EZEL NURSERY AND PRIMARY SCHOOL

VISION: For all children (rural or urban) to have access to Quality Education that will enable them to achieve academic, physical, social and Spiritual excellence.

MISSION: To provide a conducive , nurturing and developmentally appropriate environment in which children can learn and develop through study and play.

VALUES

Fear of God: We not only live for ourselves but we also live to please our maker.

Love: Loving your neighbor as you love yourself and doing to others what you would want them to do to you.

Respect: 'Respect for each other and our environment'. Being mindful of each others feelings and accepting of the differences among us.

Stewardship: an obligation to responsibly use all financial, physical and human resources.

Excellence: Be intentional about doing the right things and doing them right. Giving all of our abilities and striving for perfection.

Impact: Educating and equipping the next generation to impact and leave a footprint in the world we live in.

Ezel Nursery and Primary School being located in purely rural community presents with lots of challenges and opportunities. As both the Founder and Director and considering that we trying to do it different from a typical rural African school my biggest role is that of Envisioning. It remains paramount that my team is constantly reminded of where we aspire to get to, to remain on mission and to constantly uphold the values that we espouse.

Because experienced and highly qualified teachers or professionals generally shun villages (rural areas), 90% of my team is locally sourced and may lack some aspects of experience. I therefore have the role of assisting them build their capacity and develop their skills.

The Covid-19 Pandemic caused a lot of unexpected disruptions which included the permanent closure of a number of schools in Uganda. without a good strategy, we could have been one of those schools. My role is also so much tied to developing and implementing strategies that give us an edge and also building professional networks in the education space and other leadership spaces.

I oversee, the financial and administrative aspects and ensure that we operate according to the legal requirements.

In 2020, I was privileged to take part in a 1 year long Acumen East Africa Fellowship and in 2022, We (Ezel Nursery and Primary School) participated in the Inquiring Learners Project, a research project at the University of Cambridge. 
My Team and I are a very flexible group of people, with strong abilities at Multitasking and balancing acts. The exposure and experience we have with dealing with other competing activities surely puts us in a position in which 2 - 4 hours a week becomes workable.

Besides that, the skill sets of the various members in my team including other stakeholders we closely work with such as the members on our School management committee, local leaders, and our relationship with other schools in our community put us in a comfortable place to be a resource and to benefit the LEAP Project for the 12 week sprint.

Creating change by making Quality Education both accessible and affordable for the rural poor.

Rural Uganda, precisely the area we Operate in faced with chronic Poor Quality Education. Year in and Year out, there seems to be no change. A Report from Uwezo shows that there was a decline in the literacy and numeracy competences of pupils from Primary one to Primary six. 

By the time children in my community has completed Primary Education, that is 7 years in total, they are still unable to read and write with some unable even to properly spell their name.

The problem of poor quality education then has a ripple effect implying that these children are not able to join secondary school with many especially the girls opting for early marriage. In the end a high end up as adults who luck the competences and skills require to be gainfully employed, which leads to poverty.

At Ezel Nursery and Primary School, we believe the poverty situation in our community and rural communities in general boils down to very Poor Quality Education. Poor Quality Education for us means: Lack of a conducive learning environment (studying under trees or unsafe structures), both teacher and pupil absenteeism, lack of learning and teaching material, none involvement of parents/caregivers in the education of their children, lack of qualified and experienced teachers. Even the lack of electricity and internet play a vital role in advancing the quality of education. In the case of Agule, Pallisa only 4.6% of the population has access to electricity and just 3.7% have access to the internet. Lack of water and poor sanitation is rampant in rural schools.

Therefore the problem we are trying to address is really that of Poor Quality in the dispensation of Education in Agule, Pallisa.

In 2017 after I had volunteered and worked with Woman of Purpose a community based organization in Pallisa, I began to realize while i interacted with children I met during those 10 years, that they could hardly understand basic questions such as "How old are you? or where do you go to school? and so on. After probing further I realized the actually was not school providing the quality of education that is found in Urban areas. 
I therefore started a Pre-Primary school specially geared at addressing the literacy and numeracy component of education with emphasis on reading and writing but most of all we choose to pay attention to the environment in which the pupils/learners were learning in.

We also realized that parents paid very little or no attention to the education of their children. To address this, we required that parents visit their child at least one every school term ( A school Term is 3 months on average).

To address the issue of non qualified teacher together with that of absenteeism, we put in place policies that compelled the teachers to be present and required all teachers to have a qualification.

Ideally, we are building a school that matches those in the urban areas, a school in which children are able to have the competences required for them to fairly compete with their urban counterparts, a school that can almost certainly enable one enroll for secondary school. A school that we believe is a center of excellence, one that will produce the leaders of tomorrow, people who will pull their communities out of poverty.

At Ezel Nursery and Primary School, most of our research has been informal. Working in a rural community and because of lack of resources to carry out formal research, we have used the lean data approach to measuring our impact and getting evidence regarding the effectiveness of our service.

When we begun in 2017, we mainly relied on interiews with parents. We hold meetings with parents 3 times a year and during that time, we could randomly select parents to ask a few questions regarding the education of their children with the view of knowing if there was remarked improvement and to know what they attributed to any changes.

From 2022, when I did an Acumen Academy course on Lean Data, the started using the lean data approach to measuring data and for us it boiled to surveys we undertake every 3 months (at the end of every school term) or whenever we are introducing a new policy or activity at the school.

It is these termly questionnaires that we have mainly used to collect evidence of our service. As leader of my team, I also actively read a lot of material and research that is conducted in the areas of quality education and circumstances that lead to poor quality education or high rates of failure especially in Rural African school. 

