Which model to take to scale? Decisions on which bilingual approach and which reading model is most appropriate for Senegal

• In Event: Literacy, language, politics and money: impacts on scaling up reading reform programs

Proposal

Senegal has a long history of education programs using national languages in the early grades. The Ministry of Education piloted the use of national languages in primary education at different times and using different approaches. In addition, several local and international non-governmental organizations and other donors have worked at a much smaller scale to pilot efforts to improve Senegalese students’ learning by using national languages. Those initiatives, led by ARED, SIL, ELAN, and others, have involved between 10 and 150 schools. Each has used a slightly different mix of texts and methods, and each has had variable results in early grade reading outcomes. As of today, the Ministry of Education does not yet possess a consolidated, approved model for cost-effective, scalable multilingual education in general and reading instruction in particular.
The USAID-funded early grade reading program Lecture Pour Tous entered the scene with this context in mind. Lecture Pour Tous adds yet another early grade reading approach to the complex picture, using three of the six national languages in six regions of Senegal and more than 3,000 public primary schools and daaras. The program brings heavy investments in teaching and learning materials, teacher training, and coaching, but also in strengthening delivery systems and improving parental and community engagement. In a “faire ensemble” (do it together) approach, our team is working with Ministry counterparts on policy development, communications, standard setting and operational research. Part of this work supports the Ministry in further exploring alternatives, address priority areas for change and work towards stabilizing the bilingual education and reading reform. As part of USAID’s support, the Ministry is now starting to independently roll out implementation of reading interventions to public schools in the Saint Louis region, in a Government to Government agreement. This will allow Ministry actors to organically grow a program themselves and anticipate and respond to issues around scale-up.
The key issue for the Ministry remains to decide which model to scale up and how to manage this scale-up in practice.
In this regard, the presenters will examine together the following key questions:
• How is the Ministry managing the co-existence of competing models (and donors) for bilingual instruction, starting in national languages and transitioning to French?
• How to shape a national reading framework that gives guidance to all actors?
• What actually constitutes a comprehensive bilingual education model? How can the Ministry manage a situation where the teaching of reading in national languages is heavily prioritized in its support from donors? How does the Ministry manage the need to oversee improvements in mathematics and the rest of the primary curriculum?
• How is the Ministry coping with hot button issues such as teacher mobility in a context where teacher deployment was historically handled in a very liberal way and will now need more directives to ensure each school has teachers with the appropriate national language skills?

Authors

• Sabine Kube-Barth, Cambridge Education

• Khady Diop, Senegal Ministry of National Education