Premises and Process
Successive governments in Pakistan have tried to spread literacy and mass education on the cheap by outsourcing and sub-contracting rote learning to underpaid and untrained teachers with truly dreadful results. There is a whole generation of adults whose lived experience is that such learning does not add to job prospects. As a result in the 3rd decade of the 21st Century, Pakistan has the world’s largest cohort of children out of school.
PIEDAR started this program in 1995 with the purpose of demonstrating at a significant scale that village home schools owned by their female teachers could be transformed into good quality primary education providers on a sustained basis. The key assumption was that a trained home school teacher enjoying a good reputation and community support would be able to run her school out of fees earned when the external financial assistance came to an end.
Only a third of rural girls aged 5-14 years were attending schools in Khanewal District in 1995. Most villages that PIEDAR surveyed did not have a woman with a secondary school certificate who was willing to set up a girls’ home school. In such cases, we selected the most willing under-matric candidate in consultation with parents. We invested heavily in the supervision and training of all the teachers.
Supportive supervision was delivered through female Learning Coordinators with M.A/B.Ed. degrees. We equipped them with a four wheel drive vehicle and driver. They visited each school twice a month for a half a day and were required to fill up a standardized learning achievement form for each class every month. This helped identifying learning problems and giving feedback to the teachers.
We engaged a team of highly qualified teacher trainers from the Institute of Social Sciences, Lahore. They accomplished a teacher training program comprising nine modules delivered once a quarter at our office in Kabirwala, along with follow up exercises for the teachers. The end point evaluation showed good progress in supervision and teaching skills in the Learning Coordinators and the teachers.
Parent – teacher meetings were facilitated every month to resolve any issues. The parents were convinced to pay a monthly fee, even if only a token amount at the start, in order to secure quality education for their children. The fees collected rose substantially, and helped the teachers make the transition from fixed to performance-based salaries that were double the fees collected.
PIEDAR encouraged the teachers to behave as socially responsible entrepreneurs. A number of partner schools started evening classes for illiterate adolescents and adults. Some teachers took on additional roles as health workers, for example.
Achievements
PIEDAR partner schools crossed an important milestone when the first batch of children took part in the Government Class V exam in March 2002, and 82 out of 83 students passed the exam, most with good marks. Education Department officials came to the prize giving ceremony organized by PIEDAR and expressed support for linkages between the partner primary schools and government elementary schools. Deputy Education Officer, Education Department accepted the school leaving certificates issued by PIEDAR partner schools. The outstanding success of the children gave confidence to the teachers, parents and coordinators regarding the soundness of the approach.
At the end point of our project in June 2002, we had 40 teachers running 32 village schools with an enrollment of 710 girls. In 25 cases, Village Education Committees were assessed as actively engaged in the proper running of the schools, taking supportive actions such ensuring regular attendance, timely payment of fees, and the periodic collection of funds for infrastructure improvements. In fact, five schools had constructed their own buildings on cost sharing basis between the teacher and her community.