Q. RCC schools provide a welcoming and a child-friendly environment. With all these facilities, can the RCC programme be seen as a cost effective model?
A. The schools that I have visited in both Sindh and Balochistan are indeed child-friendly but have been made so with low-cost, indigenous materials. In several schools where HANDS has been working, parents/communities volunteered to paint alphabets, verses, poems, pictures on the walls and these were government school buildings. In Balochistan, parents brought things such as apples from nearby orchards to energize the children. Again in Balochistan, a school teacher in Ziarat illustrated child-friendly environment in a “dust bowl” school yard by asking the girls to gather in a circle and draw geometrical shapes in the dust…praising them as they completed their drawings. I indicated to the visiting government official that this is what we mean when we say “low cost”!
If we factor in ‘in-kind’ and cash support provided by parents that we have witnessed in this program, we see that the RCC model could be cost effective especially if the government’s recurrent budget covers the teachers’ salaries, training and a minimal amount for materials. But cost effectiveness should also be viewed in light of benefit to cost analysis in the long run. Evidence from other majority countries tells us that if we invest at an early enough stage of a child’s life the returns against even one dollar are multifold through savings due to controlled dropouts, lower health costs and lower social safety net expenditures on individuals when they reach adulthood. We hope to focus more on this cost effectiveness issue for Pakistan by the end of the RCC programme to inform the Ministry of Education
Q. How has the RCC programme been instrumental in involving the parents in their children’s school?
A. As mentioned above, RCC programming has successfully encouraged parents to contribute in kind and cash towards facilities for the katchi class. Other avenues of inclusion have been through literacy programs that bring mothers of pre-school children together, also street theatre to share ECD concepts with communities where RCC schools are situated and so on. So you see, those of us who are planning are also called to be creative in developing ways that engage parents but do not burden them with added responsibilities that the school should be handling.
Q. Who are the main stakeholders pivotal to the sustainability of schools that are child centered and revolve around basic concepts of Early Childhood Development?
A. I think the answer here, really, is parents and caregivers. I think parents who are in a position to choose educational options for their children are certainly key stakeholders. The problem with a sustainable school model is the lack of knowledge of just how important an intervention at this level is and perhaps how to go about advocating this at the school level. Historically, pre-school in Pakistan has not been viewed as important therefore some parents may be indifferent to such programming without knowledge of the benefits that might occur from our interventions. If knowledge is there, then the demand of communities for this support to pre-school could ensure that district officials are kept accountable. This does not abdicate government and school officials of their responsibilities for providing quality services at this level. But the pressure needs to genuinely come from parents/communities on an ongoing basis.
Q. How can the RCC model be scaled-up?
A. The RCC programme has taught us that two major ingredients are important for working at the pre-school level in government schools: proper space and trained teachers. So our program has set about to develop some low-cost models to ensure that these two aspects are corrected. I don’t think the government could ever assume total technical responsibility for improving service delivery which is why a public/private partnership (PPP) is important with regard to particularly teacher training
