Confirming the past, assuring a future

Barry SesnanEcho Bravo, Education in Difficult

Circumstances

Admission test

It’s a real need

• In Africa, there is often a paramount need for a young person to get a certificate. To western eyes may seem unimportant, tell but in most places, the certificate confirms the past and may be the only key to the future, indeed in places like Khartoum even to marriage.

New Sudan declaration

• The absence of a certification system for the New Sudan has been a major reason for an exodus of talented young people from the region in search of formal recognition of their learning in neighbouring countries. Initial steps to establishing a New Sudan Examinations Board have been made with the design and testing of secondary school examinations.

• Annual implementation of assessment processes for certification of student achievement in basic education, technical and vocational, teacher training and secondary levels

Everywhere is in crisis

• In 1993 I wrote ‘Guidelines on Education for Displaced people and refugees’. Now I am writing ‘Guidelines on Education for displaced people, refugees, the urban poor, slum dwellers, children in conflict zones, children in failed and fragile states and where all the teachers have died of AIDS or have left the job because they didn’t get paid..

Don’t experiment on my kids!

• Rational tendency to be conservative and to go for what is familiar and safe.

• We must not undermine this with ‘fashionable’ interventions or politically correct add-ons

• We must preserve time for core education (CI NRC IRC)

.• Health warning!• In Uganda we got refugees into teacher training

colleges only to find that ultimately they were not given teacher’s certificates because they couldn’t didn’t have documents to prove that they had completed primary school more than four years before.

• We must be careful that a solution will have sustainability – that it will not be denied by the next functionary in office, or disavowed years later.

. Straight talk

• 1) Education is often a pull factor in becoming a refugee. Cases of this abound, where students of the same family go to school on both sides of the conflict.

• 2) Cheating and forgery exist. Yes, that certificate photocopied and re-photocopied ten times is quite likely to be a forgery with a ‘top’ from one person and a ‘bottom’, with nice results, from another. Those who forge often benefit from our lack of knowledge of the home conditions, and from a soft heart on our part, suspending disbelief. (I do not though subscribe to the belief often expressed by an eminent person in refugee studies that a refugee has a right to lie).

Straight Talk• 3) Certification is regarded by some as simply an attendance

certificate by others as proof that you actually learned something [1] In words many of you have heard me say before, we must continue to try to smuggle education into the certification process so we should at least publicly be preferring a certificate that indicates that some kind of education took place. A corollary of this is not to fear to give a diagnostic test if that is what is needed.

• 4) Students do sometimes pretend about their past history. Being a refugee is a often a good way to get a second chance at education when you dropped out the first time around, at home. This occurs especially if we have rules about not supporting repeaters. People who saved a lot of things when they fled somehow didn’t save their school certificates which normally they carry around with them every day?

•[1] Which is why the recent discovery of forged pilot’s licences in Nairobi was a little worrying

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• . Cicéron and equivalence:

• Validation of existing qualifications

2 Bizimana and French

• Refugees must also do their bit to adapt to new circumstances. In Rwanda in the late 90s, refugees, like Bizimana, returning to the country from English speaking Uganda refused to learn French, which is still the official language, at University even though given every opportunity (including language laboratories) to do so. They even ‘fled’ back to Uganda and tried to claim to be refugees again.

The good guys• 1) In contrast to the various East African examinations councils

which would not show any flexibility of any kind, would not allow exams to be sat outside their territory, would not provide special papers or at least special questions for quite large refugee populations, the West African Examination Council played a good and positive role during the Sierra Leone and Liberian crises, by being flexible and adaptable.

• 2) The Mozambique Ministry of Education allowed its exams to be taken in refugee camps in Malawi.

• 3) The Congolese local education authorities in South Kivu supported the continuation of Congolese education in camps in Tanzania . On the other hand, the insistence by an education officer of UNHCR in Dungu in Congo that only French education would be allowed, when no one at all spoke French, there were no teachers and she did not provide dictionaries or textbooks, was definitely going too far the other way].

Health warning!

• In Uganda we got refugees into teacher training colleges only to find that ultimately they were not given teacher’s certificates because they couldn’t didn’t have documents to prove that they had completed primary school more than four years before.

• We must be careful that a solution will have sustainability – that it will not be denied by the next functionary in office, or disavowed years later. This may mean

A wider view

• I would also suggest we do not forget a wider view of what enables life to go on, but which I will not cover here. These include admission tests (as opposed to simply using the terminal results from the previous cycle) and professional qualifications. Prime examples are

• admission to professional bodies being a condition before getting a job (being a member of the Sudan Bar Association will not allow you practise law in Kenya)

• getting a local driving licence (your old licence may work, or it may not)

• being permitted to practise as a midwife • Admission is rarely as easy as illustrated I the first

photograph!

Some examples

• 3: Justin wanted to get to University of Juba (the tri-partite agreement that no one knew about)

• 4: Bru woke up to find he was a rebel

• 5: Enabling Akech to take the primary examination – baby sitters

• 6: Samuel’s papers. A failure of the duty of care

Examples

• 7:Fraser didn’t have $5 to register for his exam in Ogujebe

• 8: Martin in Dungu – finding an exam to take and how to get the candidates and the examination together in the same place.

• 9 Said and Kowa the lorry drivers and the passport The Foundation Course in Khartoum

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Unit 1 Unit 2 Unit 3 Unit 4 Unit 5 Test R Unit Test 2

Maths

English Exempt*

Arabic

Science

Another kind of passport: identity problems

Teachers’ Friend

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The problem of age limits Cote d’Ivoire

• Age limit in Cote d’Ivoire causing unnecessary problems.

• The system does not allow someone over 15 to sit a primary leaving exam or get ahead without sitting it.

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• 10: Five thousand young people needed Diagnostic tests

11: Taban and Keji were sent to Class Zero

12 Wat and Akek Learning about exams

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• Pay attention to how people solve their own problems. (‘Africa works’)

• As one of my friends says, ‘Africa works’, though we may have to modify that to say ‘ Africa works, a lot of the time, and mainly for the vocal male youth’.

ideas

• Quick one-stop, drop in method of getting certified

• Exams in specific subjects available any time, through trusted agents, or if it is simply to know ones level, on line. – what I have done a few times in English.

• To counteract lack of knowledge of own present standard, provide simple self tests, specific diagnostic exams and

• On line self testing, self diagnosis?

Ombudsman

• Advocacy / Lobbying

• Keep feet on the ground

Change the exam itself: Be flexible

• Modernise e.g. calculators• Sometimes just changing the frequency of exams• Consider the GCE approach• Consider modular approaches like in TVET• Divide an exam up – Somali example for maths• Allow exams to be taken more often in a year. • Exams must all take place at several sittings and allow

results to be accumulated.• Use more than one examination board. • Provide option papers both in subject and medium.

And now, Kenya… ?

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