These reviews have informed most of the decisions I make at the school and have contributed highly to how well our learners perform and how the community perceives Ezel NP School.

The  surveys and interviews we conduct every three months have been key to providing us with vital information concerning the impact of our service and proof that what we are doing is producing the aspired results of having rural children access quality education at an affordable price.

For example, one of the assumptions that majority of the people I shared my dream of starting a unique quality driven school in a rural community was that rural people do not really appreciate education and that they would be unwilling or even not interested in paying for a better education as opposed to accessing the free government provided primary education. Our surveys actually showed that provided the education was accessible and within acceptable pocket range, the rural flocks where then more comfortable paying a little more.

It also revealed that the more than 60% of the children in Primary 3 - primary 6 who could not understand a Primary 2 level English story, was not an issue about being in rural Uganda, but that it was more to do with the Quality of education the pupils received, For example from our records, 90% of our learners after 1 year at Ezel Nursery and Primary School are able to better literacy and numeracy competences of their urban counterparts. This year 2023, 15 out of 60 new enrollments we had were transfers from urban schools and the reason for the transfer was Quality  and affordability of our service.

Another revelation from our research was the evidence that having Qualified and experienced teachers also resulted in better performance. when we compared the performance of our learners between 2017 when we started and at some point didn't have experienced and qualified teachers and now when 100% of our teachers are qualified and have more than 1 year experience. It is obvious that the level of teacher competence and experience (whether local sourced or out of community teachers) it really didn't matter much. Because of this we choose to be sourcing our teachers locally and then building their capacity enabling us to save costs and also continue making our service affordable.

After the Pandemic, 4 schools in my community closed. And during the pandemic while school completely shut down leaving millions of children out of school with no other options.

Ezel Nursery and Primary school was able to start a Home/Community learning Project that lasted 2 years and benefiting over 400 children in our community but not only that 2 other organisations and 3 school were able to adopt our model of home/community based learning approach.

We were able to eventually attract funding for our project from Acumen and eventually become one of the Awardees for the +1 Global Fund for Education from the Roddenberry Foundation.

We were able to access these funds because of our ability to measure our impact and know what would work or not work. Because we engage parents every time we intend to start something new at the school, we are able to have their input and this helps us to make much needed adjustments to the implementation process. 

Compared to 2017, 2020 and 2023, It is obvious that we are growing and we shall need to go beyond the termly questionnaires we share with our parents and other stakeholders. To improving and building our Research capabilities. Most times working in very rural communities means that opportunities for growth are limited and opportunities to advance or learn are limited too, it therefore requires more in terms of resources especially financial. An opportunity like the one before me, would not only help us learn and increase knowledge in the Evidence Based Education but it will open up more opportunities not only for Ezel nursery and Primary school but for our community or other rural operated schools to find a footing that can lead to better results and a reversal of the never changing statistics that are associated with rural schools.

Research Question 1:

To what extend does the environment children study in affect their ability to learn?

Research Question 2:

How will the advent of Artificial intelligence affect the gap between children in Rural and Urban Schools.

Research Question 3:

What remedies if there will be available for the rural learner to navigate the gaps created by the introduction of AI in education.

By the end of the 12 weeks, We would like to be able to 

1. Have a report we can base on to see how to improve our learning environment. We would like to know what in a learning environment affects how a child learns by its availability or lack of it.

2. We would like to have a standard Operating Procedure for when it comes to the application of AI in Evidence based Education. A Document that can enable us navigate this new technology without becoming victims of its introduction.

3. We would like to have a report detailing situations in which school in rural communities or disadvantaged schools have taken advantage of artificial intelligence to gain competitive advantage.

Learning in rural communities of Africa is chronically poor, but I want to believe that in more developed countries, rural schools are able to thrive and I think some are utilizing Artificial Intelligence. Having evidence therefore of how it affects them or their learners is vital to understanding how we can take advantage of the new technology. 

1. Having an idea of what matters or having some kind of hierarchy of what is most important to the least important when it comes to setting up an learning environment or developing the infrastructure of  a school, will help us better utilize the limited finances and employing them in areas that will produce better and quicker learning curves.

And knowing how much the learning environment affects learning in relation to other important aspects such as teachers, parental engagement and so on, will help us prove or disprove our assumption that the environment plays a very important aspect to learning just as much as having qualified teachers.

2. In regard to Artificial Intelligence, we do not want to assume that it is something that will take long or that may not have any effect on the education process of the rural African child who has little or not engagement with technology. much as Ezel is a rural school, we believe that the Quality of a school determines its clients. It is not unusual for urban parents to search for quality driven schools in rural areas for their children. Ideally we are shall use the out to understand AI in the education section and to also place Ezel Nursery and Primary school at place where it will not be a victim of technology but rather we would like to put place it at a strategic place.

Long Term: Our vision is to position Ezel Nursery and Primary School as a Center Of Excellence. The LEAP Project will be instrumental in assisting us apply Evidence Base in our programs. Much as we have been gathering information that has informed some of our decisions. This project will help us or build our research skills thereby putting us in position of being able to provide evidence in wider or larger spaces. For example instead of merely focusing on Ezel, we can be able carry out research on a larger scope.

I also believe long term, this project has the potential of building our Network of professionals. I look forward to increasing the number of people or organizations that will or may place a vital role in helping us walk along this journey of making Quality Education both accessible and affordable for the rural and poor.

Short Term: The LEAP Project I hope will build and improve our research capabilities. I expect that during the 12 weeks, our understanding of Evidence Based Education will improve and our ability to measure impact will surely go beyond lean data.