Getting ready for school in Tajikistan with Child-to-Child approach
by Erlingur Erlingsson and Erin Tanner Tajikistan - January 2009 - Early education opportunities in Tajikistan are severely limited; only nine percent of children attend preschool nationwide. Children enter Grade one at age seven, and most arrive without the cognitive and social skills so critical for successful participation and retention in primary education. Since fall 2008, UNICEF has supported the Getting Ready for School pilot project in 20 schools, where the Child-to-Child approach is used to support school readiness for more than 1,000 young children. The initial success of the ‘Getting Ready for School: A Child-to-Child Approach’ initiative spoke for itself on a visit to the rural Rumi District of Tajikistan. Young children, bundled up in cold classrooms, enthusiastically counted pebbles and pine cones, matched them to numbered cards and reported their findings to their instructors. The instructors, themselves Grade four students known as Young Facilitators, proudly guided their young charges, eagerly engaging their interest, firmly encouraging their participation and gently correcting their mistakes. The Getting Ready for School pilot project aims to prepare young children for their first year in primary school by building on children’s natural tendency to play and on the social networks that exist between older and younger children. The project matches Grade four students (aged 10-11) with 5-6 year olds in weekly sessions during which the older children facilitate activities that develop young learners’ basic skills, such as language and listening, social cooperation, counting, alphabet recognition, and initial writing skills. The activities also reinforce the skills of the older children.
The classes are supervised by Grade four teachers who have attended UNICEF-funded training courses on the Child-to-Child approach and who will become the Grade one teachers of the young learners when they enter school in fall 2009. With the support of local school authorities, who provide classroom space, the scope of this project is limited only by the available time of the teachers and the willingness of the Young Facilitators. Normally preschool is not even an option for children living in rural Tajikistan. When a preschool does exist it is often too expensive for poor parents to afford, says local early childhood education expert, Mehrinisso Valikhojaeva. The Government cannot afford to build the traditional, large Soviet-style preschools in every rural village. According to Valikhojaeva, Child-to-Child provides an alternative approach to strengthening primary school preparation that could be used to meet existing needs in rural areas. Each class includes about 20 to 30 children, but the programme has a wider reach as the Young Facilitators are encouraged to give similar training to their younger siblings and even neighbours outside the classroom. The students report that the programme is helpful for their younger peers. ‘The programme is good for the small children,’ said one of the Young Facilitators, ‘I didn’t know what to do when I first went to school.’ Participating teachers are enthusiastic about the results of the programme. ‘At first I wasn’t sure that the programme would work since it is only children teaching other children, but after the first few weeks, I can already see how much progress the younger children have made,’ said a teacher supervising a Child-to-Child classroom at School No. 33. ‘Normally when children first come to school, they cannot even hold a pencil. These children already know how to count, and how to read some letters and numbers. I hope to have children who have gone through this programme in my class next year.’ Teachers also said that the programme is helping develop leadership skills among the Young Facilitators. It also consolidates and strengthens their knowledge of and ability to apply the academic material they have already learned, reported the teachers. The programme’s impact extends to school administrators, who report having a new appreciation of the needs of young learners. ‘After being exposed to the Child-to-Child approach, I see that younger children have different learning needs than older children,’ said Shomirzoev Umed, the Principal of School No. 50, ‘The traditional teacher-student pedagogy may not work with young children even though it is good for older children.’ The programme is overseen by the Ministry of Education and supported by UNICEF in cooperation with local experts in early childhood education. Initial results bode well for its potential as a national-level programme, given the high level of ownership and the acknowledgement of the need for early learning opportunities by national and district Ministry officials, teachers, school administrators, students and parents. UNICEF provided all materials, which were translated into the Tajik language and adapted to the local culture. A baseline evaluation of students’ skills was conducted at the start of the programme and follow up evaluations are planned for the end of the academic year. Over time the evaluation process aims to identify means of developing cost-efficient school readiness programmes for all Tajik children and evidence on how the Child-to-Child approach can contribute to reaching that goal. For more information about the programme and the Child-to-Child approach, see the UNICEF and Child-to-Child Trust websites.
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