VVOB Education for Development
Executive Summary
Project Host
VVOB education for development
Fellows
Annelise Eaton Buzaid, Research Fellow
Tsz Man (Bethany) Fong, Social Entrepreneur Fellow
Barbara Trudell, Research Fellow
Introduction
VVOB and the Ministry of Education in Rwanda are collaborating to institutionalize continuous professional development (CPD) for school leaders. The effective school leadership professional development programme aims to improve school leadership competences and practices among headteachers and ultimately the quality of teacher performance, and student learning outcomes. School leadership capacity-building programmes in the global North have been found to be effective in boosting student learning gains; but few programmes in sub-Saharan Africa have focused on enhancing school leadership and its impact on student learning outcomes (Sampat et al., 2020). Through the LEAP project, the ministry and VVOB are aspiring to better understand and measure programmatic impact of school leadership CPD on teachers and students.
Organization’s Role & Strength
VVOB has a mission of ensuring quality education for all learners. The organisation realises its mission by working with government officials focused on strengthening school leadership and advancing teacher professional development. VVOB invests in research to build the evidence base on what makes professional development effective. It also supports governments to build evidence-aligned programming and take effective innovations to scale.
VVOB’s theory of change starts from a human rights-based approach, ultimately focused on every child’s right to receive a quality education. VVOB works to strengthen the capacity of government institutions that are responsible for the professionalisation of teachers and school leaders. Ultimately, these actors have the greatest impact on the learning performance and the well-being of learners.
Many governments have policy plans in place to continuously improve their education systems in order to achieve SDG4. However, a major implementation gap lies between the existing legal guarantees and policies and the effective realisation of rights and SDG4 targets. VVOB puts these policy plans at the centre of its partnership with the Ministry of Education, and focuses on:
Reinforcing the capacities of duty bearers, to enable them to guarantee the right to education of the citizens of the nation (rights holders) in a more qualitative and equitable way;
Promoting equity (the right to non-discrimination) within governments’ education policies and actions.
In Rwanda, the Learning through Assessment and Data (LEAD) multi-year programme for 2022-2026 aims to support SDG4 by ensuring that all Rwandan children can actively participate in quality education and successfully progress through primary education.
Need Summary
In Rwanda, the Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programme for school leaders focuses on training and supporting newly assigned school leaders to effectively use data to improve teaching and learning in their schools. The programme is built on a strong evidence base suggesting that with adequate training and support, school leaders can improve the quality of teaching and conditions for learning.
The primary need that is being addressed by the LEAP Fellows is the design of a research methodology to demonstrate the impact of the CPD programme on distributed school leadership and student outcomes. In particular, the research will support VVOB’s partnership with government partners in Rwanda, who seek to understand the return on investment of the CPD programme in terms of student learning outcomes. Investing in research is critical to increasing the credibility of the CPD programme in order to mobilise government financial, human, and policy resources to support program expansion.
Solution Summary & Next Steps
In a first step, the LEAP Fellows conducted a literature search to develop a more fine-grained ToC. The major purpose of this step was to make the different components of the ToC testable (i.e., so that specific hypotheses could be derived). To this end, the LEAP Fellows focused on three main actions of school leaders: providing instructional support for teachers, creating a safe and positive school environment, and collaborating with parents and the community. These actions are hypothesised to improve student outcomes, such as lower dropout rates, better exam grades, and higher pass rates.
In a next step, the LEAP Fellows turned to the planned intervention rollout to suggest a potential impact study design. Because it cannot be guaranteed that the cohort-wise trained schools will be randomly assigned, the LEAP Fellows based their planning on a quasi-experimental design in which schools will be matched between cohorts based on certain criteria.
Finally, the LEAP Fellows provided recommendations on which variables should be assessed at which level (student, teacher, school leader) and how these variables can be used in statistical analyses to test the hypotheses.