The Brunei Literacy and Numeracy Coaching Programme - an embedded partnership

The Government of Brunei Darussalam has adopted a policy objective of building its human capital so that its highly educated people drive the next generation of social and economic growth as oil and gas reserves diminish. The... [ view full abstract ]

The Government of Brunei Darussalam has adopted a policy objective of building its human capital so that its highly educated people drive the next generation of social and economic growth as oil and gas reserves diminish. The Brunei Ministry of Education has recently partnered with CfBT Brunei to implement the Literacy and Numeracy Coaching Programme (LNCP). The LNCP commenced in September 2016 and will run until mid-2019.  Following a three-month inception phase, implementation commenced in January 2017.  The LNCP complements the English Language Teacher Programme which has operated in Brunei for 32 years.  The LNCP has three component parts (1) a capacity building programme building the skills of central office leaders and cluster heads; (2) the recruitment and deployment of 60 international coaches in all schools – their focus is building the capacity of teachers; and (3) a local coach identification, training and accreditation component which will build local sustainability beyond the term of the contracted support.

The overarching objective of the LNCP is to assist Brunei teacher’s capacity through building subject content knowledge and pedagogical skills (dialogic teaching and learning) and ultimately to raise student learning standards.  Future areas of support include task design and differentiation.  The partnership is evidence based and will provide support for schools and teachers to be able to case manage the learning of every student in Brunei schools.

The literacy and numeracy focus of the partnership provides a core scaffolding for Brunei to be able to improve their educational attainment and benchmark their learning performance against PISA for the first time in 2018. 

While the Literacy and Numeracy Coaching Programme is in the early stages of implementation, very promising signs are already evident.