VIEWS Volunteer Service Overseas (VSO)


Primary school teacher swaps urban jungle for Rwanda,


‘the Land of 1,000 Hills’


Primary school teacher, HARVEY GEORGE, has been working in Early Years education for the last two years in West London. Now he’s in Rwanda volunteering with leading international development charity, VSO, sharing his skills and supporting local teachers. Here, he reflects on his adventure so far.


The project is called ‘Strengthening School Readiness in Rwanda’ – I’m working with thirty schools in the south west district of Nyamasheke. It’s a beautiful, yet small and poor district, near Lake Kivu. I’m working with the Early Years teachers - supporting and mentoring them. Many of these teachers don’t have any education, let alone qualifications, so we have our work cut out. It’s an excellent community project which integrates education with health and more sustainable livelihoods. It will last for three years and I’ll be here for the first year of the project.


I’m currently going into communities and explaining how the project


will be run, raising awareness and explaining that VSO will be working with them to improve primary education. I’ve been listening to communities ensuring that their needs will shape the project for the next three years. I’ll be travelling to schools in rural areas and supporting teachers in their skills development. Infrastructure here is basic. Classrooms in Rwanda are bare


compared to the UK. Their education system is far less developed than ours. Often there’s no electricity or glass in the windows and the rooms accommodate up to one hundred primary school children. Resources for teaching and learning are also in short supply, but volunteers make classrooms resources out of local materials. Despite the challenges, children are children and I’m met with the same enthusiasm to learn here as I am in the UK. I’ve spent a total of five years teaching in the UK before coming here.


Teaching is a career where I can have a positive impact on about 30 children back home, but here I’m working in six schools and each class has a ratio of sixty children to one teacher. The impact is multiplied and my skills can positively affect the lives of so many people. In Rwanda, teachers mostly learn a ‘teacher-centred’ approach but


now, the government acknowledges that other methods are more effective like interaction, participation and group work, i.e., a ‘learner- centred’ approach. Teachers enjoy this method more and children respond much more positively to it and learn so much more. I work with people who control education like head teachers, community and church Leaders. They have a great stake in their children’s education. I have been met with masses of positivity. There’s a real urge to improve. It’s very important to learn the local language. My language tutor,


Peter, is very good. You realise that when you go somewhere new, it’s good to learn the language quickly like greetings and what to say in the market. As Nyamasheke isn’t that big, I can meet up with other VSO volunteers or spend time with friends I’ve made in the local community. We share ideas and come up with solutions together. I live alone in a house overlooking Lake Kivu. It’s close to the local


town where I do my food shopping. You face challenges when you experience a new culture, but your resilience builds up. Being away from friends and family in an unfamiliar territory is never easy, but I have a good internet connection. I can pick up 3G in my house, so I’m able to keep in touch most evenings. In my spare time I exercise and relax in my beautiful back garden where I enjoy a lot more sunshine than the UK!


uwww.vsointernational.org/educationroles January 2017 British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA)


The UK is a hotbed of EdTech innovation


This month, BESA Director PATRICK HAYES celebrates the outstanding work UK innovators are doing in the EdTech sector.


As the director of the trade association for UK education suppliers, I have the privilege of working with UK education companies as they travel the world and showcase the best of their products and services across the globe. Working closely with the Department for International Trade, in the past year alone, we will have taken over a hundred UK companies aboard to Serbia, Dubai, Indonesia, India, Hong Kong and Mexico, to name a few. But the biggest EdTech exhibition anywhere in the world remains


the Bett Show. Bett was founded back in 1985, at a time when many thought education technology was a passing fad, and few schools would ever need more than one computer. Anyone who walked through the vast, buzzing halls of London Excel in January would see just how wrong the early-eighties naysayers were. Attracting over 35,000 education professionals from all over the


world, Bett showcases the very best of EdTech. And the vast majority of these companies come from the UK. We carefully monitor all education start-up activity at BESA, and I'm


pleased to say that the flourishing ecosystem of EdTech companies stretches across the country. Exactly why the UK has become an EdTech hotbed is keenly


debated. But shows such as Bett certainly serve an important purpose in terms of bringing people together to discuss ideas and engage with the education community about how technology can help support them in the classroom. Certainly some, such as teacher and founder of Pembrokeshire-based start-up ClassCharts Duncan Wilson, have pinpointed their experiences at Bett as a pivotal moment where they decided to commit to making their start-up dream a reality. Wilson is a paradigm example of a "teacherpreneur", a teacher


who set up a business because his time in the classroom enabled him to spot an opportunity to help make teachers lives easier. There are many others across the UK - such as Jenny Cook who launched geography-resource platform Oddizzi and Craig Barton, a maths teacher from Preston who launched the ground-breaking maths platform Diagnostic Questions. Barton was one of those teachers inspired by one of Europe's


largest EdTech companies, London-based TES Global, with over eight million teachers sharing resources on the platform. It has launched the careers of thousands of teacherpreneurs, who supplement their teaching income by selling digital resources they have developed to education professionals the world over. Why has such a successful EdTech ecosystem emerged in the UK?


Speaking to Andrea Carr, founder of digital publisher Rising Stars earlier in the week, the answer became apparent. The key, Carr said, was to put teachers at the heart of everything they do. This teacher-focused ethos is infused throughout the UK's EdTech


landscape and, in my view, is why the sector is world leading. Companies are being established not to wow investors with impressive growth metrics, but to help teachers drive up standards of education globally. The UK education system has long been lauded across the globe for


setting a world standard. As education goes digital in both developed and emerging markets alike, it looks like it will once again be the UK that leads the charge.


uFor information from BESA contact: uPatrick Hayes u020 7537 4997 upatrick@besa.org.uk uwww.besa.org.uk


www.education-today.co.uk 7


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