Trained parents can enhance students’ educational outcomes.
Train parents on how to positively support their children’s academic work. Better educational outcomes during this COVID-19 crisis and onwards can be realized if they know how to support.
Over 75% of Ugandans are considered to be literates. However, this literacy is basic and highly limited to one’s environment, experience, and exposure. It’s not enough if a person can write their name or stammeringly read a local language article. We need literacy that can be galvanized by the parents to support their children in education.
When teachers spend 2–3 years training on how to teach a child and their supervisors train from time to time, nothing is done for the parents who are also the principal stakeholders in education.
Focus on teacher training and continuous professional development (CPD) to guarantee the quality of teacher service is not enough to improve education outcomes and excellent service. Parents should be brought into the equation to beef up the teachers’ efforts in teaching and skilling the children for quality education.
Two years ago I did teaching as a leadership fellowship program offered by Teach For Uganda, where I had the opportunity to interact with parents almost on a daily basis. It was disturbing to find out that parents didn’t know what was happening in school, curriculum, and how they could support their children. I made it deliberate to train and engage a couple of parents to discover the effectiveness of my notion. I am happy to report that these parents now gladly supervise, involve, and hold both children and teachers accountable for what they teach and learn because they are informed. Currently, in my coaching duties, I meet with parents and teachers but still, parents lack information and skills to support their children.
Therefore, the contribution of the parents shouldn’t be tied only to fees, food, cloth, health, and scholastics but also to the academic development of their children. To effectively have parents play their roles, it would be significant that they get trained from time to time in how to productively and actively involve in their children’s academics equipped with the right skills and mindsets. The African population and health research center report about Mayuge and Iganga reveals a lack of parental engagement in their children’s education but do you know why? (This is just a small portion of the parents…)
They lack the basic skills to support the children. This behaviour has seen a clash between the teachers, parents, and educational authorities in some parts of the country and the world in the recent past. The challenge is that parents do not have appropriate knowledge and capability on how to support hence widening the gap between learning and retention.
Therefore, much as a great number of parents have basic numeracy skills in additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions, they lack skills to relate these concepts to real-life situations in their environments. Moreover, the literacy skills for majority parents in rural areas are limited to their mother tongues, identification of vowels, vowel sounds and alphabetical letters. A majority are not proficient in reading or speaking English language and have very limited phonological awareness. This therefore clearly indicates that parents are not able to competently help their preprimary or primary children in the areas of numeracy and literacy as well as the ongoing students’ engagement program during this lockdown thus escalating disengagement and anger for failing to be of help in their children’s education.
It is not surprising to discover that these are the very areas challenging learners in regard to expected outcomes at their different grades. The Uwezo report affirms a decline in numeracy and literacy levels for children in primary in 2018. Hold on to point your fingers and ask why and how questions before the next steps.
Although Uwezo furnishes us with these updates, it’s not clear on what should be done to address this challenge and part of my way forward is to train the parents in the basics of education like tracking students progress, analyzing grades, understanding the curriculum and the termly syllabus, nurturing the children’s skills and talents, vision and goals setting, positive reinforcement and proper language usage among others.
Right now, the government through the ministry of education is labouring to engage learners during this lockdown but because most of the rural parents struggle in numeracy and literacy skills, it is hard for them to effectively supervise or support their children because they already have similar challenges in these very areas. This would have been the opportune time for homeschooling if the parents had the skills and competences to do so. Unfortunately, the government had long given up on its leadership role to involve and engage parents through mutual partnerships where there is proper information flow, involvement in decision making, research, and training.
Covid-19 is revealing one important fact that our basic numeracy and literacy skills are not enough to answer the puzzle of the day. Why? Because majority parents are not able to use those skills to meaningfully engage their learners partly because the curriculum changes and they are left out untrained or informed yet they were taught in a different curriculum altogether. Like the famous USA “No child left out policy” let’s also say no parent left out in the quest for quality education.
