening of schools because sitting at home doing nothing is not educating,” says Alie Bangura, 12. Fellow student Joseph Turay agrees: “education is the key to success. I want to learn, and sitting at home playing is not a better thing to do.”

For Rising Academies, April 14th was a particularly significant milestone. Rising Academy Regent, the first in what (it is hoped) will one day become a chain of quality schools in Sierra Leone, was due to open in September 2014. Instead of celebrating, we found ourselves scrambling to find an alternative form of provision that would ensure our students did not miss out on the quality education they signed up for.

For 7 months, our Ebola Crisis Home Outreach programme provided much-needed access to high quality teaching and learning for students that would otherwise have been stuck at home. 193 students in 9 communities attended at least some of our home schooling lessons. Strict Ebola protocols saw our teachers carry out 7,185 Ebola screenings (taking temperatures, washing hands, and checking for signs and symptoms), helping to keep them safe while the epidemic raged around them.

And even though ECHO was very much an emergency measure in response to extraordinary circumstances, the Solon Foundation and Rising Academies have tried from its inception to gauge the impact on student learning outcomes through termly assessments. We are pleased to be able to share the latest results. When we did this exercise in December, we were able to compare students in the ECHO programme to students who had completed our baseline assessment in August but not attended our lessons. This gave us a convenient comparison group. Unfortunately, we were not able to replicate that this time: most of that comparison group ended up enrolling in ECHO from January onwards as parents saw that schools would remain closed past Christmas. That said, we are able to draw some conclusions from looking at the progress over time of students who joined the programme when it first started:

• There was a statistically significant improvement in English reading comprehension.
• The total number of lessons attended from September through to April predicted improvement in reading. The more lessons a student attended, the more their reading scores improved. This was true for both boys and girls.
• English writing and Maths scores increased but differences were not statistically significant.
• There is a lot of work to do on the quality of students’ writing and more basic penmanship, but we saw statistically significant improvements in the number of words that students wrote.

With schools reopened, and most children now back in school, our Ebola Crisis Home Outreach (ECHO) program has, as expected, wound down. But we continue to operate the program on a small scale for a few students whose parents can’t or won’t send them back to their old schools for this school year.

Our efforts have recently received a technological boost. Back in January, GlobalGiving introduced us to the team at Journey, a leading developer of smartphone apps for mobile workforces. The Journey team already had experience of developing apps for the Ebola response, and generously agreed to develop an app for tracking student and teacher attendance. We have now rolled out the app in our school and with our home study groups, leading to more reliable record-keeping and saving teachers and program managers valuable time that can be better spent on improving teaching and learning.

Finally, we’ve been making a big push on scholarships through GlobalGiving and GlobalGivingUK’s 100% match funding campaign. We’ve had an amazing response so far - thank you to everyone has donated. But with our ambitious plans for growth, we'll soon have a lot more schools and a lot more students to be serving. The good news is that if you haven’t already given there’s still time to give and get your donation 100% matched. And if you know other people that might be interested in supporting quality education in Sierra Leone, do spread the word! The campaign ends on May 31st in the UK, though It will still be possible to make donations on the US site for a little while longer.