Evaluation of NRC's Host Community Education Programme in Jordan
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Evaluation of NRC’s Host Community Education Programme in Jordan Dr. Ritesh Shah, University of Auckland July 2018 Executive summary Since 2015, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has been working to ensure that vulnerable Syrian and Jordanian children residing in host community settings in the north of Jordan have enhanced access to quality educational infrastructure and services. Specifically, NRC has supported the expansion and/or refurbishment of school facilities, to address the significant demands placed on existing infrastructure by the growth in student population since the start of the Syrian crisis. In these same schools, NRC has concurrently worked on strengthening school systems to address some of the endemic weaknesses facing overcrowded school in host communities, including issues of insufficient maintenance and cleaning of existing facilities, violence and bullying, a lack of parental and student engagement in school decision-making and planning, and poor-quality teaching and learning. The broad objective of this holistic approach is to ensure that vulnerable Syrian and Jordanian students attending these schools have access to protective and dynamic school environments which are conducive to quality teaching and learning, and that foster social cohesion. Ultimately, is hoped that in doing so, these students have increased access to school, remain in school, and that learning outcomes are improved. This evaluation was commissioned by NRC Jordan country office, and conducted by Dr. Ritesh Shah from the University of Auckland, Faculty of Education and Social Work in 2018. The purpose of this evaluation was two-fold. One is to look back and assess how NRC has improved access and learning outcomes for vulnerable students in host community schools in Jordan. The other is to support organisational learning by assessing opportunities and possibilities moving forward, with consideration of the operational space NRC has for supporting education provision in host community settings. In particular, it was commissioned to ensure that NRC’s response in the coming years remains relevant to the needs of its beneficiaries, fit for a changing institutional context, and effective in terms of ensuring students’ long-term access to quality education. The evaluation identified several key successes of NRC’s activities to date, including: NRC’s holistic approach to support schools in host community settings has been appropriate to the needs of the Jordanian education system, the concerns and issues faced by school stakeholders and direct beneficiaries, and to the expectations specified in the INEE Minimum Standards in the key domains of Access and Learning Environments, Teaching and Learning and Teachers and other Educational Personnel. NRC’s school expansion and construction activities have led to increased enrolments of Jordanian and Syrian students in all target schools, though not as fully as NRC might have expected and not to a level where sufficient space is allocated per student, according to Jordanian standards. The majority of new enrolments have come from other schools (private and public in roughly equal proportions). The benefits for these students in moving to the newly expanded schools include: less time and improved safety travelling to/from school, the ability to study in schools in their local community, access to better facilities, and reduced financial expenditure, in terms of transport and school fees (for those coming from private schools). Expansion, construction, and rehabilitation activities have also improved students’ self-reported ability to learn due to being in classrooms that are better ventilated, less crowded, insulated, and brighter; and having access to sufficient, clean, and operational WASH facilities. NRC’s maintenance, cleaning, and hygiene promotion component, which accompanies the construction and rehabilitation focus, is a needed and necessary component for sustainability of the impacts of NRC’s infrastructure-focussed support. As a result of these activities, improvements are noted in the ongoing cleanliness and functionality of school facilities and perception of the school environment overall. This component has also engendered a sense of ownership and pride amongst students in each school involved in ii championing healthy, safe, and clean school environments, and increased the attention being given within the instructional programme to such discussions. NRC’s approach to remedial education/learning support services in the host community settings—in the form of a summer school programme—has helped to bolster students’ sense of academic self-efficacy and motivation to succeed in school. These are vital preconditions for later academic success according to international research. Additionally, the qualitatively different nature of the teaching and learning experience for students in the summer school programme, which NRC has complete control over, allows it to offer a broadened curriculum, supportive teacher-student-parent interactions, and strengthen social cohesion amongst students. Such experiences are highly valued and appreciated by the beneficiaries. The more recent attention NRC has given to addressing violence and bullying in host community schools through its Social Cohesion Toolkit, and particularly to providing teachers and students with concrete tools and approaches for being aware of and redressing or mitigating such actions, has already had some immediate impacts on student and teacher attitudes and practices. In doing so this component has the potential to be a key catalyst for supporting safe, inclusive, and protective environments in schools. The evaluation also identified a number of key challenges and concerns that need to be considered as part of shaping its future responses in host community settings. These include: The need to continually assess and respond in kind to the operational spaces which NRC has to influence and shape improved educational outcomes for the most vulnerable students residing in host community settings. In many instances, NRC’s ability to achieve desired outcomes for its interventions in host community schools has been strongly mediated by the locus of control which it has to ensure these outcomes. For example, while reducing overcrowding and increasing access for students are key logics of intervention for school expansion and construction, NRC has little ability to influence how facilities it builds are subsequently utilised. Likewise, while NRC expects its summer school programme to allow underachieving students to catch up to grade-level expectations, this may be an unrealistic outcome for a short-term intervention, where many of the students are already significantly over-aged. Based on this, it is recommended that NRC reviews the outcomes and key objectives for each component of its response package, and critically assess the operational space it has to achieve such outcomes in light of the findings of the evaluation. Where it is determined that the operational space does not exist, strategic decisions must be made to either alter/shift the response or the expected outcomes of the current response. Internal, organisational, and external coordination and collaboration has not occurred as extensively or effectively as it could and should, and has greatly compromised the ability for the programme responses to date to leverage on the experiences, knowledge, and expertise of a range of internal and external stakeholders. It is recommended that management of the host community programming makes stronger efforts to coordinate with other programmes within the education core competency, specifically the camp and youth programmes. Concurrently attention should be given to coordination, communication and possible collaboration across core competency areas working in the Irbid district, and any future districts where the host community education programme might expand to. Finally, NRC Jordan should identify and proactively seek out opportunities to coordinate and collaborate with other actors working in the education sector in Irbid and other host community settings in Jordan, as well as with NRC education programmes in the region. Insufficient attention has been given to the use of monitoring and reporting data, within and outside of the education programme, for formative programme design, refinement, and improvement. Specifically, opportunities to use data on the needs and key issues keeping students out of school, or pushing them out of school has greatly improved internally and iii externally in the past year to eighteen months. Analysis of these data could help NRC to decide whether and how it should shape its educational responses in host community settings in coming years, and particularly to identify whether its efforts should focus more on addressing the needs of out of school students, who may or may not be served well by the formal education system; or focussed on ensuring that students currently in school remain in school. At the same time, the operational space(s) which NRC has to work in, or can work to establish in coming years, must also be considered. It is recommended that as part of a strategy revision process, NRC consider the rationale for and response in host community education programming, in light of the current operational context, and identification of the needs of those who remain most vulnerable educationally in such settings. A key, core outcome, which sits across the core competency, should unite the response