Guyana: Closing the learning gap for the most vulnerable students

At the Precious Gems Nursery School in the region of Bartica, Guyana, teachers are making learning fun for their young learners. In the playground, a group of children concentrates as their teacher prepares to throw them a ball.

This fun and simple exercise helps improve children’s motor skills while enhancing hand-eye coordination.

Inside a classroom, teachers and students sit in a semicircle, singing. In an adjacent classroom, students are learning the alphabet: using playdough, they must follow the outline of the letter which has been written in chalk on their desks.

The school walls are painted in bright colors and display several learning resources, posters and drawings, reflecting the school’s values and celebrating the children’s learning achievements.

Precious Gems Nursery School is among several schools that have benefitted from a GPE-funded program implemented under the leadership of the government of Guyana and with support from the World Bank during 2015-2018.

The program focused on improving literacy and numeracy skills for children in preschool through grade 1 in remote hinterland and riverine regions.

Past challenges

Traditionally, Guyana’s hinterland and riverine regions faced several disadvantages in early childhood education compared to coastal areas.

These remote regions suffered from a lack of appropriate learning materials in schools. Learning materials were either lacking entirely, or not aligned with the curriculum.

Teachers were required to improvise using what was donated by parents, community groups and NGOs, or make their own materials. To teach children to count, teachers built abacuses using seeds; to teach music, they fashioned impromptu percussion instruments beaten with sticks.

The lack of trained teachers also posed a challenge: in 2011-2012, 53% of early childhood education teachers in hinterland and riverine areas were untrained. Even among trained teachers, instructional methods didn’t follow best practices.

Many were unaware of the role of play in stimulating cognitive thinking and developing social and motor skills.

The combination of inadequate teaching practices and the lack of appropriate learning materials, in the context of historic regional poverty, had a negative effect on learning outcomes.

In 2013, the Ministry of Education administered a diagnostic assessment to more than 700 children entering grade 1 in hinterland areas. The findings were alarming: approximately 60% of the children had not mastered the prerequisite skills for reading, and less than 10% could demonstrate any understanding of text.

Additionally, 40% showed very little or no ability to identify even basic numbers.

Dismantling the barriers to quality education

To overcome these challenges, the GPE-supported program promoted an integrated intervention that focused on three pillars:

• providing capacity building for teachers
• improving the supply of teaching and learning materials
• providing training to primary caregivers to help them better support their children’s learning at home.

Thanks to the training program, teachers feel more confident during class. They can effectively tailor lessons to meet the needs of the children and know how to create an environment that stimulates children’s learning, engagement and creativity.

Teachers also monitor their students more closely and regularly, with the support of formal guidelines, which helps to ensure improved learning outcomes.

And, with curriculum-specific learning materials now available, thanks to the distribution of early childhood education resource kits, lessons have become easier to deliver for teachers and more interactive and interesting for students.

Teachers report far greater engagement when the lessons incorporate the new learning materials and children are also more motivated to come to school.

More involved parents

The GPE-supported program organized training sessions for parents or primary caregivers during parent-teacher association meetings. Other initiatives included setting up parent-teacher conferences, establishing learning resource centers and conducting home visits to promote parents’ engagement in their children’s learning.

Additionally, GPE funded the award-winning “Read. Play. Love.” campaign, the first literacy and numeracy mass media campaign for parents and caregivers of children under 5. The campaign encourages parents to start modelling pro-educational behaviors at home.

Reaping the benefits of early childhood education

Several head teachers have reported an increase in enrollments since the GPE-supported improvements and that children are better prepared for primary school. Primary teachers agree that children are acquiring a strong foundation that will help them to succeed in the next phase of their education.

The GPE-funded program has brought tangible results in improving learning and equity in Guyana’s hinterland regions:

• 8,700 school vulnerable students living in hinterland and riverine areas benefitted from the program
• 88% of vulnerable young children living in remote areas master early reading and math skills at the end of preschool. These children now have similar levels of pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills than their most privileged peers
• 526 teachers participated in a compulsory annual training program which covered pedagogy, phonemic awareness, phonics instruction and the use of resource toolkits. The training was delivered by master trainers, high-performing teachers selected for initial training from the different regions, whose role was to train early childhood education teachers as well as monitor and mentor them
• 750 early childhood education resource kits were distributed to schools along with teachers manuals. These kits included more than 30 learning resources such as stackable cubes, numeracy flash cards, mega blocks building bags, and alphabet and numbers foam puzzles. In line with the aim to promote more experiential and inquiry-based learning activities for children, the learning materials help students learn independently and in small groups through play.

Ensuring sustainability after the program ended was a key priority for the Ministry of Education. To achieve this, teachers and master trainers will continue to receive training as part of the ministry’s professional development program.

In addition, the replenishment of the early childhood education resource kits has been budgeted for in the following financial plans.

GPE has supported the government of Guyana in making an investment in education that will have long-term impact, ensuring that future generations of children have equal learning opportunities.

Now young children living in the most disadvantaged areas of the country can get off to a good start, which will set them up for success in their schooling career.