What We've Learned
OUR BIGGEST COHORT OF STUDENTS SAT FOR THE STATE END OF PRIMARY SCHOOL EXAMS: HERE’S WHAT WE ARE LEARNING
By Ee-Reh Owo, Schools Director
After Mount Nyiragongo erupted in May 2021, all of Goma’s schools closed for three weeks, and termly exam preparations and revision fell by the wayside. After the initial shock of the emergency, we took stock, rallied, and coordinated an emergency food and water response. Students in Goma took their exams later than everyone else, with the government delaying the exams to give students, who had lost a further three weeks of schooling to the volcano eruption and following earthquakes, a chance to recover some learning before sitting for this critical exam.
As we all know, the pandemic raised great difficulties for schooling all over the world. We had finished the first term with 131 students in 6th grade across the six primary schools (by 2023, nine primary schools will have full cohorts): the government then closed schools during January and February of 2021 for a second time – we observed a greater impact on enrollment with this second closure, meaning that by the end of the year we were left with 118 students (42.4% girls) sitting for the government’s end of primary school exams. Immediately there is a question for us here to examine: while we have overall gender parity, why are fewer girls reaching the end of primary school, and therefore not going onto secondary school, which is proven to have many benefits to society (while the opposite poses so many risks)?
WHY END OF PRIMARY SCHOOL EXAMS MATTER
The end of primary school exams are high-stakes for our students: passing them is a requirement for entry into secondary school. When a primary school reaches capacity and enters their Primary 6 students for the first time, it’s a coming-of-age moment to see how their results will compare nationally. In past years, our most established schools have set a high standard, so there’s always some healthy pressure to perform, but always accompanied by high levels of support to be drawn from the other schools in the network. Collaboration between our headteachers runs deep with mutual support and respect, peppered with a dose of healthy competition.
OUR RESULTS
117 of 118 passed! Not only that, 97 (73.7%) of them passed with 70% or higher (pass mark 50%) and 38 of them were girls (76%). We are so proud of these achievements! When we take a closer look at the data there are usually a mixture of takeaways – sometimes we celebrate, and sometimes the data highlights challenges that we need to learn more and do more about. From our analysis of these exam results, we wanted to share some key takeaways that will inform our work going forward:
Girls outperformed boys in the test overall, and specifically in French and Math.
The girls who stay with us to the point of sitting for these exams do really well. We have a challenge to overcome with retention, and we need to know if we need to approach girls’ retention differently to an overall approach, given that more girls have left, but the ones who do stay achieve good learning outcomes.
The end of year exam score consists of 50% test and 50% school points. The boys outperformed the girls on school points.
We want to systematically examine why boys are outperforming girls on school points.
Urban students outperformed rural students overall, but rural students scored higher on school points.
We think that this is because our urban schools teach a more challenging curriculum and during the pandemic our standardized exams have paused. They need to return so that with comparable results, we can find out how to support our rural students better. This highlights a more general problem with standardization in the end of primary school assessments.
From when this cohort was in primary 4, 37.4% of the cohort left us before getting to the point of sitting the exam.
This is our most arresting statistic. We have to prioritize retention and do all we can at a school and community level to ensure that children can stay at primary school and continue on to secondary school.
Retention presents particularly tricky obstacles to overcome when it comes to operating schools for communities affected by conflict, and it goes beyond messaging the value of education, improving the quality of education, or access to education.
The communities we serve are transient – fleeing insecurity then returning when they hear there is more stability.
They are poor – parents make pragmatic decisions based on survival.
Access to healthcare is difficult – children leave school because they are sick.
Finally, our schools, teachers, students, all performed remarkably well in the face of an extremely challenging year, matching prior years’ achievements, and demonstrating again the resilience of communities affected by conflict and the power of education.
Final thoughts
Haraka haraka haina baraka – (literally, hurry hurry has no blessing). When working in conflict zones, everything feels urgent, and yet everything needs time. Taking a deep dive into data is worthwhile because each piece of information paints a more detailed picture of what is going on – in this case, how children performed in the end of primary school state exams after an unprecedented two years. The results are a testament to the perseverance and resilience of our teachers and students who, amid conflict, poverty, disease, a volcanic eruption and the subsequent evacuation… we continue to build peace through education in the face of it all. These results also prompt and provoke us to take note where the aforementioned challenges still need overcoming – where we must take our time to focus our efforts to firstly understand the problem, identify the causes and apply ourselves to address them.
