Quarterly Performance Report No. 11: Education Support Program

The program focuses on two key areas: the role of school Boards of Trustees (BoTs) in promoting citizenship, governance, and community participation, and the infusion of young Assistant Teachers (ATs) into the education system. These ATs bring a renewed hope to the education system, inspired by the values of the Arab Spring: human rights, dignity, and justice. In the beginning of Year 2, ESP implemented new and modified activities to meet the needs in both focus areas. These activities included developing and implementing a remedial reading and writing program, initiating Science Clubs, building BoTs' capacity to support at-risk students, building the capacity of school-based mentors, supporting the selection and training of school leaders, and supporting the certification of 50 local MoE training units. ESP also increased the target number of trained ATs to 100,000 and modified the indicators, activities, and the report accordingly. Throughout this quarter, Social Work Departments (SWDs) independently continued BoT training, where 398 new BoTs were trained, bringing the total number to 20,189 trained BoTs to date. ESP continued to support the implementation of Science Clubs through working with BoTs, assisting schools to train 121 teachers to participate in the Science Clubs. To date, 1,475 students completed more than 10 Science Club sessions. ESP also continued to support the remedial reading and writing intervention, despite the short duration of this semester, which posed a challenge to the full implementation of the program. Therefore, ESP held meetings to propose alternative ways to add teaching hours to the program, which resulted in schools implementing the program as a weekend or summer activity. To date, 13,964 students have completed a minimum of 28 hours in the remedial program. Further, ESP trained 150 new trainers this quarter to support the implementation and monitoring of the program. Working with the Professional Academy for Teachers (PAT) and the local training departments, ESP trained 17,968 ATs on certified additional modules. ESP also coordinated with PAT to certify four new training programs. This report discusses the milestones and achievements of ESP between April and June 2014, elaborating on the highlights provided in this summary and detailing the activities ESP initiated and implemented during this quarter. The ESP team regards education as an opportunity to aid and enhance Egypt's reform process. The program's focus areas include strengthening the local educational structures that support teacher professional development and community involvement in educational decision-making and quality improvement. ESP also seeks to work with the MoE to augment its capacity to develop and manage local-level crisis contingency planning, with the goal of reducing the negative impacts of future political and social disruptions to the school system and ongoing delivery of educational services. The program's progress-to-date indicators show significant achievements, including the number of Idarra-level SWDs that completed the ESP-developed training package endorsed by the MoE, the number of BoTs that completed the MoE-endorsed BoT training course, the number of students in selected schools who participated in reading/writing activities, and the number of students in selected schools who participated in Science Clubs. The program's target number of newly hired teachers who completed the PAT-certified training course is 100,000, and the percentage of newly hired teachers who successfully passed the PAT-certified training course is 80%. The ESP team is committed to continuing to provide the utmost support to the process of delivering quality education to all Egyptians. The program's focus on strengthening the local educational structures, supporting teacher professional development, and promoting community involvement in educational decision-making and quality improvement will help to improve access to education in Egypt and enhance the country's reform process.