The power of global perspectives to inform local innovations in early education
Online learning was not a priority for my early childhood classroom. Not in 2019. Many of my students had limited access to the internet or devices. What was the point? My online learning focus was highlighting good quality online content for parents. As a parent of young children I know screen time is used as childcare (no judgement, our television is babysitting whilst I write this article). My students though already faced an array of socioeconomically-influenced barriers to traditional in-school learning and this was my priority.
Then, as we all know, everything changed.
My students needed to learn remotely and I had no idea how to reach them. The barriers had not disappeared; they just needed to be surmounted very quickly.
As an evidence-led practitioner, I usually conduct a research review when facing a newly identified problem. But this one seemed new altogether: where could I find evidence for something like this?
Zooming out: what is working in this space?
It might have felt like it at the time but barriers to physically attending schools and early learning was not a new problem for everyone. On a global scale, 264 million school-aged children could not access education before Covid-19. In fact, 175 million pre-primary aged children (50% of the world’s pre-primary population) are not enrolled in preschool provision. Parents were increasingly the first port of call for learning.
As the pandemic wore on, a community of colleagues, from Washington to Kuala Lumpur, working in early childhood education shared examples: from radio lessons in Sierra Leone to national television schemes in Colombia, from leveraging pre-existing apps in Lebanon and Jordan to capacity-building in local family-focused hubs. We needed to enable parents far more than before.
In the UK, we sorely lacked knowledge of the best ways to reach our most disadvantaged pupils. We were busy printing packs, sending home paper and pencils, signing up to online learning platforms, delivering synchronous and asynchronous online learning, attending webinars on online learning and calling parents. Was all this exhausting effort translating into pupil impact?
Zooming in: the active ingredients of an intervention
How could I broaden my horizons beyond evidence-informed approaches that are effective for those working in socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts in the UK, to those from elsewhere that might be replicable?
I realized we needed to look at and address the underlying problems families might be facing.
I began calling parents to discover the exact barriers to online learning, discovering that many relied on shared mobile data plans and devices. I was aware they faced barriers to reading in English, that 50% lived in poverty and that whilst most parents cared very much about their child’s education, time, knowledge, confidence and health affected how families with low incomes engaged in early education. Unsupported paper packs might help overcome the tech barrier, but not the barrier of parental engagement.
This contextualisation required me to zoom in on interventions more closely. A collaboration between the early learning app Vroom and the International Rescue Committee came to light:
- It used social media channels to send play ideas directly to the mobile phones of displaced Syrian families
- The pilot had employed A/B testing and profiled users to narrow down the most effective channels and messages — the report had done the work of identifying the key elements that I needed to prioritise in adapting.
- The intervention was mobile-friendly and accessible to parents.
- It made small asks of their time and confidence.
- Crucially, it met them where they were at with resources.
- Its findings aligned with what the professional judgement of my global colleagues was telling me, too: visuals, personal relationships and WhatsApp were all especially valuable levers in remote early learning.
Transferring and adapting
It was neither possible nor suitable to simply transfer the exact IRC/Vroom collaboration into our context. This is a common challenge in applying educational research in practice: context is everything.
That said, the IRC report, itself an adaptation of existing tools for a specific local context, identified the ‘active ingredients’ of the intervention, spelling out what I needed to keep to make it work. This included leveraging personal relationships, using ‘people like us’ to deliver the content and preferring image-based WhatsApp content over other media and platforms. This process is sometimes called striving for fidelity, meaning being faithful to the ‘active ingredients’ of an intervention but intelligently applying contextual knowledge for necessary adaptation.
I did not need to have the full level of data to interrogate as the IRC project had used and ethical application would not allow AB testing in my class community. I knew I needed evaluation, though, as part of my motivation was to slow down the massive array of remote learning options so that I could focus on what worked. Assessing pupil progress through online interventions is notoriously challenging, but evidence reviews and discussions with colleagues at EasyPeasy, Learning with Parents and Boromi helped me to understand what effective impact measurement of home learning in my context could look like.
At this point, I knew we were innovation ready.
Deploy and Test
Our intervention turned out to be pretty simple:
- We talked to parents about how they currently supported their children to learn through play, established what worked for them and set a comparison point to understand how this might change at a later date.
- We planned, scripted and delivered a series of videos with simple play ideas linked to child development benefits.
- We monitored implementation data for ideas on how to adapt the approach, for example uploading videos to YouTube a week after sharing, because late joiners to aWhatsApp group could not access older content.
We knew that the majority of parents at least viewed the content. A later survey established that all of those who viewed them enjoyed them and the majority found them useful for learning. The online content reached more people than our printable content and received more positive feedback.
Clearly, parental engagement was a success. What about developmental impact?
Engaging parents in learning is something of a holy grail in my educational context: we know it leads to improved outcomes but evidence of how to do it effectively is less secure. This intervention made a huge difference to the numbers of parents engaging in remote learning, which is an excellent start.
Did our pupils make progress? That is difficult to say: we do not have a sizeable comparison group of children who did not access the content, for example, and no prior data exists on educating in a pandemic in South East England.
We continue to adapt and improve the intervention, which now runs alongside our in-school teaching and forms the core of our remote learning plan for if and when it is needed again. Its success has also seen elements adapted for our wider school community, where engagement needs to increase.
Why does this matter?
Teaching is a practice of hundreds of decisions and choices to be made. As any sports person can tell you, embedding incremental change can have outsize impact on results. Of all the choices to make, which is best? Evidence-informed practice allows us to identify and implement the most effective interventions.
Deploying innovative techniques to empower and inform parents is the best investment to improve learning. How we do so will shape the world of our children that is inexorably moving online.
As we work towards a world where parents and teachers connect seamlessly, I’d love to hear your examples, learning and reflections from the use of tools to support learning. Share experiences and innovations in the discussions with comments below. You can also join the conversation with us on Twitter @earlyinsights
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