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.
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”.
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