Outsourcing learning has amazing benefits for rural schools
Outsourcing learning is still a foreign concept in many schools across this country, especially those in rural areas. Thanks to the efforts of the Hazyview Digital Learning Centre (HDLC), however, schools in Hazyview and surrounds have reaped the benefits of this move.
Cicilia Sambo, principal of Tfolinhlanhla Primary School in Shabalala, outsourced her school’s digital learning in 2013 and has since seen amazing results.
The grade fours’ maths marks increased with 30 per cent, while English went up with 39 per cent, compared to the previous year’s results.
This school was one of the first to benefit from the then newly-established HDLC, a high-tech hub of digital learning and skills development run by South African non-profit organisation, the Good Work Foundation (GWF).
Many of Tfolinhlanhla Primary School’s learners were part of Hosanna Church‘s well-known Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) Programme. As the church is located next to HDLC in Shabalala Village, the OVC group would use the HDLC’s facilities during the afternoons. The tablets in the barn were loaded with English second language and mathematics apps and the classrooms and desktop computers were made available for homework support and project research.
“I noticed improvements in the OVC kids who attended our school,” said Sambo. “It not only reduced absenteeism, but promoted an openness to want to learn. The reading improved dramatically, and that had a ripple effect. The kids wanted to engage and you could see that.”
In August 2013, Sambo and Crispen Bvumbghe (head of open learning at HDLC) proposed an open-learning model that would allow the school to outsource two hours of learning per week to HDLC for all grade four learners.
The model would focus on dramatically improving a rural child’s ability to learn what GWF refers to as “the languages of access” – English, digital literacy and mathematics.
“The Annual National Assessment results for the grade fours were poor in 2011 and 2012,” said Sambo. “In 2013 we saw a staggering jump in English language, over 20 per cent in fact, and in 2014, they achieved an average of 77 per cent for mathematics, compared to 40 per cent in 2012. We are now one of the top-performing schools in the district and our results are on par with semi-private model C schools.”
Seven schools are now outsourcing supplementary digital learning (with a focus on English and mathematics literacy) to HDLC, many of those on Sambo’s recommendation.
A phase-two roll-out of the model plans to reach 10 000 schoolchildren by January 2016 and, with the requisite financial support, the model can be scaled to reach more than 100 000 pupils within 12 to 18 months.
South African conservationist and GWF chairman, Dave Varty, has been assisting in the development of the open learning model for over three years. “I have worked in rural areas all my life,” he says, “and it’s time to accept that we cannot build a computer lab in every school or up-skill teachers quickly enough. This model eliminates the need to do either of those two things and provides remote communities with access to world-class education for a relatively small capital investment. We’re talking R250 per learner per year. For a 30 per cent improvement in English and mathematics, that’s exceptional delivery of value.” GWF CEO, Kate Groch, set out to create this “hub and satellite” model so that it could be replicated across rural Africa and managed by the local people that each hub serves.
“Principal Sambo has been a true pioneer,” says Groch. “It is not easy to be the one to stand up and say, ‘We have problems with space, with funding, with access to digital literacy, and with our results’. Principal Sambo did that, and together, we are seeing a result that will shift the future of an entire generation.”
