Mother tongue education is cost-effective

Policymakers are often reluctant to support mother tongue as a medium of instruction in schools, arguing it is too expensive. Yet the savings can be significant.

Mother tongue education (MTE) results in lower dropout and repetition rates than traditional approaches where children don't learn in their own languages.

A cost-benefit analysis of MTE programmes shows that they cost more to set up but the costs of moving to MTE are not as high as might be expected. Additional costs of developing MTE programmes include:

• scripting and developing local languages for academic use
• writing, developing, and publishing textbooks and materials
• developing programmes to train teachers in MTE approaches
• better teaching of the dominant language as a second language

Moving to an MTE system is estimated to cost up to four or five percent of a country's education budget. However, extra teacher education costs for MTE decrease over time. Once a new teacher education programme has been designed and trialed it is absorbed into the overall system.

Similarly, the costs of textbooks and materials are absorbed into overall running costs with time. Once developed, they only need updating and reprinting, as with any textbooks.

MTE leads to reductions in repetition and dropout rates, resulting in significant cost savings. When fewer children have their education interrupted by repetition and dropout, it takes less time (and costs less) to get the same number of children through basic education. Additional benefits accumulate to a country from adopting MTE as students' future earning power is likely to increase if they stay in education for longer.

In Guatemala and Senegal it costs more to publish textbooks in local languages but not as much as some claim. In Guatemala 0.13 percent of the recurrent education budget is spent on textbooks. Guatemala's savings have been estimated at over US$5.6 million a year due to reduced repetition and dropout rates resulting from MTE, allowing for higher costs of delivering schooling.

Policy implications

• MTE needs to be introduced against a background of broader investment by donors and national governments in education. All education systems need to invest in flexible and well targeted teacher recruitment, training and development to reach Education for All goals.
• Governments must give long-term support to MTE, as most benefits will only be seen after a few years. MTE is therefore more likely to succeed in a relatively stable political context.

By Helen Pinnock, Save the Children UK, summarising review by Kathleen Heugh
www.adeanet.org/biennial-2006/doc/document/B3_1_MTBLE_en.pdf (Chapter 8)

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