Inclusive ECCD: - Consultative Group on Early Childhood Care and ...

CASE STUDIES
■ encouragement to develop ongoing relationships
between schools; and
■ workshops for some grade 3, 4, and 5 teachers,
as well as more kindergarten teachers,
at the end of the school year.
Results
Results have been generally good. Seventy-five
children in all have been included, and the only
real problems have been where school improvement
had not gone far enough or where pressure
(and the very real difficulty of having to refuse
places) led to a primary school taking on too
much and overloading some classes which were
then unable to complete the year’s curriculum.
One pleasing result, not looked for in this first
year, has been the drop in the failure and repetition
rate in many primary schools. As one head
teacher said, “1995 was the very last year of high repetition
rates. We can now recognise difficulties long before the
exam and put in extra help”. In her school the grade
exam failure rate had dropped by over half, and
all but one of the ten children with special needs
were moving up a grade in September 1996.
Work in the kindergartens has gone very well
with all the recruited children making significant
improvement. It takes little imagination to consider
what the situation for each of these children
would be had education only been offered at age
seven.
Kindergarten staff immediately recognise the
relationship between school improvement and integrated
education and see the new tasks as deepening
their general teaching skills by becoming
better able to see individual differences and the
need for the all round development of the child.
They have also seen how much co-operative
working relationships can contribute to the work
of the school. This aspect of the programme is
therefore very welcome and is seen as an additional
spur to general school improvement.
Kindergarten teachers have also been very
pleased that their special skills with families, with
social and emotional development and creating
interactive relationships with children have been
recognised and that primary school teachers have
come to see how those same skills can enhance
their own work. In Laos, as it is elsewhere,
kindergarten teachers have lower status than other
teachers do. Co-operation and joint training is
leading to a reassessment of their skills and roles.
When primary school teachers turn to them for
ways to improve children’s social skills, for ways
to involve families, for methods of making teaching
aids, for their understanding of child development,
their self esteem and confidence grows.
Families and communities have very much welcomed
the programme. Previously when no services
were available, families had been isolated
and, feeling there was no way forward, were unable
to help their children. With access to school
and a personal relationship with the teacher, attitudes
have quickly changed and many families
are working hard with their children. Seeing the
changes in children and families, communities
have become very supportive. As these children
have never been removed from the village or urban
district into institutions, there is no feeling
that they should be somewhere else.
With word spreading, one current problem is
the enormous demand for expansion. For example,
in one district with one integrated primary
school, requests were received from all the adjacent
villages’ primary schools. It would be very
easy to overwhelm the implementation team, so
that schools would not receive the necessary support.
One of the strengths of the team is their
day-to-day work in different branches of education,
but work on this programme is still new to
team members and must be fitted into their other
responsibilities. One way to help support teams is
to provide a steady expansion of the team from
those schools using existing teams to train additional
team members with experience. Already
some head teachers are beginning to take on this
additional role. Nevertheless the greatest danger
at present is too swift an expansion before the
personnel resources are available and before a
proper evaluation of the methodology has been
undertaken.
All teachers have made very full use of the mutual
support, which has been encouraged, and indeed
this would appear to have been one of the
key components of the programme. This has
been seen to be true elsewhere in school improvement
work (e.g., in the UK), however,
where there is very little expertise to call on,
where there are no diagnostic and assessment
procedures for young children, and where there
are, as yet, very few reference materials, teachers
must develop, between themselves, knowledge
on how to observe, discuss, plan, and evaluate results
themselves. This can only be done through a
co-operative team approach within and between
schools.
It is also clear that the high level of co-operation
between all those involved is vital. This includes
co-operation at ministry and policy
making levels—especially between health and
education, between administration across and between
levels, between schools in different sectors
and regions, between teachers, and between
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