Exploring the compounding influence of marginalization on outcomes for girls and policy in STAGES primary and secondary schools

• In Event: Addressing marginalization in Ethiopian education: relationship between language transition, social, economical, physical and personal barriers with student performance and policy

Proposal

The Supporting Transition of Adolescent Girls through Enhancing Systems (STAGES) project is part of the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development’s (DFID) Girls’ Education Challenge-Transition (GEC-T) and is being implemented by Link Community Development (Link) in Ethiopia’s Wolaita Zone of the Southern Nations Nationalities and Peoples Region (SNNPR). The project provides a broad range of interventions focused on improving the conditions for education in Wolaita zone, specifically for girls who are economically, socially, and culturally marginalized, face high drop-out rates related to poverty, school distance, and early marriage and face significant challenges to transition into later grades (Tesfaye, 2015). The STAGES program is designed to support three primary goals across seven years: to improve learning outcomes for all students, to support successful transition into higher grades, and to achieve a sustainability of interventions. To achieve these goals, the STAGES project is intricately woven into the existing structures of the Wolaita Zone education system.

As part of the STAGES approach, the project supports schools in accordance with the region’s language policy which states that all students transition to English in grade 5. STAGES supports schools through professional development for teachers in content areas and language skills, resources for classrooms in mother tongue and in English, support for parents and communities, as well as engaging Woreda-level actors in providing adequate policy and resources to support changes in the classroom. Further, the project is most intensively working in upper primary and secondary to provide the greatest support to girls between grades 5 through 9 where successful transition is the most difficult – due to multiple barriers they face inside and outside the classroom.

This presentation will include three analyses and discuss the implications of the findings for the project’s interventions and policy in the Wolaita Zone. The first analysis will examine the trends in student’s performance in reading - both in mother tongue and in English – in grade 4 (the grade prior to the transition to English) and in grades 6 and 8 to identify where and how student performance changes across the transition to English. The second analysis will compare trends in reading and mathematics performance for girls who are at-risk for dropout to girls who are at lower risk to determine the relative influence of language, economical, social and personal factors on successful transition into grades 5, 7 and 9. The third analysis will examine the implications of teacher and school-level factors that influence girls’ abilities to successfully transition and demonstrate reading and mathematics proficiency in English in secondary grades.

The findings will be contextualized within the scope of DFID’s GEC-T initiative in Ethiopia and project interventions under STAGES. Presenters will examine the possibilities and challenges to influencing policy and practices at the local and regional levels through ongoing project activities. Presenters will also share how the projects activities respond to issues raised from these findings, specifically regarding language, resources, curriculum, teacher preparation and the role of community- and ministry-actors.

Authors

• Hetal Thukral, School-to-School International

• Samantha Ross, Link Community Development International

• Randy Tarnowski, STS International