Every learner must have the opportunity to learn and achieve their full potential.
This demands deliberate attention from individuals with the mandate and responsibility to support learners and considering the universal trends in young people’s learning and the impact of COVID-19 legacy on the education sector, action is now more urgent than it ever has been.
Most 10-year-old children on the continent of Africa cannot read and do not have age-appropriate numeracy proficiency.
The situation worsens by the time they enter secondary school, where these young people are expected to be prepared for further studies, the world of work and adult life.
This expectation seems to be anchored in young people’s assumed ability to read a text with comprehension, be functionally numerate, culturally driven by values, scientifically literate and demonstrate a breadth of skills such as problem-solving, creativity, innovation, communication, and collaboration, digital literacy, and global citizenship.
However, the gap between current and expected practices regarding young people’s right to a quality education widens with each passing day.
It seems that our best efforts are not good enough. More intentionality is required both at the systems level and the school level.
Moral Leadership
Leadership is a responsibility, and moral leadership is a responsibility to transform and change the learning crisis trajectory and do a greater good for all learners.
Moral leadership is about building a coalition of change makers to create resilient, inclusive, and safe learning systems and environments that see humanity and potential in every learner.
Moral leaders for education are not only driven by values for the greater good, but they also inspire and stimulate action in their teams to focus on what is good for all learners and in this case, foundational learning.
Moral leadership requires an all-embracing process and approach to moral problem solving and necessitates a self-improving school and education system that is built on self-governance.
Therefore, educational leadership as moral leadership must be understood as a personal and societal practice. It must ensure the achievement of educational goals at the system and school levels, which, in this case, requires ensuring that all learners are functionally literate and hold relevant skills.
Requirements for moral leadership
The systems level refers to the national, regional and district levels.
This level is the home for robust and implementable policies, strategies, and plans, and at this level, budgets should be in place for foundational learning and the inculcation of a breadth of skills in every learner, wherever they are and whatever their circumstances.
While the continent of Africa needs more policies of this kind, the most significant issue now is translating such policies into action.
For example, a research and advocacy project was carried out in 2022 by the Education Commission [now Learning Generation Initiative] with their country partners in Ghana, Rwanda and Kenya.
The research was supported by funding from the LEGO Foundation, which promotes inclusive, engaging, and adaptive pedagogies.
The study focused on creating awareness of innovative pedagogies and revealed that although there are policies, plans and strategies in place for implementing such pedagogies and developing a breadth of skills in learners, the implementation of the policies varied widely.
On average, 38 per cent of teachers in the schools visited showed evidence of translating the policies into practice. Increasing the proportion of teachers implementing such policies requires a paradigm shift and a reconstruction of this problem as a moral problem that requires moral leadership.
School-level
At the school level, leadership should be distributed such that each person assumes full responsibility for their assigned area of operations.
In addition, in a typical school, there should be a board or management committee, senior leadership team, middle leadership team, teacher leadership team and student leadership team.
The ability of these groups of leaders to collaborate and plan and define the skills and knowledge needed to implement national policies is critical for ensuring that young people’s right to receive a quality education is fulfilled and that young people exiting the formal education system at any point are proficient in language literacy, cultural literacy, scientific literacy and numeracy with a breadth of skills.
At the heart of Ghana’s Standards-based Curriculum for pre-tertiary education is the 4Rs policy – Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and cReativity – but this policy cannot be implemented if all levels of school leaders are not intentional about their practices.
The right culture for learning must embrace the reality that the inability of learners to demonstrate their ability to read, write, do arithmetic, be creative or be problem-solvers (as a minimum) is a moral problem that can only be addressed through moral leadership.
Systems and school levels
At the systems and school levels, moral leadership requires that the moral problems Africa faces, including learning poverty and the foundational learning crisis, be seen through the lenses of public value and social justice.
The functional literacy of all learners must be recognised as a prerequisite for the welfare and well-being of the public, as well as the economic, human, social and political enrichment of the individual countries and the continent.
At the same time, moral leadership ensures that the rights of individual learners are met, inequality is removed, and the potential of learners is adequately developed for the benefit of their immediate and wider communities. Thus, moral and adaptive leadership requires the following changes.
i) Governments and policymakers must make targeted investments in foundational learning, focused on a collaborative approach to relevant policymaking.
Such policies should be made using what I have coined as commonality capital (engaging and involving policy implementers in the policy engineering process from the beginning to ensure policy ownership and avoid commonality deficit and de-energised policy).
The writer is an Education and Development Consultant
