Bluebell school assessment 2024

Bluebell classroom November 2024

Bluebell School is operated by Oasis for Posterity in Balagram, a small town in Nilphamari district. It provides 60 children with a no-fees education from pre-school to grade five (the terminal primary grade in most of South Asia). The school serves an adjacent social housing village for landless families, with additional students attending from the nearby town.

Donor contributions helped us buy a classroom TV for on-line teaching programs

Several times, we have assessed children's learning in the two key cognitive skills, reading and arithmetic. How to do it? Unfortunately, in both India and Bangladesh, official learning outcomes reported for government schools are either impossible to interpret or seriously biased. Two decades ago, Pratham, a large Indian NGO initiated very large – over 600,000 children – biannual surveys conducted in students' homes. To enable comparison – between Bluebell and Balagram students, and between these schools and Indian equivalents – we used a protocol similar to the ASER surveys employed by Pratham in India.

Previously, we have organized in-home surveys only for children living in the social housing project. In 2024, for comparison, we also surveyed public school students in Balagram, the nearby town. Recently, BHP Director John Richards published a summary of the assessment findings (link below) John’s report covers not only the Bluebell assessment results but also the survey protocol, comparisons with results in India using the same survey tool, the impacts of Covid shut-downs and parental literacy, and “learning poverty”.

RICHARDS Bluebell School Assessment 2024.pdf

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Education priorities

BHP Director John Richards along with colleagues Manzoor Ahmed and Shahidul Islam recently published an op-ed on education reforms in Bangladesh’s leading English-language newspaper. They recommend urgent and short-term actions to return to a “new normal” with effective consultation processes to engage students, families and teachers. In the medium-term, they propose, “Teachers' professionalism and performance are the pivot of change in education.” They also propose increased education budgets; meaningful assessment of student learning; decentralized management, and involvement of industry experts to ensure graduates have the right skills. This is an ambitious agenda and the authors conclude, “The interim government is not expected to complete all the needed reforms. But if it realizes at least some of the key reforms and charts the way ahead for others, it will have done justice to the sacrifices of students and citizens during the July-August movement.” You can read about BHP support for primary education in our earlier blog posts.

The importance of learning assessment

BHP Director John Richards has been working with Bangladeshi colleagues proposing reforms to the country’s education system. Following joint publication of a textbook, “Political Economy of Education in South Asia”, John contributed to a recent essay in a prominent Dhaka newspaper. The essay covers all aspects of an agenda for education reform aimed at building an equitable, inclusive and quality education system for all.

Among many other recommendations, Dr. Manzoor Ahmed, the lead author, writes: “One of the priorities should be a broad assessment of primary-level students' ability to read and do basic arithmetic, and actions based on the assessment to reach these targets.” This has been a major focus of BHP expectations for the primary school that we support through the Oasis for Posterity NGO. You can read about the latest assessment and follow-up actions in earlier editions of this blog.