Global Education Digest 2012 - International Reading Association

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SECTION 5 / The costs of school failure Early intervention is also considered effective when pupils facing learning difficulties are identified early in the school year and are provided with individual remediation. Examples of remedial classes in many OECD countries, instruction language catch-up programmes in sub-Saharan African countries or dual language programmes show that they can help to prevent pupils from repeating grades or leaving school early. When the grounds for early school leaving include family-related factors, school interventions (by the classroom teacher or the school principal) involving the pupil’s family can help to remove the risk. Effective policy measures would include establishing mechanisms to track and bring early school leavers back to school. However, individual remediation and tracking mechanisms are also costly to implement. A wide age range of pupils in classrooms also helps to explain high rates of repetition, early school leaving and low learning attainment. Late entry and subsequent grade repetition increase the prevalence of over-age students in schools. The likelihood of leaving school early grows as the curriculum – designed for an intended cohort of younger pupils – becomes irrelevant to learners and the opportunity cost of staying in school increases when compared to the opportunities of the labour market. Early marriage, especially for girls, could also be a factor in early school leaving. In terms of policy measures, interventions should focus on minimising late entry into primary education (e.g. through school fee abolition, raising awareness of the importance of entering school at the appropriate age and improving record-keeping systems for children’s ages), reducing repetition and enforcing laws on compulsory education. Improving education quality, especially in the crucial early grades, is also an important policy intervention for reducing repetition and early school leaving, and improving literacy and learning levels. One measure of the resources invested in primary education is related to class size. For example, in all of the middleor high-income countries with available data, primary school classes have fewer than 30 pupils, and in a majority of them, there are fewer than 20 pupils per class. On the other hand, in sub-Saharan Africa, the average class size in public primary schools ranges from 26 pupils in Cape Verde to 84 in Central African Republic. In four out of ten countries reporting data for this region there are on average 50 or more pupils per class. Not only are classes in sub-Saharan Africa large in general, those in the critical early grades of schooling are typically larger than others. For instance, in Burundi and Madagascar, there are on average over 60 pupils per class, while in Chad the average 1 st grade class has 85 pupils (see Figure 25). The situation in Chad is of particular concern, since studies show that classes exceeding 70 pupils have a negative effect on students’ learning achievement (Pôle de Dakar, 2005). In Chad, Madagascar and Togo, there are on average more than 20 additional pupils in Grade 1 than in the final grade of primary school. In Burundi, Mali, Niger, Rwanda and Senegal, there are between 10 and 20 more pupils in 1 st grade classes. In Chad, Madagascar and Rwanda, the large differences in class sizes are reflected by low survival rates to the last grade of primary education. In Madagascar and Rwanda, only about one in three children entering Grade 1 reach the end of primary education. In Chad, it is fewer than one in four. In this context, policymakers should seek costeffective measures to reduce class size, especially in rural regions or disadvantaged areas, like the slums surrounding big cities in Burkina Faso and Kenya. Such cost-effective measures could include the construction/rehabilitation of schools to make them more accessible and secure, provision of additional grades to incomplete schools (typically found in rural areas), expansion of the supply of post-primary education, introduction of cluster schools in remote areas, and the use of salary incentives and other attractive measures to facilitate the deployment of teachers to remote areas. Late interventions, for example when students enter school at an older age than the official entry age or after they have left school prematurely, 58
OPPORTUNITIES LOST: THE IMPACT OF GRADE REPETITION AND EARLY SCHOOL LEAVING FIGURE 25 How large are primary school classes in sub-Saharan Africa? Average primary-level class size by grade in selected countries, 2010 or latest year 90 85 Chad 85 More than 50 pupils per class 80 75 70 65 Burundi 65 Madagascar 63 Pupils per class 60 55 50 45 40 Mali 59 Togo 57 Rwanda 53 Niger 46 Senegal Guinea 42 55 47 39 35 35 30 Mauritius 31 32 30 25 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 Grade Note: The figure excludes multi-grade classes. Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics database. are more costly and more difficult from a learning perspective. Early school leavers who exit school before acquiring basic literacy skills are more likely to remain illiterate if no specific intervention is developed for them. One of these interventions could be second-chance programmes. They can include adult literacy programmes, with or without the possibility of obtaining an equivalence for re-entry into the formal education system; or accelerated learning programmes for children in refugee camps in Tanzania and Kenya, for example, or for former child soldiers in Colombia, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Other examples of possible interventions include schools for life, as found in Ghana, which offer the equivalent of three years of primary school in nine months; ‘Educatodos’ programmes in the Honduras, which provide the six grades of the primary cycle in three years; SPARK (Skills, Participation, and Access to Relevant Knowledge) programmes in Zambia, where the seven grades of primary education are taught in four years; and catch-up programmes/classes in post-conflict countries such as Afghanistan, Burundi and Liberia. 59
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Global education diGest 2012 INSTIT
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GLOBAL EDUCATION DIGEST 2012 Opport
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FOREWORD Each year the UNESCO Insti
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CONTENTS Foreword 3 Acknowledgement
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Page 62 and 63: REFERENCES Belfield, Clive (2008).
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Page 66 and 67: DEFINITIONS Educational institution
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Page 74 and 75: A N N E X B INTERNATIONAL STANDARD
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Page 78 and 79: A N N E X D ELECTRONIC RESOURCES UI
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Global Education Digest 2012 - International Reading Association

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