Rwanda has made strong progress in increasing access to education, but various indicators and studies show that learners continue to struggle to master foundational skills. This in turn leads to repetition or even drop-out from school, which disproportionately affects the more vulnerable learners.
School leaders play a crucial role in tackling this issue, through close follow-up and monitoring. To be able to fulfil this crucial role, school leaders’ competencies to use data for reflection, school improvement and monitoring of the quality of systems and equity, can be strengthened. Considering Rwanda has invested in a large number of new schools in recent years, newly assigned school leaders can especially benefit from stronger competencies in this regard. Government staff at sector and district level need to further support an enabling environment for school leaders to apply effective distributed leadership and to take data-driven decisions.
School leaders and school-based mentors have the competencies to use data to support teaching and adequately address repetition, drop-out and equity gaps in learning outcomes.
- Ministry of Education (MINEDUC)
- Rwanda Basic Education Board (REB)
- University of Rwanda – College of Education (URCE)
- National Examination and School Inspection Authority (NESA)
The LEAD programme centres on strengthening the competencies of school leaders and school-based mentors to rely on and use data to improve teaching, learning and school-based teacher professional development. School-based mentors are in-service teachers who have been identified by their school leader as best placed to take up mentoring roles for their peers, lead on school-based teacher professional developed initiatives etc.
The programme is built around 4 pillars:
- Strengthening the competencies of school-based mentors and school leaders to use data on the status of learning disaggregated by different types of students. Regular monitoring can reveal changes over time in response to interventions to improve student outcomes, providing additional data for decision-making.
- For school-based mentors, this means assessing student performance, understanding the causes of learning gaps, and doing self-assessment, among other things.
- For school leaders, this involves using data to inform the overall school performance, and supporting planning and monitoring activities.
- Support to government staff at sector and district level to coach and mentor school leaders and to facilitate professional learning communities (PLCs) for school leaders. This allows them to gain insights into challenges that schools face and to support them in taking data-driven decisions.
- Strengthening the competencies of REB, NESA and URCE staff through blended learning activities on using data in continuous professional development (CPD) programmes.
- Generation and use of evidence to institutionalise and scale CPD programmes and PLCs nationally.
By the end of the programme:
- School leaders and school-based mentors use data in school improvement plans to address repetition, drop-out and equity gaps in learning outcomes.
- School leaders, school-based mentors and sector and district officials have positive attitudes towards distributed leadership.
- Building further on previous work with VVOB in Rwanda on effective school leadership and educational monitoring coaching:
- REB and URCE have redeveloped and continue to deliver the CPD programme on Effective School Leadership and continue to support PLCs. The redevelopment aims to better equip school leaders to effectively lead the school using data.
- Building further on previous work in partnership with VVOB in Rwanda, REB, NESA and URCE have redeveloped and continue to deliver the CPD programme on Educational Mentorship and Coaching for district officials, sector officials and school-based mentors.
- Based on generated evidence, MINEDUC, REB and NESA recognise the importance of the abovementioned CPD programmes and PLCs as mandatory in related policies and budgets for cost-effective delivery of CPD; and mobilise resources to that end.
- MINEDUC, REB and NESA establish a comprehensive data ecosystem for planning, monitoring and evaluation mechanisms for delivery of CPD programmes at national, district and sector level; and use it to motivate education actors to participate in the CPD programmes and PLCs.
