One example of how quality female educators can be ensured is the Wing School project by Oxfam in Ghana and ACE (Alliance for Change in Education). The wing school project was established to address the problem that many rural communities in northern Ghana do not have access to a primary school nearby, which prevents many children from attending school. Some communities fall short of the requirements from the Ghana Education Service (GES) on the considerable financial, administrative, and human resources involved in setting up and maintaining a full primary school. At the same time, the children from 4-9 years are too small to walk the long distance of often more than five kilometres that is especially too unsafe for girls. This is why the wing school initiative was developed.
A wing school is designed to operate as a wing or an extension of an existing formal public school, which then maintains some supervisory and administrative responsibility for the wing school. The wing school initiative reaches the children living in educationally hard-to-reach communities. It delivers a proven educational and pedagogical package of learner-centred and gender-responsive education with mother-tongue instruction to children from age 4-9 (and occasionally, above age 9). The wing schools in these marginalized communities fight hard to attract qualified female and male teachers.
Wing school teacher training in Ghana
How did this initiative ensure quality educators of all genders?
Often, female teachers and educators lack safe transport and proper working and living conditions in hard-to-reach communities. Therefore, the wing school initiative embarked on the possibility of allowing educators of all genders working at the wing school to reside in the community in a safe and secure environment. Teachers were recruited from nearby communities through networking and broadcasting of vacancies in community radios. Teachers took up volunteer positions and were recruited among people who could read and write but who had not obtained a professional teacher education. Some had been prevented from completing senior high school or had failed the tests necessary to progress to tertiary education. Candidates had to go through a formal application procedure. In the interview, they would learn about the wing school initiative, the varied (formal and informal) roles of the volunteer teachers and the working and living conditions associated with the job. They would also be tested on their competency in the community’s local language. Although it was a volunteer position, the teacher would receive an allowance of money, food, and be offered protection from harm. More importantly, they would be given a chance to further their education as they could enrol in the UTDBE (Untrained Teachers’ Diploma in Basic Education) program for free. They would eventually be offered employment as professional teachers afterwards if the Government of Ghana had the provisions necessary. This would increase the number of qualified teachers, especially female teachers, in these marginalized communities.
Every volunteer teacher at the wing school would be trained before they would start teaching. Each year, the new teachers appointed were taken through an initial 21-day round of training before placing them in the schools. The courses were residential and used contextually adapted training guides made available from Oxfam in Ghana on request. Prior to these pre-service training workshops, master trainers – mostly from the District Directorate of Education (DDE) and School for Life (a local NGO) – facilitated relevant Training of Trainers (ToT) sessions. Those trained at the ToT workshops then cascaded the training down to the volunteer teachers in their respective districts. The 21-day training packages comprised both plenary sessions covering the more generalist pedagogical training (using English as the medium of instruction) and language-specific sessions conducted in different local language groups. The importance of keeping to learner-centred approaches as a means of enhancing children’s self-esteem and assertiveness was emphasized.
Learner-centred, gender-sensitive teaching: including lesson note preparation, teaching and learning material development / improvisation, group work, role play, learning through discussion/debates and talking walls; addressing gender awareness by portraying girls in roles they rarely see (e.g., serving as doctors or as their schools’ senior prefects or killing snakes) and presenting boys sharing basic household chores (like sweeping and fetching water);
Subject content;
Instructing classes in L1 (mother-tongue/first language);
School/community relationships and responsibilities to DDEs and communities;
Teamwork/ mutual support in delivering lessons.
The District Directorates of Education continue to support the wing schools by including them in their regular circuit supervision visits. During these visits, Circuit Supervisors are encouraged to check teachers’ lesson notes and observe how they deliver lessons to their pupils. Based on their observations, they are expected to provide mentoring, technical advice, and support to project staff so that these could be planned for and covered effectively during future rounds of refresher training, and flag areas requiring more intensive training for the attention of their DDEs.
The supervisory headteachers from the parent public schools were also assigned supervision responsibilities. Taking the wing schools as extensions of their schools, the supervising headteachers are required to visit twice a month. The school management committees also continually monitor teachers’ attendance and punctuality, pupils’ attendance, and the effective utilization of instruction time. Likewise, parents are taught to monitor their children’s performance by assessing their exercise books for the kinds of ticking teachers placed on their children’s answers. In addition, annual tests are conducted on random samples of pupils to assess their numeracy and literacy achievements. These assessment results are used to engage at the community and district levels – with parents, school authorities, and the DDEs, with the aim of advancing the objectives of the initiative.
Time is set aside during each school term to organize a three-day refresher training workshop for the serving volunteers. These are held over weekends, as the volunteer teachers are already committed to the UTDBE program which was scheduled for the school vacations. Supervising teachers are invited to participate in these workshops to enhance their own capacities.
The recruitment, training, and continuous development of the educators from these wing schools ensured the change outcome of quality educators of all genders. The volunteer teachers could develop their own professional capacities for the benefit of the schoolchildren but also to empower their own social and economic situation – which is especially important for women.