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Reaching out-of-school children in Ghana with multigrade schooling

Northern Ghana has high levels of poverty, scattered settlements and low socio-economic activity. Many of the children in this area would never have been able to attend school if not for the School for Life programme, a model of multigrade schooling. What impact has it had on improving access to basic education?

The development of primary education in Ghana has led to conditions that ultimately create a need for multigrade schooling in the northern region. Early policies favoured high quality primary education over rapidly expanding access, which meant that schools were built in well-populated areas while sparsely populated areas, especially in the north, were disadvantaged. Despite recent education sector reforms, this situation largely continues today.

The School for Life programme is one of three programmes run jointly by northern Ghanaian community-based organisations in co-operation with the Ghana Danish Communities Association and Denmark-based Ghana Friendship. The school term runs from October to June to avoid the farming season and classes are from 2pm to 5pm, leaving children free to help with farm chores in the morning. After the nine-month programme, graduates are expected to join mainstream schooling.

The study found that:

Within seven years, the School for Life (SFL) programme covered about 26 percent of communities, enrolling over 36,000 pupils, of whom 61 percent were mainstreamed into the public school system.
About 11,000 SFL graduates did not enrol in public primary schools as they could not find schools within a reasonable distance or their parents could not pay fees or buy uniforms.
Teachers in some public primary schools identified SFL graduates as usually among their best students.
The total running cost of an SFL school per student per year was US$31, compared with US$39 for state-run schools, mostly due to the cost of supervision of teachers and in-service support.
SFL schools are highly cost effective in that after nine months of instruction, about 62 percent of pupils reached the third and fourth grade levels of formal schooling (ie US$50 for SFL versus US$204 for the equivalent in public schooling).

The SFL programme is not explicitly referred to as multigrade schooling and, as such, it does not receive recognition as a viable alternative to monograde schooling to reach out-of-school children in remote locations. More needs to be done to promote such innovative approaches and integrate them into formal basic education. The lessons that can be learned from this study are as follows:

Monograde schooling is not the only way to provide quality education for all children, particularly in situations where there is a high repetition or drop-out rate or conditions increase the likelihood of out-of-school children.
Achievement with multigrade schooling depends to a large extent on effective organisation of instruction.
The cost of setting up a multigrade school (up to 75 students) within small communities is relatively high, and running costs are similar to a monograde primary school (up to 200 pupils). Yet they have lower drop-out rates and reduce numbers of out-of-school children.
Multigrade schooling can make a positive contribution towards improving access and providing high quality education if it receives high teacher commitment, professional support for teachers, textbooks and teacher guides, and commitment from the community.

Source(s):
‘Extending Basic Education to Out-of-School Children in Northern Ghana: What can Multigrade Schooling Teach Us?’, by Albert Kwame Akyeampong, in ‘Education for All and Multigrade Teaching: Challenges and Opportunities’, pages 215-238, Springer: Dordrecht, edited by Angela Little, 2006 Full document.

Funded by: USAID

id21 Research Highlight: 17 December 2007

Further Information:
Albert Kwame Akyeampong
Centre for International Education
University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton BN1 9RE
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)1273 877051
Fax: +44 (0)1273 877534
Contact the contributor: a.akyeampong@sussex.ac.uk

Centre for International Education, University of Sussex, UK

Views expressed on these pages are not necessarily those of DFID, IDS, id21 or other contributing institutions. Unless stated otherwise articles may be copied or quoted without restriction, provided id21 and originating author(s) and institution(s) are acknowledged.

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