Sustaining improvements in the literacy levels of early grade pupils across Nigeria

Literacy underpins the realisation of the sustainable development goals, but how to sustain improvements in literacy that have resulted from teacher education programmes still needs to be addressed. Numerous programmes have... [ view full abstract ]

Literacy underpins the realisation of the sustainable development goals, but how to sustain improvements in literacy that have resulted from teacher education programmes still needs to be addressed. Numerous programmes have witnessed short-term improvements, but many have struggled to make a lasting impact. This paper presents practical experiences of efforts to sustain literacy improvements in tens of thousands of government primary schools across Nigeria resulting from an in-service synthetic phonics teacher training and resource programme. These experiences include the development of localised “Teacher Leaders”, tasked with expanding and sustaining the implementation of the programme and aided with the tools and sustainable resources to do so through enabling them to be local educational entrepreneurs; the integration of technological innovations, including a teacher lesson plan app, WhatsApp groups amongst teachers and regular batch SMS messages to teachers; and efforts to sustainably embed the method into the education system through such things as providing material printing licences to federal government and the development of modules for pre-service teacher training providers, amongst other strategies. Additionally, the paper highlights factors that have been important in facilitating teachers’ sustained application of the knowledge and skills gained through the programme, which have mainly included intrinsic and extrinsic rewards brought by the nature of the teaching method itself – teachers enjoy implementing the method because it is fun and interactive, feel competent in doing so because it is very easy and quickly effective and have widely acquired increased social status as a result of being a teacher on the programme. The paper builds upon the quantitative evidence of improvements in literacy levels presented at the 2015 UKFIET conference through utilising largely qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with teachers, school management, government officials and programme staff, focus groups with parents, existing project monitoring sources and insider-participant observations.