Lessons learned from Africa’s largest English literacy programme: Jolly Futures

• In Event: Evidence-based decision making in education
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Impact evaluations & program plans: deciphering the data for decision making

Proposal

Ignited by the challenge of achieving Universal Primary Education by 2015, development actors and governments together succeeded in dramatically improving access to primary schooling for children across the Global South. However, despite attending school, millions of children are still not acquiring even basic skills such as literacy. This means that millions of school-attending children cannot read even part of a sentence in any language and so cannot access most of the school curriculum. Thus, schooling is not really producing education in any real sense. This concerning problem has produced a shift in focus amongst the education development community, from increasing access to schooling to also improving learning within schools. However, the problem of how to successfully increase learning, particularly literacy, still exists, with external reviews of key interventions persistently finding a lack of impact on learning.

This paper will present applied research on Africa’s largest English literacy project, known as “Jolly Futures”, under which significant increases in early grade literacy skills have in fact been achieved, despite the pupils almost entirely not speaking English as their mother-tongue. The project was initiated in 2010 and is now being implemented across all 36 States of Nigeria and the Federal Capital Territory. It is also now starting to spread to several other sub-Saharan African and South Asian countries. The aim of this project has been to significantly increase the English literacy skills of early grade pupils in Nigeria’s government schools in order to provide a strong foundation for their wider learning and prepare them for the transition to English instruction in Primary 4, in recognition that the illiteracy rate amongst 5 to 16 years olds in the country is as high as 51.5 percent in any language (National Population Commission (Nigeria) and RTI International, 2015 Nigeria Education Data Survey (NEDS), USAID, 2016). Through providing this foundation, pupils will be enabled to access information and contribute to a sustainable future.

Under the Jolly Futures project in Nigeria, over 60,000 teachers and 3,500 government officials so far have been directly trained in the Jolly Phonics literacy programme, supported and resourced, potentially reaching around 3.5 million early grade pupils. The project has been funded by over £11million worth of donations from the publishers of the Jolly Phonics literacy scheme – Jolly Learning Ltd – the Nigerian Government through its Universal Basic Education Programme, and recently as part of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). It is being managed through partnerships between the non-profit organisation Universal Learning Solutions and State and Federal Government agencies.

This paper will present data from a variety of sources, including literacy skills tests administered with pupils in focus schools, reports from thousands of monitoring visits to schools and the general experiences of project staff, amongst other sources. Through this, the paper will highlight a number of lessons that have been learned, with the aim of providing guidance for those initiating literacy projects elsewhere.

In particular, the paper will discuss the significance of the project utilising the systematic synthetic phonics literacy teaching method, and the importance of the simple, fun and interactive nature of the Jolly Phonics scheme for motivating teachers and learners and consequently facilitating the increases in learning. It will argue that, with such methods and tools, increases in literacy skills can easily be achieved, even for those pupils with English as an additional language and having no mother-tongue literacy skills to build upon, and even where the teachers’ English literacy and language skills are limited. It will further highlight the key aspects of the project model that have been significant for enhancing and sustaining the impact of the project, with a particular focus on the establishment of “Teacher Networks” and dedicated monitoring and mentoring teams, and the intensive technical support that is provided to government officials. Moreover, the paper will discuss how the partnership between a non-profit organisation and the Nigerian government, as well as the extensive government funding, have helped to facilitate positive working relationships and a high level of government buy-in, and have also ensured that the intervention is a good fit for the context.

The paper will also summarise the key challenges faced over the years, with a particular focus on how teachers’ relationships with the government and their local communities affect their levels of motivation and so the extent to which they choose to implement the scheme. In doing so, it will highlight the role of incentives and informal social control mechanisms, as well as the role of politics in affecting the project’s impact. The paper will note how some challenges have been overcome and will seek advice for existing challenges, particularly in terms of motivating teachers in very challenging rural schools where there is a lack of community and government engagement.

In terms of what might be done differently in future interventions, the paper will suggest that greater engagement amongst all development actors, to ensure synergy and positive collaboration, should be sought from the initiation of interventions. It will argue that this will prevent overlap of interventions and confusing messages being given to teachers, which can affect results.

Overall, this paper will share the lessons learned from 8 years of implementation of Africa’s largest English literacy project, with the aim of enabling more children around the world to learn to read and write with joy, experience their right to learn, and contribute to a sustainable future.

Author

• Louise Gittins, Universal Learning Solutions