Quality Education for All?

I have just returned from a three-day conference in Kigali on the theme 'Quality Education in Rwanda'. There are major difficulties associated with the transformation in education which is taking place in this country. Teachers are woefully underpaid and, because of the move to 9 years basic education for all, the government has introduced double shifting into the teaching day. There are simply not enough classrooms or teachers to lump everyone together so teachers do two half-day shifts to be able to cover all the students of up to 60 in a class. The long day, poor salary and large class sizes also make for low motivation among many staff. The pupils, on the other hand, have a relatively short day which parents often take advantage of, using them as workers in the fields. There are possible ethical questions about child labour but who can blame the parents for seeing idle children as a resource. There are, after all, no libraries or study centres that these children can attend before or after school. There is no reading culture here and precious few books especially graded readers suitable for early learners of English.

Attentive participants

Most teachers have been educated in French and now have to teach in English. In addition they are supposed to start using what is called a 'child-centred curriculum' which basically means children more actively participating in their learning. This modern, western approach to learning conflicts with the traditional chalk and talk method which is still very much the norm here. It is not uncommon to observe classes where children will not say a single word during a lesson which may be totally conducted in heavily accented, faltering and grammatically incorrect English. At the conference one VSO teacher, who is a fluent Irish speaker, made the audience feel bewildered by giving a brilliant demonstration in incomprehensible Gaelic of what it must feel like for large numbers of Rwandan students to sit in classrooms and be subjected to a daily round of uncontextualised blather in a foreign language.

A keen student voices his concerns

But where to begin to solve the problem? There is no doubt that the teachers are planting bad habits into the students especially where big words are transplanted from the French pronunciation directly into English. And how, if the teachers are struggling with English themselves, can they be expected to teach effectively using pair and group work activities associated with this new methodology? Yet this kind of learning is essential if Rwanda is to produce a populace which is more confident in the active listening and speaking idiom. Currently this is not happening in schools, with what passes for dialogue usually a form of stilted, rote learning with little flexibility of question and response. "Good morning", "How are you", " I am fine thank you, and you", as the only sequence, belongs with Dick and Jane and the structured Alexander books of a bygone era - firmly in the recycling bin. Language learning develops best with adaptability of thought that gradually allows the student to imagine different ways of communicating. It's wonderful for confidence too, which is half the battle in speaking a language - when you can say "Hello", "How's it going", "What about you", "Not bad", "Okay", "See you later", instead of only the prescribed rote. This growing confidence, too, helps liberate you from the fear of making mistakes, which is inevitable in language learning, but which paralyses so many.

The current reality versus hopes for the future

Methodology teachers employed by VSO are helping to train interested Rwandan teachers especially in the use and development of visual aids (often rice sacks are the source material for writing on). Such aids are essential elements in communicative teaching methods but they only work if accompanied by the knowledge and training of how to use them effectively. Most educational volunteers come from a primary or secondary teaching background in the UK or North America but very few have qualifications in the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) which is a vastly different way of approaching language teaching. As one UK teacher said to me during the conference -'being able to teach TS Eliot isn't much good here.'

Part of crowd at Amahoro Stadium for big screen telecast of Champions League final

VSO Rwanda is in expansion. Indeed it is the only country in Africa where numbers of volunteers are growing. It is the precious baby of many western governments especially the US and the UK. The British Conservative Party is even sending a large delegation of MPs and party members to visit our schools for two weeks in July. I doubt I'll bump into any of them but if I do, I will emphasise, as I did at the conference, the importance of recruiting suitably qualified EFL teachers, over a defined period, to improve English teaching ability and enhance better teaching practice. It would be nice, too, if salaries of Rwandans were increased from 25,000 francs ($42) minimum a month for entry level primary teachers but the Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) bureaucrat at the conference said it wasn't going to happen as they couldn't afford it. Others said that it was simply a matter of priorities as Rwanda has the lowest teaching salaries of any East African country. However, a lot of money is being spent on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative as it is seen as part of Rwanda's goal to be the hub of the African IT industry in the 2020 vision but is much criticised because laptops are being sent to some so-called Child Friendly Schools - a UNICEF definition - which don't even have electricity.

Dangerous electric cables on short cut to Bert's house where I was staying during the conference

I believe in a one laptop per headteacher policy for my district of Ngoma (which is lucky in having better electricity and internet access than some other districts) so that they can all start to use email and USB memory sticks to store all the training information that I give them in action and strategic plans, evaluation procedures and many other common sense ideas. I am not confident that hard copies won't simply find their way into cupboards to be forgotten after I am gone. At least with electronic versions there is a permanency and the simple facility of making adjustments - dates, costs etc - when necessary on a termly or annual basis. I am also pushing for training in the use of any future laptops, which the heads have been promised, otherwise they too will gather dust like many of the textbooks which sit on school store room shelves because the teachers are afraid to use them.

Much to my delight I managed a game with the Kigali Kougars on Sunday morning on a pretty fine artificial pitch. Cairns Rovers  (my old team) eat your heart out

Regarding the reading problem, I pushed at the conference - and with delegates of USAID and UNICEF who have strong links with EFL publishers like Longman, Heinneman and Macmillan - for the importance of simple, child friendly reading materials of which there is a complete dearth. Cultural appropriateness can be a problem with some of these graded readers but only by flooding the schools with such books can a reading ethos start to develop. Little children stop me in the street begging for books to read and don't understand why I don't have boxes of them in my house! Stella's young adult students also crave reading material. She has taken to lending out my old Guardian Weeklies for want of an alternative but the articles are usually too difficult for them.

Initiating a push for more EFL trained teachers, good graded readers and establishing the use of email, simple spreadsheets and folders for all 69 head teachers after my sector wide training sessions would at least be a small, tangible contribution to the development of this small but crowded country.