Report to John Richardson Community School

Jo Richardson School Funds GTS Bakoteh

Mr. Andy Buck, head teacher of the Jo Richardson Community school in Dagenham arrived at the GTS Bar and Restaurant in Christmas 2005, he visited the Bakoteh school and offered to help raise the funds to support the developing school.

In 2006 he returned having raised money in his school from the annual rent of lockers to the school's students.

In April 2006 shortly after my annual visit to Gambia I sent the following report to the head master & governors of the Jo Richardson school.

I am delighted to report to you and your school governors on the progress made by GTS and GETSuk at the Nursery school we run in Bakoteh, (an urban village on the outskirts of Serrakunda which is the largest conurbation in The Gambia).

It has been over a year since you offered us a donation to help the school develop

Education, especially nursery education is mainly provided by local entrepreneurs more interested in the income the school can provide than the quality of the education that it offers. Very few nursery teachers are qualified at a nursery level and there is no proper curriculum. Each local nursery manages with whatever staff it can get to provide what ever they feel small children should learn. Most nursery schools operate in one or more rented rooms in someone's compound (A compound is generally a walled collection of houses containing the members of a very extended family, they generally house between twenty and forty occupants)

The school at Bakoteh was a derelict building when GTS took it on, and it appealed to us because it belonged to the community and was not part of a compound. It had two rooms that could be used as class rooms and a small office and a store. It had no playing area for the children, but was built on one side of a large open area containing the village tap. It was the meeting place of several sand roads that serviced part of the housing in the village.

The building had to be largely demolished and rebuilt and this took most of the year before we met you.

GTS set the school up as a community school and handed it over to the community when the construction was completed, painted and furnished at that time we expected the community to appoint suitable teachers and GTS agreed to fund their salaries. It soon became apparent that none of the appointed teachers had any real teaching experience and the community had little idea how to run or administer a school as a place of learning. It looked like a school, the children had uniforms and school bags but there was no administration, no one had a list of who attended there was no register, there was no timetable, there was no direction and as a result there was very little learning going on.
I should explain that GTS (Gambia Tourist Support) started as a membership organisation to support tourists visiting the Gambia and earning money from them to provide employment for local people and any profit was used to provide educational sponsorships. GTS started in 1997 as a concept and a web site, but really started operating in 1998. By 2002 it was sponsoring about 40 children mostly of nursery age - but we recognised that not much education was happening - at that time we thought is was because the teachers had no resources, not even chalk, but even after we provided chalk, paper and crayons, there was still no noticeable improvement. With some evidence we concluded that the resources were simply being sold to supplement the teachers' meagre salaries and GTS decided that we needed to set up our own school.

Bakoteh was the result, the funding for the renovation came from using half of all GTS membership fees.

The school was opened in 2004 but there were insufficient funds for anything beyond paying the teachers salaries. The school was stocked with on going donations from tourists who brought an assortment of items that they thought might be useful. But the teachers had no idea how to use many of the resources that were brought and mainly resorted to endless sessions of rote learning of the days of the week, months of the year, the alphabet and numbers. None of the children could identify a letter taken out of sequence and none were able to take the correct number of counters to match a number that might be selected from 1 to 10. Most could chant the alphabet and recite their numbers from 1 to 100.

What was needed was a curriculum and the teaching resources to deliver it. What was needed were local people with the ability to use those resources effectively so the children could start to make sense of the foreign words they were learning in their chanting sessions.

This was the point when Andy Buck offered to provide support for the school, a great deal of progress has been made since then.

In June 2006 Jo Evans stopped developing educational materials for GETS - having failed to provide any report on how far his work had progressed in the initial 12 months.

His initiative was dropped as it turned out too resource expensive and the ideas of Cliff Parfitt were introduced and are still being used and developed.

First the head teacher was replaced and Jo Evans an ex Primary head from the UK spent several months in the school helping the new head prepare registers, establishing a school routine. The children started entering the school in an orderly manner, a register was taken. Classroom order was established. The children started simple activities with end results that could be displayed on the classroom walls.

Education started to be fun.

We are nowhere near getting 'there' yet, Jo is now busy in Gambia working on the curriculum and developing the resources to deliver it, we have a very small skills workshop made up at present of Jo and a young Gambian man who was a teacher before he joined us and between them they are working on making all manner of resources for the teachers to use.

In addition, we are extremely lucky to have the free services of Cliff Parfitt, who wrote and had published many books, slide and tape sets for reluctant learners in the 1960's after that, he went to live in Japan and developed a whole range of teaching tools for his Japanese students to learn English. He has retired and returned to the UK and is now modifying all of that material for use in African schools and especially for GETS in Gambia.

We hope to have the first bundle of resources ready by September when I return and will be spending time each week introducing Cliff's resources to the teachers and children at Bakoteh.

I find it very difficult to put into words the thanks needed for people like you and your whole school. I get the rewards of smiling Gambian faces, but I really do want you to know what a fantastic difference your contribution is making.

Your donation has gone into the Bakoteh school account and is being used not only to keep the school open, but also to develop a whole new approach aimed at getting Gambian non English speakers to master English in its spoken and written forms. Thank you from all the teacher and children at the school, many have no idea yet that education can set them free, but they all have a great deal more respect for it than many of the children and parents in our own country.

If I can provide you with any more information, please do not hesitate to ask, on my next extended visit in September, I will get photos and tape recordings from the school so you can better see and understand what we are doing.

Francis

Gambia Education and Teaching Support - Reg Charity No 1110998