VIEWS Vo Volunteer Service Overseas (VSO) olunteer ServiceOverseas (V O) (VSO)


Fighting for an edu catio n in Nort


rthern Uganda Educating girls is not a priority development charity ty in the districts ofMoroto and


Kotido, according to a newreport by Gender Education Research Specialist and VSOVolunteer, Dr Pauline Faughnan. In her report ‘Fromthe Ground Up’ – commissioned by leading international ty, VSO– Pauline investigateswhy it’s so


difficult for girls to attend school. InMoroto, only


6.41%of girls finish their primary


education. According to the 2014 census, there are 23,154 girls aged 12 in


4,786 of them


(20.7%) are currently attending school. From


January 2014 to April 2015, according to their Head Teachers, 445 girls dropped out of school inMoroto and 752 girls dropped out in Kotido. Data collected from 20 schools suggest that the main barrier to a girl’s education is poverty. Due to limited finances, struggling parents see their daughters as a vital source of income. Instead of studying books, their daughters are brewing and selling beer, traipsing to town to sell charcoal, working in restaurants, weeding or rearing animals. In short, families simply cannot afford to send their girls to school when an extra pair of hands can bring in some money.


Girls are also forced to marry young in exchange for a decent ‘bride price’. Teenagers are often sold into marriage in exchange for cattle. In Karamoja, the less educated girls are, the higher the bride price. The best preparation for marriage is to stay at home and help, not get an education at school. Approximately 35%of girls drop out of school because of early marriage and 23%drop out due to pregnancy. Over 15%of married women aged 20–49 are married by t he age of 15 an d nearly half (49%) are married by the age of 18. Teenage pregnancy rates are high - 24%is the national average but in some regions, 34% of teenage girls from the poorest households are pregnant compared to 16%of teenagers from wealthier households.


Educating girls is not seen as a good investment - even having to buy a pen was enough to discourage some parents from s daughters to school. If there is spare cash, it’s the boy from an education. According to local tradition, a girl married off for money.


can always be who benefits ending their


With few positive female role models around who embrace education, it’s difficult to break this cycle of harmful negativity. The few girls who do have time for school face other challenges. Schools are often far away so it takes considerable time to get there on foot. Then there’s the poor quality of teaching, inadequate classrooms and infrastructure, limited books and resources, lack of security, hardly any toilets or running water, low morale of Teachers and low achievement rates – none of which are conducive to a good education. Almost three quarters of Head Teachers surveyed acknowledged that facilities for girls at their school were inadequate. Attending school during menstruation is particularly challenging - a lack of changing rooms, toilets and even doors means little privacy. In addition, a lack of wash basins, soap and sanitary products leads to poor the absence of such basic facilities, it’s hardly surprisin


home during their period. Given these circumstances, boys’ academi c performance is better than girls.


Having established the key areas which need to be improved, VSO – through its volunteers like Pauline – will work with local partners to transform girls’ education in Northern Uganda.


ww www.vsointernational.org/educationroles Novemb e r 2016 2016


Moroto, but only between 6 and


hould not feel guilty at all. Should the pupil have left school becoming familiar with Shakespeare or Austen, then perhaps, but not because the pupil couldn’t cope in the workplace. This is a burden teachers should not be saddled with.


without She s


Such a situation is symptomatic of the very real danger that the obsession with preparing children for the workplace will water down their education within schools.


Students are not just machines needing to be programmed with certain skills that mean they can more effectively transition into the workplace when they leave school. Equally, education should not just be a process of inputting these skills. The subject knowledge the y acquire at schools should play an important role in their development as human beings.


Studying English, for example, should give pupils insights into the human condition, not into how to perform certain functions in the workplace. The longstanding trend to modernise education around perceived needs of business runs the risk of affecting the transmission of subject knowledge to students, and it is a concern when this is at the expense of their intellectual development.


bj


Young people’s lack of skills is often cited as a reason by employers for not running apprenticeships at their organisations. Only 15 per cent of employers in the UK currently run such schemes, compared to 30 per cent in Australia and 24 per cent in German y. This is of increasin g concern to government, which has ambitious plans to have three million apprenticeships by 2020, and will be imposing an “apprenticeship levy” on larger businesses to help encourage it.


Employers also say they do not feel that apprenticeship programmes offer exactly what is needed for their industry or size of business. Just to add to the pressure, Ofsted is starting to get involved in apprenticeships. They have recently undertaken an audit of a number of apprenticeship schemes, and some of their findings have been very critical. Inspectors observed, for example, “apprentices in the food production, retail and care sectors who were simply completing their apprenticeship by having existing low-level skills, such as making coffee, serving sandwiches or cleaning floors, accre dited” .


Surely, you don’t need Ofsted to tell you to realise that undertaking apprenticeships that accredit cleaning floors is a waste of time. The most successful apprenticeships seen by Ofsted were in the motor vehicle, engineering and construction. These are sectors that have historically relied on apprenticeships for their future skilled workforce.


g that girls stay at hygiene.With


Rather than playing the “numbers game”, or turning schools into careers centres, a better government target would be the expansion of the productive sectors that do need skilled apprenticeships, such as construction, engineering and motor vehicle production.


We may then find that issues around youth unemployment and lack of employer take-up in apprenticeships resol ve themselves .


For information fromBESA contact: Patrick Hayes 020 7537 4997


patrick@besa.org.uk www


ww.besa.org.uk www. wwweducation-today.co.uk.co.uk 7 BritishEduca cational SuppliersAs


VIEW S British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA) rs Association(BESA) A)


Schools are not t he panacea for skills shortages


Thismonth, Patrick Hayes, BESA Director, examines the UK’s numerous skills


shortages and argues that schools are not to blame.


At a recent event held by the All-Party


Parliamentary Group for Education, an English teacher recounted her guilt at the fact that one of her pupils only lasted a week during an apprenticeship at a hairdresser’ because t he pupil could not cope with the experience.


s


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