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Article: LCD Ethiopia facilitates School Performance Appraisal meetings for over 6,800 stakeholders |
During May and June 2009, LCD facilitating 62
The SPAM brought together all elementary school stakeholders in Damot Gale and Bolosso Sore to engage with the school performance data we have collected in support of the Ministry of Education’s School Improvement Programme.
The meetings enabled parents and community members to hold dialogue with service providers and opinion leaders to analyse strengths and weaknesses and set improvement targets.
It is hard to convey the sense of excitement that these meetings have engendered. The very fact of at least 100 community stakeholders per school sitting together with concrete evidence of school performance and being given the chance to take part in analysis and planning in a very structured way is quite ground-breaking in the context in which LCD is working. Attendance at these meetings was very high - especially given the season when most families were busy farming following a period of rain at the end of a long dry period.
The woreda staff who co-facilitated the SPAM were delighted, saying that LCD is helping them to do their job thoroughly by providing the detail of what is actually happening in schools. The SPAM have greatly assisted a shift from a culture of blame to each stakeholder realising his or her potential to contribute to school performance. Once stakeholders acknowledged their roles and responsibilities, planning for school improvement to try and achieve the standards set by government was straightforward. Everyone exactly knew what to do for the school.
All schools and each cluster of schools now have prioritised improvement plans and school and woreda stakeholders are using these to guide all efforts in each school as well as supervisory / support activities in each cluster for the coming year.
