Lessons from learning studies

At a time when more than 70 million children are not in school – almost half of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa and a quarter in south-west Asia – research in Cambridge is aiming both to understand precisely what benefits education brings and to improve its provision where it is most needed. These are the combined goals of complementary research programmes ongoing in two research centres at the Faculty of Education.

It’s the big picture of how and why education plays a central role in the development of nations that concerns the Centre for Education and International Development (CEID). Directed by Professor Christopher Colclough, CEID leads a research consortium on educational outcomes and poverty (RECOUP) that is focusing particularly on what difference education makes in India, Pakistan, Ghana and Kenya.

Meanwhile, research at the Centre for Commonwealth Education (CCE), directed by Mike Younger, is aimed at helping to improve both the quality of teaching in schools and the local leadership needed to continue this in the long term. Although CCE is working at some level with all countries in the Commonwealth, current projects are based in Ghana, Tanzania, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, Kenya and the Caribbean.

At the heart of the multi-dimensional topic of education is a central guiding principle, as Professor Colclough explains: ‘Put simply, education is tremendously affirming – once you are given even a basic education, those skills cannot be taken away. Education can potentially determine future behaviour, productivity, health, fertility, citizenship and equality of individuals.’

Educational outcomes and poverty

RECOUP is investigating how education affects the lives and livelihoods of people living in poorer communities – focusing on sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, regions that pose the greatest challenge to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) set 10 years ago by the United Nations to provide universal primary education by 2015.

Now midway through its five-year £2.5 million programme, funded by the UK Department for International Development, RECOUP involves academics from several disciplines across seven academic institutions in India, Pakistan, Ghana, Kenya and the UK (Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, and coordinated by Cambridge).

To arrive at a sense of the impact that education has on individuals – socially, economically, behaviourally and politically – the research is based extensively on fieldwork that combines household surveys with qualitative interview-based enquiries. Importantly, the research is also investigating the policy interventions that might best support positive returns on investment in education, looking for instance at partnerships with the private sector and aid donors.

Some of the latest findings relate to the relationships between education and earnings. ‘Education is fundamental to people’s identity and their sense of themselves. But as well as these non-market benefits it’s also valued for its role in helping individuals to achieve higher earnings and avoid poverty,’ says Colclough. ‘While this is still the case, our data indicate that the pattern of the relationship between education and earnings may be changing.’

Until recently, the general pattern has been that every extra year of primary schooling in developing countries brings a greater proportionate increase in earnings than additional years of secondary and tertiary education. This means that the earnings benefits in return for very modest investments in education have been very high. The indications are, however, that this is no longer the case, and that education at higher levels has a much stronger relative impact on earnings than education at primary levels.

This has implications for education and labour market policy, as he explains: ‘Although primary education is just as important as it ever was, it needs to be balanced with expansion at the post-primary level. Also, the rapid expansion in primary schooling has not been without risks – in some cases, stretched resourcing has jeopardised the quality of teaching to the point where basic numeracy and literacy skills have been reduced, lessening the very positive relationship between earnings and number of years spent in primary school.’

Building sustainable quality

Identifying how schools in developing countries might enhance the quality of their teaching, and maintain this for the future, is the primary purpose of CCE. Funded by £3 million from the Commonwealth Education Trust, the programme is now midway through its four-year span and ranges in scale from working with all of the teachers and children in a single school, to working nationwide with schools, government education ministries, local universities and NGOs.

The emphasis is on building the capacity for excellent education in a sustainable fashion – often through the professional development of teachers – which will continue after the lifetime of the research programme. One of the most ambitious of the projects, based in Ghana and working in collaboration with the University of Cape Coast, the Ghana Education Service and UNICEF, is aimed at equipping a cohort of 150 head teachers to implement school changes and transform educational leadership across the country.

Other projects focus on teaching resources and styles: whether it’s the provision of AIDS education to primary school pupils in South Africa, or supporting learning through information and communications technologies in Zambia (see below), or promoting poetry in schools in the Caribbean. Many projects have tangible outcomes, such as the development of a teaching tool kit for AIDS education, which will be available for education establishments throughout East and South Africa.

‘The Education for All agenda means that there are now more children than ever before being taught to the age of 11. Their fortunes will be affected by their educational experiences,’ comments CCE Director Mike Younger. ‘There is an urgent need to examine the policies and practice that can help governments and schools respond effectively, particularly in regions where the challenge of achieving the MDG objective is greatest.’

For more information, please contact Professor Christopher Colclough (c.colclough@educ.cam.ac.uk) and Mike Younger (mry20@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of Education.