Accountability Toward Ensuring Children’s Basic Learning: The Head Teacher’s Perceptions

• In Event: Understanding social responsibility towards teaching and learning, Part 2: The role of school actors.

Proposal

Head teachers can improve school climate through school leadership and management, empowerment of teachers, and encouragement of students. However, while the role of head teachers is crucial to fulfilling school accountability, particularly towards achieving learning for all, data from rural India indicates that children’s learning outcomes remain low and stagnated. Since many children are not learning, this raises an important question: are head teachers aware of this situation? In light of this central question, this research focuses on understanding head teacher’s ‘perceptions’ particularly concerning children’s learning and the factors which may influence how head teachers perceive the situation in rural India.

Adopting the Reasoned Action Approach by Fishbein and Ajzen, this study ultimately aims to predict head teacher’s actions, and therefore we explore their perceptions towards children’s learning as the first step in this presentation. In particular, we raise the following questions: 1) To what extent do head teachers perceive learning challenges in the schools they lead? 2) To what extent are the differences in head teachers’ perceptions associated with their key background characteristics (particularly gender, caste, location and years of experience)? and 3) Have the head teachers’ perceptions towards children’s learning changed as a result of an intervention aimed to enhance accountability relations? To investigate these questions, the paper uses data collected from around 850 primary public schools in 400 villages in the district of Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh, India between 2018 and 2020.

Analyses using the baseline survey data show that the majority of the head teachers perceived no serious learning problems in their schools and thought that children achieve the required learning for their grade. Yet, test scores results reveal that a significant proportion of children attending grades 2 to 4 of these primary schools were unable to perform even the most basic numeracy or literacy tasks. These results suggest that most head teachers tend to overestimate children’s learning. However, head teachers with more experience and those who do not have children are more likely to be aware of learning problems. Furthermore, female head teachers and those who are officially designated (rather than acting) head teachers are more likely to recognize that children are promoted without learning in their schools.

Between the baseline and midline, we find statistically significant changes in perceptions among head teachers. In particular, the proportion of head teachers who perceive that children were not learning declined. In addition, the proportion of head teachers who perceive that children were promoted without learning also declined. The results of an RCT design show that areas where there was an intervention to increase accountability see the largest change in the proportion of head teachers who responded that children were promoted without learning. This was not the case for the proportion of head teachers who perceived that children were not learning, as changes in this indicator remained the same across treatment and control schools. Understanding the school leader’s perceptions of learning is important to generate a sense of social responsibility towards children’s learning. Unless school actors perceive there is a problem, actions are unlikely to change.

Authors

• Chihiro Kobayashi, University of Cambridge

• Ricardo Sabates, University of Cambridge