Delivering effective teacher training programmes in Northern Nigeria: insights from the Teacher Development Programme (TDP)

By Zara Durrani, Oxford Policy Management (OPM) Consultant “…Whenever our colleagues that participate in TDP come back from their meetings, they gather us in a class and teach us what they learnt. We have learnt many things like grouping of pupils, the use of simple, simple words when giving examples, and allowing the pupils to…

Can Government Make Private School Markets Work for the Poor?

By Ian MacAuslan EDOREN has recently launched a new report: “Can education markets work for the poor? Potential learning from the DEEPEN Programme” This provides a review of the ‘Making Markets Work for the Poor’ (M4P) approach, used for the ‘Developing Effective Private Education in Nigeria (DEEPEN) Programme. DEEPEN is a DFID-funded programme to create…

Improving the capacity for managing basic education in Nigeria: What can we learn from the ESSPIN Experience?

 By Ifeatu Nnodu, OPM Education Consultant The challenges facing the education system in Nigeria have been well documented, such as in this literature review by EDOREN, and DFID-funded projects like ESSPIN and EDOREN are producing more data, research and evidence on what works for improving the education quality, access and systems in Nigeria. Nigeria’s new…

What does unequal access to education look like in Nigeria?

By Alia Aghajanian Four out of ten Nigerian school-age children are not in school (see UNESCO report). Even more unsettling is how this statistic is drastically different for girl children, the poor, and the North East and North West regions of Nigeria. A study of the trends in inequality in access to schooling between 2003…

How do we tackle the three major policy challenges facing Nigeria’s primary school teachers today?

By Victor Steenbergen, EDOREN Research Officer                                               Teachers are becoming a big priority for Nigeria’s new APC government. This December, President Muhammadu Buhari announced a large new “Teach Nigeria” scheme, where it promised to recruit over 500,000 new teachers. During the 2016 budget presentation at the National Assembly, the President mentioned that: “We also will partner…

Is school classification worth all that fuss?

By Oladele Akogun, EDOREN Country Director In their obsessive search for patterns, researchers continue to commit a disproportionately large amount of an already abysmally scarce resource of human effort, time, and money to an exercise with little value. During the recently concluded UKFIET conference on education, I was dumbfounded by the proportion of presentation time…