Building a Sustainable and Comprehensive Education Monitoring System

• In Event: VIRTUAL HYBRID PANEL: Measuring what matters: Comparative perspectives on monitoring and assessment in education

Proposal

The USAID Ghana Partnership for Education Learning project is currently completing its final year in a 5-year early grade reading program. A reading intervention of daily 60-minute lessons in Pre-primary, grade 1 and 2 was developed in partnership with the Ghana Ministry of Education (MoE) and implemented in 11 local Ghanaian languages in over 7,200 schools in 100 districts in 10 regions of Ghana. In support of this reading intervention, the FHI 360 team developed a monitoring system to identify low performing schools. The project first trained 821 government school monitors to use mobile devices to monitor implementation of scripted lesson plans, in-school teacher support and pupil learning outcomes. Then, officials from the Ministry of Education at the national, regional and district levels were trained to access this data through an online dashboard and use the results to provide targeted coaching support.

During the final year of the project, the Ghana Education Service (GES) expressed a desire to sustain and expand the monitoring system beyond the scope of the 100 districts supported by the USAID program. The Learning team worked closely with the Ghana Education Service to help them establish a new unit within the Quality and Assessment department to oversee the monitoring of the education system through classroom observations and other interview protocols. Learning trained the staff of this unit and will continue working with them through the one-year extension of the Learning program focused on Transition to English. This paper will present the process of collaboration with the GES, progress since the handover activities, and discuss strategies for ensuring the sustainability of a comprehensive education monitoring system.
First the paper will review the collaboration required to establish a new government unit, including creating staff profiles, identifying qualified candidates, procuring hardware and software, securing office space and defining a clear purpose for the unit. Then, we will describe the scope of the initial capacity building workshop. Learning provided three weeks of capacity building for the ten staff of the new GES unit. During the first week the GES staff learned how to install and configure a cloud database. In the second week the staff learned how to design, install and manage surveys on mobile devices. Next, the GES staff learned how to automate data cleaning, analysis and reporting using dashboard software. In addition to the sessions focused on technology the team also learned about the processes, timelines, and logistics for running the monitoring system.

The presentation will conclude with progress made by the new monitoring unit in its first 6 months of operation, including additional capacity building for the unit, lessons learned from the collaboration between Learning and the broader GES and MoE staff, and progress towards scaling the system from 100 districts and 7,200 schools to the 250 districts and 35,000 schools across all of Ghana.

Authors

• Kwabena Tandoh, Ghana Education Services

• Ania Chaluda, FHI 360

• Brian D. Dooley, FHI 360