Sabre Education

In 2008, Ghana became the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to introduce compulsory early years (kindergarten) education, however there is still a significant lack of quality in kindergarten teaching. Play-based learning is proven to improve children’s learning outcomes during these early years, and yet the majority of kindergarten teachers in Ghana are not trained to teach in this way. Working with the government, Sabre delivers Transformational Teacher Training to support teachers to implement active, play-based learning in their classrooms.

Now that this programme has been piloted and the positive impacts of the training proven, it is ready to be scaled out across Ghana to ensure that every child has the best possible early years education. The Elevate Prize funding will enable this scale up.

The support and mentorship that The Elevate Prize offers to the winners would help to increase Sabre’s global eminence, helping us to create a spotlight on early years education and bring attention to this critical but much neglected area of education policy and provision. With increased awareness of the importance of early years education comes the possibility of reaching scale within and outside of Ghana.

I am extremely proud of how far my country has come in improving the quality of education for our children. But there is still much to be done. A child’s early years are where foundations are laid and yet poor-quality teaching continues to fail young children across the country. We need to change this.

My passion for providing children with the best possible start in life has fuelled my 20-year career striving to transform early years education in Ghana. Most significantly, in 2012, I was the lead consultant for the Ghana Education Service facilitating the development of a 5-year Operational Plan which led to the national scale up of quality kindergarten education. Sabre has been a key partner in helping the government to implement the Operational Plan, and so I was thrilled to join Sabre at the beginning of 2020 as Executive Director.

For a small charity Sabre is making a big impact on the quality of early years education in Ghana through their Transformational Teacher Training. I am therefore excited to drive forward Sabre’s ambitious expansion plans to reach more teachers across Ghana and ultimately model our work with the government in preparation for expansion across Africa.

In Ghana, only 62% of ECE (kindergarten) teachers have received any formal training, and very few of these will have received training on how to effectively deliver the play-based kindergarten curriculum advocated by the Government of Ghana. “Play creates powerful learning opportunities across all areas of development.” (UNICEF, 2018). As a result, learning is still typically delivered using memorisation and repetition techniques. Looking beyond Ghana, the Education Commission estimates that by the SDG target date of 2030 over 60% of children in Africa will not achieve primary-levels skills.

The work of Sabre Education is addressing these critical issues. Young children are our future leaders and change agents and we need to prioritise and invest in their education – right from the start.

Sabre has been delivering its award winning Transformational Teacher Training since 2013 in partnership with the Government of Ghana to scale up quality kindergarten education. The training supports teachers to move away from rote-based teaching to an active, play-based pedagogy. Having tested and refined our training model over many years, we are now at the exciting stage where we are ready to take it to scale across Ghana and improve learning outcomes for millions of 4-5 year old children.

Sabre’s work is helping to disrupt the perception of early years education in Ghana and across Africa. Kindergarten teachers are traditionally viewed as less skilled educators, and early years’ classrooms the least important. However, evidence shows that interventions in the early years are among some of the most effective interventions for both reducing inequalities and improving social and economic outcomes (Zubari and Rose, 2017). Our forward strategy aims to share our learning and expertise beyond Ghana. Working with partners we want to implement quality early years teaching and learning environments in schools across Africa.

Sabre’s approach to improving quality in early years education, through its Transformational Teacher Training, is innovative in three key ways:

1) It is delivered in partnership with the government, enhancing the existing systems, which is vital for sustainability. Our training is fully embedded in government policies and systems, creating systemic change.

2) It trains practising kindergarten teachers and student teachers to ensure quality throughout the kindergarten sector. In a Ghanaian context the new pedagogy is highly innovative taking a child-centred, play-based approach.

3) The training devolves key aspects to the classroom, helping trainees to put theory into practice.

Since 2013, Sabre’s Transformational Teacher Training has reached:

·      104,617 kindergarten pupils

·      3,833 kindergarten teachers, head teachers and student teachers

·      631 Ghana Education Service district officers

·      178 College of Education Tutors

·      1,163 Newly Qualified Teachers

An Innovations for Poverty Action evaluation on our work provided strong evidence to support our play-based methodology. The study showed the sustained impact of play-based learning even years later when many children returned to traditional styles of learning in primary school, a truly unique finding in the African context. The full report can be found here.

Now that we have tested, refined and replicated our teacher training model in three regions of Ghana we have ambitious expansion plans, which will increase the impact of our direct implementation activity across the 13 regions we are yet to reach, whilst simultaneously using our learning to create system level change in partnership with the Government, helping Ghana to progress SDG4.2- universal access to quality pre-primary education.

Beyond Ghana, as an organisation we have rich experience to share with partners in other countries that are in earlier stages of influencing their own government’s policy, to support others to implement play-based early years teaching.