Accelerating Change through Disruptor and Spill-over Effects: The power of accelerated education programs to influence, reform, and transform formal education systems

• In Event: Accelerated Education as an Instrument of Disruption

Proposal

Accelerated Education Programs (AEP) typically serve to fill critical gaps in providing essential educational services for disadvantaged, over-aged, out-of-school children, and youth. This paper examines how AEPs do more, driving positive change in both nonformal and formal education. The Education Recovery Support Activity (ERSA) in northern Mali and the Accelerated Quality Education for Liberian Children (AQE) both offer practical insights into how lessons learned from AEPs can address some of the challenges faced by formal education systems. Specifically, this paper will compare how these AEPs helped fulfil out-of-school learners’ right to education (including the development of critical thinking, resilience, and life skills) while simultaneously contributing to the improvement of their national education systems, utilizing disruptor and spillover approaches.
Starting with commonalities, the paper will outline how the respective contexts shaped the design, implementation, and monitoring of the AEPs, including particularly instructional approaches, curriculum, learning objectives, community involvement, and adaptive management. Looking at these features, the paper will propose key institutional factors that can explain how ERSA and AQE succeeded differently in playing a disruptor role in the formal system. The paper will elaborate on how ERSA’s strategy of spillover provided several successes, especially when the community and schools managed to reinvest AEP inputs into formal teaching, including: recruiting facilitators as community teachers to address the lack of official teachers; supporting MoE efforts to ensure teachers are assigned correctly and present at schools; improving schools’ coverage and infrastructure; and improving teaching quality.
Highlights from Liberia will demonstrate how the integration of AQE methods into conventional schools has served to disrupt the formal systems' status quo, with schools, principals, and teachers’ serving populations of over-aged and on-aged students with two accelerated tracks operating through a “One-School Model” (OSM). Evaluations conducted in 2019 and 2021 found that the AEP curriculum and OSM model were well-received by schools. Educators there hold positive views of AEP-conventional school (CS) cross-pollination through shared lesson plans, skills training, and classroom observations. However, one evaluation found OSM functioning in some schools as two parallel systems of AEP and CS serving the same children, in which both groups may have been disadvantaged. In the current education sector plan, ensuring on-age enrollment and expansion of ALP through the OSM are the two key leveraging strategies the MoE is using to tackle the over-age issue in Liberia sustainably.
In looking at both contexts, the paper will consider factors related to the organizational structure of the MoE, the coherence of the learning assessment system across formal and non-formal education and its capacity to inform AEP instructional practices, among other aspects. The presenters will also discuss the stressors and challenges to provide the same level of effort to CS as for AEP, in terms of school management and functionality.

Authors

• AUDE VESCOVO, Education Development Center

• Mary Hooker, Education Development Center EDC