SDG Target 4.2 identifies ‘pre-primary education’ as a strategy to strengthen school readiness and contribute to the quality and outcomes of education. This is supported by powerful evidence on the benefits for disadvantaged and marginalised groups. The challenge faced by many countries is to deliver the proven potential of well-planned, quality programmes to scale.
Ethiopia’s most recent ambitious targets for early learning are set out in the Fifth Education Sector Development Programme (2015), with pre-primary education identified as a “tool to increase equity in the education system” and pre-primary classes (known as O-Class) seen as the most rapid route to scale-up. Based on recent Young Lives engagements with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education, to support scale-up, this paper summarises Ethiopia’s growing commitment to pre-primary education and its challenges in delivering early learning for all.
The paper draws on exploratory fieldwork on three key themes, namely (i) the response of Regional Education Bureaus in planning, financing, management and ensuring human capacity for scale-up; (ii) the potential of Ethiopia’s Colleges of Teacher Education to supply sufficient trained teachers to work with young children, especially in the rapidly expanding O-Classes; and (iii) community stakeholder perspectives on what children need at different stages prior to going to school and on how this relates to current early learning provision. The final section introduces parallel experiences of other countries, notably ‘Grade R’ in South Africa, and presents six key challenges for scale-up: equity; age-appropriateness; cross-sectoral coordination; capacity building; and research and evidence.
While Ethiopia’s initiative to scale-up O-Class is a welcome indicator of policy commitment to SDG Target 4.2, there is a risk that low quality pre-primary programmes will not deliver on the potential of early childhood education and that children (especially poor children) will be the losers.
