Co-designing and scaling short-term school readiness programs with Ministries of Education in the Middle East to increase access to ECE

• In Event: Jumpstarting primary school: Approaches to ECE for near-1st graders with no prior access

Proposal

Across the Middle East and North Africa, only 30% of children were enrolled in any kind of pre-primary program as of 2020. Protracted conflict, acute crises, and resulting displacement have only hindered access to early childhood education (ECE) throughout the region. ECE is widely recognized as essential to building social-emotional, language, pre-numeracy, and pre-literacy skills that prepare children to enter school and thrive throughout their lives.


The Ahlan Simsim project, a partnership between the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Sesame Workshop, has collaborated since 2020 with Ministries of Education (MoEs) in the Middle East region to create 2-week to 1-month long school readiness programs for children entering first grade without access to ECE. While full-year in-person pre-school programs remain ideal, not all children can access this level of pre-primary services. Having short-term options for ECE expands access to a wider group of children – those who cannot access long-term services due to lack of availability of programs, limited resources, conflict, or displacement.


These school readiness programs are part of Ahlan Simsim’s larger collaboration with partners across the Middle East to co-design and scale contextualized solutions to improving early childhood development (ECD) services and outcomes throughout the region. These school readiness programs are scalable models that lay a foundation for broader system support for ECE in these contexts. The IRC collaborated with government partners to co-design these school readiness programs, ensuring that the government teams own and take forward these programs as part of their national and sub-national systems. The school readiness curricula focus on social-emotional learning (SEL) and learning through play, in addition to numeracy and literacy. To date, these school readiness programs have reached approximately 5,000 children in Northeast Syria, 6,000 children in Jordan, and 82,000 children in Iraq. Given limited resources, training first grade teachers to implement 2-week to 1-month programs in schools prior to the start of the first grade year was the most feasible solution to begin expanding access to ECE for children entering public schools in these contexts, but this is only a first step. Ahlan Simsim and its government partners are exploring opportunities to further expand access to and quality of ECE and pre-primary programs.


This presentation will describe the process of adapting pre-school curricula for short-term delivery with government partners in Jordan, Iraq, and Northeast Syria. It will describe the learning objectives of these programs, elements of implementation quality in how teachers delivered play-based learning activities, and how the school readiness programs differed across the three contexts. This presentation will share monitoring data collected by the IRC and government partners to highlight successes and challenges in implementation, caregiver and child feedback on the programs, and their contributions to child development outcomes.

Authors

• Manar Mohyddein Shukri, International Rescue Committee

• Laila Hussein Hussein, International Rescue Committee

• Maram Yousef Shahin, International Rescue Committee

• Chantale Kallas, International rescue committee

• Phoebe Sloane, International Rescue Committee

• Heidi Rosbe, IRC