Executive Summary

Project Host

Fellows

Andrew Armstrong, Social Entrepreneur Fellow

Matt Lloyd-Rose, Social Entrepreneur Fellow

Introduction

Street Child runs Community Based Education Programs in remote and crisis-affected regions of Afghanistan with a strong focus on improving foundation literacy skills among the Out-of-School-Children. They recruit and train teachers, as well as coaches to support them. A 3rd party Early Grade Reading Assessment showed that the “Street Child programme is doing very well in ensuring that reading skills of students are improving compared to other reading programmes in Afghanistan” (End Line Evaluation Report of Multi Year Resilience Programme-Uruzgan).

However, Street Child’s evaluations have also shown that there is low fidelity to prescribed teaching practices especially among novice teachers in hard to reach districts of provinces like Zabul; they are determined to address this.

Through the LEAP Project, Street Child and the LEAP team are seeking to understand the challenges community-based education teachers in Afghanistan face in translating professional development into practice. Together our goal is to identify strategies to better support Street Child’s teachers to apply what they have learned and to translate these practices with fidelity and quality into improved student learning.

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Organization’s role and strength

Street Child ensures that children are safe, in school and learning even, and especially, in low resource environments and emergencies. The scale and scope of challenges affecting children in emergencies and low resource environments, especially in the era of the COVID-19 crisis necessitates agile and ambitious action. Street Child is committed to confronting these challenges through purposeful programmes, and pledges to make a meaningful, material contribution to increase safety, access to schooling and learning for a million children during 2021-24 and millions more through its powerful partner network. By targeting the most marginalized, tailoring and integrating its response for them, accelerating local level action and by assessing impact, Street Child is on an illuminated path to redeem its pledge.

Street Child Afghanistan works across 15 provinces in Afghanistan providing humanitarian relief and response. In 2022, Street Child made up 13% of all community-based education (CBE) centers across the country. In 2022-23, more than 10% of learners in community-based classes in Afghanistan were attending Street Child run classes.

Street Child uses the Early Grade Reading (EGR) curriculum developed by the Ministry of Education (MoE) of Afghanistan in collaboration with the USAID funded Afghan Children Read initiative (ACR). An important aspect of this work is improving teachers’ instructional practices at scale to improve student learning.

Need summary

It is widely recognized that teachers are the strongest school-level predictor of student learning (Scwhille et al., 2007). The critical role that teachers play in delivering quality education is amplified in humanitarian crises, and yet teachers in these contexts face some of the most difficult teaching conditions. Moreover, these teachers often have little to no teaching experience, work in under-resourced environments, and receive professional development support that is uneven, inadequate and fails to meet their needs (INEE, 2015).

Several of these challenges are relevant to Street Child’s EGR intervention in Afghanistan: teachers often have no teaching experience; resources are limited; and, while they are supported by teacher coaches, coaches are often new to teaching themselves and struggle to model prescribed practices and support teachers to improve.

Program evaluations of Street Child’s EGR intervention in three provinces highlighted a common issue: low fidelity to prescribed teaching practices compounded by weak evidence of the impact of coaching.

Given the layered nature of Street Child’s intervention (working with teachers, teacher coaches and coordinators at the provincial level) identifying at which levels of the program leakages and barriers to implementation were occurring required investigation.

The LEAP project team’s approach was to work with Street Child to review the wider evidence base and gather insights from Key Informants (KI) involved in the program with the goal of locating where the main barriers to fidelity might exist and identifying strategies that will have the greatest impact on improving teachers’ uptake of the prescribed teaching practices.

Solution summary and next steps

We anchored the project in a simple problem statement agreed with Street Child:

There is low-fidelity to prescribed teaching practices among novice teachers in the targeted hard to reach districts.

And we set the following simple objectives to guide us:

To increase:

Fidelity to prescribed teacher practices
And effectiveness of coaching services

By:

Identifying the root causes of low fidelity and ineffective coaching.
Developing a set of recommendations drawn from relevant research and best practice.
Creating a feasible implementation and evaluation roadmap for the Street Child team.