School Priorities - SNV

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Community Participation Community participation involves everyone taking an interest in children's education and wellbeing at school. SNV’s strategy to increase both the relevance and quality of education students receive has revolved around several issues: access to quality education, school leadership and accountability. Although the Universal Primary Education (UPE) programme has abolished tuition fees, parents still have a number of schoolrelated costs, including books, stationery and equipment, exam fees, uniforms and transportation. Together, these items can cost just as much as tuition fees and make access to education inequitable. Those who can afford to pay, receive a quality education. Those who cannot afford to pay, receive a poor-quality education or no education at all, with girls most affected by families’ tough economic decisions. To make education more equitable, educators have been searching for a more effective partnership between schools, parents and communities. The idea is to share 24
Community Participation responsibility for creating quality education by getting communities and parents to buy in to the education system and create solutions to their common problems. National and international players continue to try to prescribe the environment in which a quality education can be delivered. It is a school environment with a limitless supply of textbooks and materials, gleaming classrooms and immaculately-dressed pupils. But few schools or communities are like this. Prescriptive national and international programmes don’t fully appreciate the local context, passing over information that could guide effective ground operations. After all, the perceptions, actions and decisions of local schools and communities shape the extent to which a quality education can be provided. The continuing gap between national and international interventions and local realities demonstrates that actors must encourage community participation if they hope to integrate theory with practice. The following stories look at several relationships between local schools and their surrounding communities. Together, these relationships are referred to as “community participation”. Community participation is a participatory strategy or approach that opens up education service delivery processes so that they can benefit from the input of all stakeholders, namely children, local communities, teaching staff, district education officials and private education practitioners. Involving these different groups can enrich and improve access, retention and leadership in primary education provision. By working together, these groups can find appropriate solutions to common challenges within their schools, such as tackling inequity, training good leaders and sustaining the educational system. Community participation helps these groups feel ownership of the interventions taking place in their schools. In the following stories, SNV describes its experiences of what has worked and what has not with regard to community participation. Readers may have questions about what community participation means. For instance, is it about providing financial resources or labour force? Or is it about being able to participate and decide? These questions are explored throughout the stories, which throw light on the approaches applied to create an environment in which schools and communities work closely together to provide all Ugandan children with a quality education. Children First demonstrates the power of contributions from Kumi pupils and parents to school management. In the article Junior Achievement, Mpigi students discover how to apply what they have learned in school as they become active members of the community. In District Education Ordinances, Arua District seeks to make parents and community members take responsibility for combating absenteeism. School Lunches showcases Kiboga District’s efforts to provide lunch to an additional 4000 students. And, finally, Community Leads the Way shows the creative local solutions that Kyenjojo parents developed to address school problems. Each community is different and therefore developed its own solutions. While the following stories show a diversity of contexts and solutions, they also put forward lessons learned to guide replication in other communities. “Quality education is not acquired in isolation from the social setting in which students live. It embraces the notion of education as an empowering process which promotes social change and contributes to building a just and democratic society. „ — Beyond Access: Transforming Policy and Practice for Gender Equality in Education 25
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