Linda Davis, head teacher, Ghana
After 14 years as a head teacher in a Shetland primary school, Linda Davis wanted to do something different. Then she saw an ad for VSO. Within months she was on her way to Ghana with her husband Peter. By building the skills and confidence of seven Ghanaian school inspectors, Linda and Peter have improved standards in 14 schools – which means over 4,000 children get access to a better education.
I’ve known about VSO for as long as I can remember, but I’d always assumed they were looking for graduates. I rang up and said, ‘I’ve seen your advert and I’m interested, but you’ll probably tell me I’m too old.’ And that was when I found out that they did want people in their fifties.
Life in rural Ghana
A few months later my husband Pete and I were on our way to Ghana. Our placements were in Bongo District in one of the country’s poorest regions. It’s very rural: people are subsistence farmers and live in very traditional homes made from mud with a straw or tin roof. We lived in Bongo village, the capital of the district, and we had one of the smart houses – it had concrete walls, a tin roof, a tap, a cold shower and a toilet. It was a flush toilet but we quickly realised that a drop pit would have been better because we frequently had no water!
Challenges in schools
My job title was ‘Management Support Officer in Education’ with the Bongo District Education Office and one of my jobs was to look at why there was such a poor rate of passes in junior secondary schools. The official language of education in Ghana is English. We soon realised that the problems in the junior secondary schools were a result of the poor English teaching in the primaries. The children were coming to school speaking the local language, because that’s what they spoke at home. Many of the teachers didn’t have a good enough grasp of English to be able to teach it to the children well.
Typically there’d be six teachers in a school with around 300 children, but only two of the teachers would have had any training. The average class had 45 children but we found a lot with over 90.
Bongo District was split into seven areas and each area had a circuit supervisor – like an education adviser that went round inspecting the schools. But these supervisors hadn’t had any real training either and didn’t really know what they were meant to be doing in schools. So clearly providing some training for them was a priority. We taught them what they should be looking for in schools and what they should be doing to address weaknesses. Our bottom line was that there was no point in inspecting schools if it wasn’t going to lead to improvement.
Sharing skills and expertise with local colleagues
Each of the seven circuit supervisors chose two schools in their district. First Peter and I would inspect one school while they observed and joined in a bit. In the second school we’d hand it over to them. We’d watch and nudge them in the right direction so they’d be able to continue it on their own. When all 14 schools had been inspected, we made recommendations for each school and then in order to meet the recommendations we worked with the circuit supervisers on things like in-service training for teachers.
Success!
We had no idea if this would continue after we left. Six months after the end of our placement I returned to Bongo to undertake a three-month placement setting up a model kindergarten, and I was really pleased to discover that the circuit supervisers had taken everything on board. They had a rolling programme so that they’d be able to involve all the schools in the inspections every four years. They told me they were much happier because they knew they had something specific to do when they visited schools. So I think our biggest success was feeling that we’d given them purpose to their work, and seeing the improvement in English teaching.
I think doing VSO is a brilliant change for you personally. But it’s also good for the teachers you leave behind in the UK. Because you’re leaving a headship, you leave a gap so someone can move up. That leaves another gap, a gap that can be filled by a new teacher. So schools can develop their staff and get new people, and personally you’ve had a really good change as well. So I’d certainly recommend it.
