Community-Led Learning as a scalable and sustainable innovation to mitigate lost learning in Uganda

• In Event: Unleashing the Potential of the Community to Address Education Disruptions and Inequity: Global Evidence from Learning Catch-up Programmes

Proposal

Public education systems alone can’t cope with the recovery from the learning crisis created by Covid. In the context of Uganda, the system couldn’t cope before the pandemic, why will it now? Building back, let alone building back better, is impossible without communities taking greater leadership in children’s learning. The Strengthening Education Systems for Improved Learning (SESIL) Community-Led Learning (CLL) initiative provides a tested model for what that might look like: a model that can work at scale not just during school closures, but also as a supplementary, remedial strategy for recovering learning going forward.

SESIL is a 5-year programme, funded by UKAID, which supports the Ministry of Education and Sports in Uganda to strengthen the effectiveness of the education system and improve literacy and numeracy in the early grades.

The CLL initiative was initially designed to address the challenge of helping the most marginalised children in Uganda improve their literacy and numeracy skills when there are no schools. Uganda had one of the longest school closures in the world, with nearly two years of lost learning for the early grades. Following a successful pilot with 13,000 children in 2021, the programme was incorporated into the Ministry of Education and Sports’ national education plan for school reopening and has gone to greater scale. In August 2022 it is operating alongside schools reaching over 250,000 children, and due to reach over a half a million by June 2023.
A quasi-experimental impact assessment was conducted between January – May 2022 with a representative sample of a cohort of 93,000 children who completed a 4-month cycle of CLL lessons. A logistic regression analysis demonstrated that CLL is effective in improving the foundational literacy and numeracy levels of children, particularly in the lower-level skills which the initiative targets. A child who attended CLL classes more than doubled their odds of improving their literacy level than a child who did not attend CLL. The CLL classes were found to be effective for both boys and girls, children of different ages and children with and without disabilities. There is also emerging evidence of how CLL works alongside schooling, with school leaders helping identify learners for CLL and communities strengthening their relationship with schools.

The presentation will share the quantitative and qualitative findings and unpack how the CLL initiative enables communities and system actors to effectively drive it at scale, and crucially at minimal cost. It will reflect on the trade-offs and opportunities of working at scale and the paths to creating a truly sustainable model of community engagement in children’s learning.

Author

• Laura Garforth, Cambridge Education