Reaching the marginalized: EFA global monitoring report, 2010; 2010

010CHAPTER 32Education for All Global Monitoring ReportSchools havea vital roleto play inaddressing thesocial attitudesthat devaluesome culturesBox 3.18: Achieving ‘Excellence in Cities’?A targeted intervention to support deprived urban schools in England (United Kingdom)England’s Excellence in Cities programme was aimedat improving pupil achievement in deprived urbanschools. Introduced on a pilot basis in 1999, it wasextended nationally until 2006. The programmereached in particular children from non-whitebackgrounds, those with English as an additionallanguage, those entitled to free school meals andchildren identified as having special education needs.Eligible schools received higher than averagesupport per student. In 2005, this amountedto £120 per pupil per year, only 4.4% above theaverage allocation. Institutional support includedfour core elements, although specific interventionsvaried by setting. Local partnerships encouragedschools to work together in developing needsassessments and strategies. Learning Support Unitsassisted students failing to achieve academically andexperiencing behavioural problems. Mentors wereprovided to children making slow progress inlearning. A separate part of the programme soughtto identify and support ‘gifted and talented’ children.further than many countries, seeking to combinemother tongue instruction with Amharic andEnglish in grades 1 to 8. One recent review oflearning assessment data concluded that ‘thoseregions with stronger mother tongue schoolinghave higher student achievement levels at Grade 8in all subjects, including English’ (Heugh et al.,2006, p. 6). In Mali, bilingual schools have beenassociated with large declines in dropout andrepetition (World Bank, 2005c).Evaluations revealed some positive outcomes. Thegreatest impact was on mathematics achievement atage 14. Within the most deprived schools, however, theimpact was greatest for children previously achievingmedium and higher scores. No impact was found forstudents using support units and students with amentor at age 14 made less progress than thosewithout. Pupils designated as ‘gifted and talented’registered higher levels of achievement, but therewas no evidence of an Excellence in Cities effect.One possible explanation why this programme failedto achieve stronger outcomes is that insufficientadditional finance was provided. Another factor isthat schools in deprived urban areas, includingthose covered by Excellence in Cities, were finding itincreasingly difficult to recruit and retain experiencedteachers. More fundamentally, it appears that theinitiative failed to override the wider structures ofdisadvantage in the home and beyond that pushchildren towards educational marginalization.Sources: Vignoles (2009); Kendall et al. (2005).history and the role of indigenous peoples.In other countries, intercultural and bilingualeducation has suffered from poor design andweak implementation, with intercultural educationreceiving particularly limited attention. In Peru,which pioneered the approach in the region,it is largely limited to indigenous communitiesin remote rural areas, and many nominallyintercultural and bilingual schools offer no teachingin indigenous languages (Cueto et al., 2009).Overcoming underlying causes of marginalizationassociated with language requires more thanbilingual provision. Language is wrapped up withcultural identity and schools have a vital role to playin addressing the social attitudes that devalue somecultures. That is why education reform in someLatin American countries has sought to combineintercultural and bilingual education. In Bolivia,reforms that started in the mid-1990s introducedintercultural and bilingual education on a nationalscale for the three most widely used indigenouslanguages. Bilingual teaching expanded rapidly,from 75,896 pupils in 1997 to 192,238 in 2002, or11% of all primary school pupils (Sichra Regalsky,n.d.). Alongside this change, curriculum reforms ledto the development of courses and textbooks thatattach more weight to the country’s multiculturalEducation systems can be instrumental inovercoming marginalization arising from languagedifficulties. The starting point is to align the rulesgoverning education with broader principles ofinclusion. Many countries have not yet done this.In the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, theconstitution forbids discrimination betweenethnic groups and emphasizes the importanceof expanding education in ethnic areas. Yet it alsoestablishes Lao as the official language, includingof instruction in school – an arrangement thatarguably discriminates against children fromthe 27% of the population that does not have Laoas the mother tongue (Benveniste et al., 2007).Legal recognition of the entitlement to be taughtin a familiar language is an important principlestill lacking in many countries.200