First-ever national ECCE curriculum in Kiribati
Strengthening teaching practices
The first-ever national Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) curriculum is currently being developed and will be implemented at all the ECCE centres in Kiribati.
“Each teacher had to develop their own activities and topics without any specific guidance,” says Binatia, who teaches a class of 3-year-olds at Yonatia preschool in South Tarawa. She has more than 10 years of teaching experience and remembers what it was like before there was an ECCE curriculum. “The topics taught at my centre were very different from the topics taught by other centres. I used to spend a lot of time coming up with activities that children would enjoy.”
ECCE is an emerging sub-sector of the education sector, which started to be prioritized after the ECCE Act was enacted in 2017, to regulate ECCE services in Kiribati. Up until this point, there was no national ECCE curriculum which meant that the quality of education offered at each ECCE centre varied considerably.
In 2018, UNICEF began supporting the Ministry of Education in Kiribati to develop the first-ever national ECCE curriculum. One of the key elements of the support was to involve various relevant stakeholders to ensure that a standard quality of ECCE would be offered at every centre regardless of their geographical location, or whether they were managed by the church, council, or community.
Once the draft curriculum was ready, the Government set about training the teachers, and in 2021, 126 ECCE teachers from South Tarawa were trained to pilot the national draft ECCE curriculum. One of those teachers was Binatia.
While Binatia had always put emphasis on creating activities that she thought her class would enjoy, now she had concrete examples and guidelines on how to do it.
“The training provided me with wide knowledge on how children enjoy learning through different types of play,” says Binatia, who also found she learnt many more skills to help her with her work. “The teacher guides help me a lot to develop day-to-day activities,” she adds. “I learned a lot of new techniques which I never knew before like weekly lesson planning, creating lesson timetables and conducting evaluations.”
Binatia smiles and says that after she started putting the new ECCE curriculum into practice at her centre, she saw many changes in children’s attitudes and behaviours. “They are getting used to following routines such as morning circle, handwashing and closing prayers, and are enjoying activities more and looking happier,” she says.
But it wasn’t just skills and ideas that Binatia learnt. She also highlights how the ECCE curriculum contributed to unite ECCE teachers in Kiribati.
“Now we teachers are working as one, one team of teachers in Kiribati for all children in Kiribati because we have one curriculum,” she explains. “We collaborate with teachers from other schools owned by different churches, creating rhymes and songs together,” she says happily.
The national ECCE curriculum continues to be piloted in two of the country’s outer islands, following which, it will be finalized, and a national rollout will begin. UNICEF role in the development of the ECCE curriculum involves supporting the Ministry of Education in the consultation, development, piloting, finalization of the curriculum, nation-wide teacher training, monitoring and evaluation.
