Today marks International Day of Education, which celebrates the role of education for peace and development. Without providing children with a quality education, countries will never be able to break the cycle of poverty. 

This important day, highlighting that we all have a responsibility for the future generations, has allowed us to reflect on the work that we are doing in Ghana and how we can help children to succeed by providing them with a quality early years education. 

Kindergarten in Ghana represents the first two years of compulsory education (4 and 5 year old children). Evaluation of our work has shown that the training delivered to kindergarten teachers is making a difference on the educational outcomes of the children in their classes, but what happens once these children leave kindergarten?

It is sometimes questioned if the benefits that children receive from a quality kindergarten education will start to disappear once they enter primary school, and revert back to the old style of rote learning, with poorly trained teachers. However, an impact evaluation on Sabre’s teacher training methodology is starting to show that this is not the case…

Sabre’s teacher training content was used to create a short in-service training project delivered by the National Nursery Teacher Training Centre in Accra, the Quality Preschool for Ghana (QP4G) project. Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) conducted an impact evaluation on this adapted in-service teacher training and demonstrated the training was successful in improving children’s pre-literacy, pre-numeracy and social-emotional skills, which are important elements of school readiness. 

IPA continued to follow these children and their results have been groundbreaking in an African context. Their report showed that, “One year later, when children moved to their next year of schooling, the impacts on social-emotional development persisted. Two years later, preliminary evidence shows sustained gains in literacy, executive function, and behavioural regulation. There was also persistent positive impacts on both literacy and numeracy outcomes in classrooms where teachers had low burnout levels.”

We can now see that the benefits of a quality kindergarten education can persist into primary schooling, going against the suggestion that there will be a fade out. This is hugely exciting evidence to back up our teacher training methodology, and on this International Day of Education spurs us on to keep reaching more children throughout Ghana and beyond. 

If you would like to read the complete findings please follow this link:

https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/impacts-teacher-training-and-parental-awareness-kindergarten-quality-ghana