‘Big Five’ Challenges in School Education

EDUCATION has always been an integral part of Namibian culture and society, and teachers currently enjoy that respect and trust.

Teaching is also regarded as a noble, prestigious profession – akin to medicine, law or economics and one driven by normal purpose rather than material interests.

Factually, there is no shortage of challenges in our school education. Some of the biggest challenges we face can appear frustratingly intractable. Despite reform efforts, regular government reviews and ongoing calls for change, progress in addressing our most significant challenges is often slow and solutions continue to elude us.

It is not that people don’t know what the challenges are. But their roots sometimes lie largely outside the reach of schools or in deeply entrenched educational processes and structures that are difficult to change.

A political response is sometimes to focus instead on low-hanging fruit and quick wins – to make changes at the margins where change seems possible. However, real reform and significant progress in improving the quality and equity of Namibian schooling depend on tackling our deepest and most stubborn educational challenges.

Here are the five challenges:

1. Raising the professional status of teaching: A need to raise the status of teaching as a career choice to attract more able people into teaching and to develop teaching as a knowledge-based profession. Attracting the best and brightest school leavers to teaching is only a first step for top-performing nations.

They also work to understand the nature of expert teaching and use this understanding to shape initial teacher education programmes, coaching and mentoring arrangements and ongoing professional development.

2. Reducing disparities between schools: A need to reduce the disparity between the schooling experiences of pupils in most and least advantaged schools. Some countries have been successful both in lifting overall levels of achievement and in reducing differences related to socio-economic background.

Two conclusions are that increased national overall performance is associated with greater equity in the distribution of educational resources, and that equity can also be undermined when school choice segregates pupils into schools based on socio-economic background.

3. Designing a 21st century curriculum: A need to re-design the school curriculum to better prepare pupils for life and work in the 21st century. Today’s world is vastly different from that of 50 years ago. The pace of change is accelerating with increasing globalisation, advances in technology, communications and social networking, greater increased access to information, an explosion of knowledge and an array of increasingly complex social and environmental issues.

The world of work is also undergoing rapid change with greater workforce mobility, growth in knowledge-based work, the emergence of multi-disciplinary work teams engaged in innovation and problem solving and a much greater requirement for continual workplace learning. Many features of the school curriculum have been unchanged for decades.

We continue to present disciplines largely in isolation from each other, place an emphasis on the mastery of large bodies of factual and procedural knowledge and treat learning as an individual rather than collective activity. This is particularly true in the senior secondary school, which then influences curricula in the earlier years. As a result, pupil’s experiences of school subjects can be very different from the experiences of those who ultimately work in these disciplines.

4. Promoting flexible learning arrangements focused on growth: A need to provide more flexible and personalised learning arrangements in schools to better meet the needs of individual learners. The organisation of schools and schooling also has been largely unchanged for decades. Although composite classes are common, pupils tend to be grouped into year levels, by age and to progress automatically with their age peers from one year of school to the next.

A curriculum is developed for each year of school, learners are placed in mixed-ability classes, teachers deliver the curriculum for the year level they are teaching and learners are assessed and graded on how well they perform on that specific curriculum.

This approach to organising teaching and learning might be appropriate if pupils of the same age commenced each school year at more or less the same point in their learning.

But this is far from the practise; the most advanced learners commencing any year of school are typically five or six years ahead of the least advanced learners. In practice, this means that less advanced children often struggle with year-level expectations and are judged to be performing poorly – often year after year.

At the other extreme, some more advanced students are unchallenged by year-level expectations and receive high grades year after year with minimal effort. Underpinning this practice is a tacit belief that the same curriculum is appropriate for all, or almost all learners of the same age.

Learning success and failure are then defined as success or failure in mastering this common curriculum. This age-based approach to organising teaching and learning is deeply entrenched and reinforced by legislation that requires teachers to judge and grade all learners against year-level expectations.

5. Identifying and meeting the needs of children on trajectories of low achievement: A need to identify as early as possible children who are at risk of falling behind in their learning and to address their individual learning needs. By year three, there are wide differences in children’s levels of achievement in learning areas such as reading and mathematics.

Some children are already well behind year-level expectations, and many of these children remain behind throughout their schooling. They are locked into trajectories of ‘underperformance’ that often lead to disengagement, poor attendance and early exit from school. Trajectories of low achievement often begin well before school.

Differences by year three tend to be continuations of differences apparent on entry to school when puipils have widely varying levels of cognitive, language, physical, social and emotional development.

Some children are at risk because of developmental delays or special learning needs; some begin school at a disadvantage because of their limited mastery of English or socio-economically impoverished living circumstances and some, including indigenous children experience multiple forms of disadvantage. Thus, many children in our schools not only remain on trajectories of low achievement, but also fall further behind with each year of school.

They make up a long and sometimes growing – tail of underperforming learners, many of whom continually fail to meet minimum standards of achievement.

Therefore, since teacher education became part of academic university studies, Namibian teachers’ professional identity and status have gradually increased.

During the course of future education reform, teachers should demand more autonomy and responsibility for curriculum and learners assessment. Teachers’ strong competence and preparedness create the prerequisite for the professional autonomy that makes teaching a valued career.

Further, a critical condition for attracting the most competent young people to teaching is that teachers’ work is an independent and respected profession, rather than just a technical implementation of externally mandated standards and tests.