A Book Worth Reading: From Village School to Global Brand: Changing the world through education

I have just finished reading a new book called From village school to global brand: changing the world through education, which I recommend to anyone at all interested in the crossover between private sector enterprise and education.

It is written by a colleague of mine called Professor James Tooley. He is well-known in certain circles for his previous book called The Beautiful Tree about his experiences with low-cost private school entrepreneurs in India and Africa. His day job is running the E.G.West centre, which is an interesting education department that sits within Newcastle University. Most of the time however Professor Tooley is travelling to far-flung and slightly dangerous places. He's unlike many academics because he has left the ivory tower and applied some of his own theories in the real world. Chiefly by setting up a low-cost private school chain in Ghana called Omega, which has just received a large amount of funding from Pearson education to expand rapidly. This could be very big news if you're a poor Ghanaian parent seeking a better school for your son or daughter. But I'm digressing.

Why did I think this book was an interesting read? 

Well,without giving too much away I can tell you that it charts the evolution of the private school chain SABIS from its beginning in Lebanon 125 years ago through to the current day. Prof Tooley has organised in each chapter of the book the key components of the educational model, highlights of the secular humanist ethos, some details on the SABIS flagship schools and the company's wide geographic reach, and the various business models it uses.

He finishes, as one might expect, with a ringing endorsement of the company's senior management personnel and some interesting reflections on why governments are so badly placed to deliver the kinds of quality and scale changes needed within education. There is a particularly good bit I liked where he makes an extended comparison between the airline industry and the education industry. Consumer experience in both is largely determined by the quality and training of the professional service staff, be they air hostesses or teachers. What systems can you put in place to ensure that every passenger or school child comes away with comparably high levels of satisfaction?

So, who would benefit from reading this book? 

If you work for a private education company, as I do, it is very revealing about some of the myths and trends within the education industry at large. If you're interested in unusual public-private partnerships there are some detailed case studies of SABIS' PPP models currently deployed within Kurdistan, Abu Dhabi and the USA. If you're an educational theorist the book is interesting on some of the learning mechanisms and 'big data' tools which SABIS has developed over the years. The company is driven by systems and process, in its desire to industrialize its methods, to reduce costs and educator error. It also seeks to innovate to create a student-led school-wide culture, even fully autonomous "teacherless schools" where students who've learnt how to learn can teach themselves and each other. Finally if you're just interested in being a student of business, in particular of family-run businesses, the entire book is a case study of how a single company can grow from humble beginnings and gradually gain influence in increasingly larger spheres and in different countries.

Some of the quotations that stuck with me while reading I copy out below:

"A bright student is usually better than a mediocre teacher at teaching his or her peers." (Mrs Saad)

Collaboration is more important than competition, and that's why ranking of students is not allowed: "One of the results of rankings,"says Ralph Bistany, "is that one kid has an interest in another kids failure. Nobody in society should have an interest in somebody else's failure."

"We are going against the trend here; we are trying to create a teacher independent classroom. Because if you want to apply it at a scale,it's extremely difficult to build that based on exceptional teachers. You cannot change the level of education worldwide if what you are doing is centered only on the ability of exceptional professionals." (Mrs Saad)

In education, however, governments still second-guess the kind of education required by young people in preparation for adult life and where and how it is delivered. But the mechanisms governments have at their disposal are cumbersome and bureaucratic; in any case, they can't be attuned to issues such as the ways in which humans flourish, central to any ideas of what education is for. (James Tooley)

"All equity investors who came and talked to us were always concerned about their exit strategy after five years. But my short term is 25 years; the long term is the next 100 years." (Carl Bistany)

This last reminds me of the Chairman Mao famous bons mots when asked in the mid 1960s whether he thought the French Revolution of 1789 had been successful.

His reply: "It's too early to tell."

It is true that almost everything to do with education change and reform moves very slowly. I do worry about this, as none of all the well-intentioned reform work we are all now pursuing may even bear fruit for our own children - are there any ways to speed up the lag between policy reform and implementation?  A subject for another post I think.

Finally, I should report that I read the bulk of this book via my iPhone and iPad from the Kindle edition.  While that's a helpful way to get the text I did notice that the hard copy of the book which I ordered for colleagues in the office has pictures in it, which I didn't get on my digital edition. And we all like pictures.  

One major area of interest for me in my work is tackling the problem of reaching children who currently do not go to school at all.  This is Millennium Development Goal Number 2 ("Achieve universal primary education"), which sadly we are still a long way off from achieving by the target date of 2015.

UNESCO have recently published their Education For All Global Monitoring Report (June 2012), see here.  It is worth reading.  I pull out some arresting charts and key quotations, by way of summary:

"Worryingly, the number of out-of-school children has remained at 61 million over the last three years. Much of this global stagnation is due to trends in sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of children out of school has actually risen over the past three years, from 29 million in 2008 to 31 million in 2010. Although enrolment has continued to rise, it has not kept pace with the increase in population." (page 1). 

I had no idea that Nigeria had by over 10m children not in school - double the second most struggling country's out-of-school population, which is Pakistan at 5m children.   I have strong reasons to suspect (since I've been working there, on this area) that Ghana's out-of-school population is understated at 567,000, which makes me wonder what the likely error range might also be on the Nigeria and Pakistan numbers.  It's probable that globally the 61m figure is a conservative estimate (partly for political reasons; governments and donors tend to want to show how much progress has been made since 2000) and in fact the problem is worse than we think it is.  
 



Most alarming is the following insight:

"Of the 61 million children who were out of school in 2010, 47% are expected to never enter school. A further 26% have attended but left school, and the remaining 27% are expected to enter school in the future (Figure 3)." (page 2).  

One of the things the chart above shows is that of the 30.6m out-of-school children in sub-Saharan Africa, a full 55% of them are unlikely ever to enter a school.   The drivers of that are complex and vary from country to country, but poverty, gender and lack of access (i.e. a nearby local school, with available teachers who actually turn up) are recurring themes.

The policy implications for this are in one sense quite clear - African governments and relevant donors should be focussing on solutions which target that 55% who never get to a school in the first place.  We know that building bricks n' mortar schools and extending the often dysfunctional state system is both time consuming, hugely costly, and often partially hostage to political election cycles.  We also know that mobile and web-based education delivery is now a reality and vast amounts of decent quality open-source educational content now exists on the web.  Can there be a way to bypass the former problem by deploying the latter solution?

I for one am hoping that governments, donors, and citizens themselves start to apply real thought to new models of open-source, distance learning, precisely to reach this majority sub-population who never even get to see a school in the first place.  (Investing in nation-wide broadband and mobile coverage in many of these African countries would, I opine, be a good start...but that's the subject of another posting).   

Prof Sugata Mitra's work on Self-Organised Learning Environments (or SOLEs, see his TED talk on this here) is one response to this, as is Prof James Tooley's desire to unlock low-cost private school chains across Africa by liberalising the education supply-side.  Both of these are going to be trends to watch over the next few years, and again, I shall try to touch upon them in separate, dedicated postings.