Education can eradicate the darkest chapters of a community and enhance the way of living. All scholars throughout history have considered education to be the key component of success. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) also highlight the importance of it. The 4th goal of the SDGs is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Every child is special and full of hidden potentials.
Ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education is not possible to achieve overnight. While everyone advocates for equal opportunities, the argument for equity that emphasizes addressing the needs of each student according to their current context may be more viable. This is the argument for the School Improvement Plan (SIP) which seeks to eradicate the educational inequity and support the children according to their needs, discovering their highest potentials for the future.
School improvement is a common phenomenon of Theory of Change. Theory of Change relies on a continuous improvement structure. It can be implemented by considering several factors like contexts of the change, long term effects of such change, narrative diagrams, assumptions, implementing agencies, evaluation of the inputs and outputs. This theory requires five steps for a change, such as inputs (vision), outputs, intermediate outcomes, outcomes, and finally the impact.
The School Improvement Plan suggests a structure that involves different stakeholders of a community to work together and work for a specific, common purpose. Their purpose should be divided into several smart goals. In order to form such goals, we need to identify problems using the Fishbone diagram which consists of the various problems through the fishbone structure. Later, for entertaining the smart goal we need to use the drivers diagram where the drivers from primary and secondary evolves into changed ideas.
The School Improvement Plan identifies problems and sets up a SIP team at school consisting of different stakeholders of the school community. The team works for a common smart goal, develops smart goals, evaluates inputs, outputs, intermediate outcomes, incorporates feedback, takes necessary steps, and changes ideas as needed. As the team includes all the stakeholders of a school community and has empathy to all the opinions, a successful change can be achieved in accordance with the needs of a school community.
A SIP Team should consists of fourteen members such as a school principal/head teacher (HT), one assistant teacher, one school board member/SMC members, a school counselor, parent and community engagement coordinator, school psychologist, parent or guardian representative, student-leader advisor (SLAs), a nurse/doctor, data analyst, monitoring and evaluation specialist, a finance officer, district administrator, and one education advocate from any nonprofit organization. There are certain roles and responsibilities for each member to eradicate the educational inequity in a school.
The HT will act as a chair to the team. They will monitor the overall process, decide smart goals, hold other members accountable, provide feedback, and manage the whole team by taking necessary actions. The HT will chair the team and finalize the action plan to eradicate the educational inequity and to facilitate the students for their growth. One assistant teacher will help the HT with that process and continuously collect data from the other teachers about the students.
One SMC member will provide guidance and support to the team. The school team must consist of a school counselor who will mediate between the parties if any inequity takes place. The parent and community engagement coordinator will maintain the liaison between parent and community stakeholders. They will be responsible for seeking resource support from the community, arranging monthly meetings with the community, parents and the team so that the problems could be identified easily and work on them. Community voice is a very important part of this movement and a coordinator ensures such.
The school team needs a psychologist and a doctor for providing mental and physical health support to the students. Concentrating on the students’ health is another aspect of the goal. A guardian representative and an SLA are both essential for the team. Guardian representatives and SLAs will bring voices from the parents and the students respectively. As a result, community voices along with these two can be merged in order to identify the root causes of educational inequity taking place in that community.
Later, teachers' data, and reports from data analyst and evaluation specialists will help the team to bring necessary changes to achieve the goal. They may suggest a change for their action plan and review smart goals by providing feedback. There should be a finance officer and district administrator who will ensure proper funding from the government and maintain liaisons between them.
Furthermore, a member from any non-profit organization can help the team by arranging training and running pilot projects to provide extra support for the students and other stakeholders management.
The above-mentioned roles of a school improvement team will help to eradicate the educational inequity in a community, build leadership among the different stakeholders, identify problems, evaluate outputs, make necessary changes to the action plan, and ensure the growth of their smart goals.
School improvement aims to create leaders in the school community through collecting data, summarizing the data, taking data driven decisions, identifying the root causes, planning actions, evaluating the existing drivers, maintaining liaisons, initiating Comprehensive Needs Assessments (CNA), establishing a SIP team, define the roles, forming action plans, identifying mitigation strategies, forming smart goals, and monitoring the overall progress of the journey.
The monitoring of the progress can be divided into three stages: Quarterly establishing the baseline of data collection; monthly evaluating the progress, and providing necessary feedback; and finally the yearly monitoring system that assesses the growth.
This is how the continuous improvement system may work through the PDSA cycle that consists of planning, data collections, evaluating data, and taking necessary actions for solving the problem. Implementing school improvement will grab the attention of the policy makers towards the overall improvement of a school community and will ensure quality education for all.
Md Asif Mahbub Tanvir is a Teaching Fellow at Teach For Bangladesh.