The reason I came to The Gambia was to try and share what little I know of managing schools with the education authorities here as they work to improve their systems and provide a quality education for all the children in the country.

The school system here, although based largely on the English system, is very different in many ways. Firstly, education is not compulsory and schools have to do their best to convince parents of the need to send their children to school at all. This isn’t always easy as it is traditional for children to work in the home and on the land as soon as they are old enough, and without this extra labour it is difficult for families to manage – particularly at busy times such as harvest.

Attendance throughout the year is very variable with more children attending in the dry season (November to May) than in the rainy season, when they are needed on the farm.

A few years ago, the Gambian government pledged to make education available to all pupils and started a campaign to enrol more children. The campaign was very successful and the numbers of children suddenly turning up at school overwhelmed the system and there were acute shortages of buildings, furniture and teachers. For some time now, the Department for Education has been doing all it can to build new classrooms, provide new furniture and train more teachers. In spite of their best efforts, many schools are still having to operate a ‘double shift’ system where some pupils attend in the morning and others in the afternoon. There are many disadvantages with the system, not least the fact that by 6pm, the teachers have been standing in front of classes for over 9 hours.

In spite of these measures, there are still insufficient trained teachers to cope with the workload and so most schools have to use unqualified teachers.

Teachers across the country tend to be demotivated by the hard working conditions and the low wages. When you add in the fact that they can be posted anywhere in the country and have to live in remote villages away from their homes and families it is not surprising that the retention rate of teachers is very low, with many leaving each year to pursue more lucrative professions.

It is against this background that the staff at the Regional Education Directorate work to ensure that all children who wish to attend school are able to do so and that they receive the best quality education possible. The staff at the Directorate is quite small – particularly when compared to an English LEA. In the office there are the Director of Education, a Principal Education Officer, a Senior Education Officer and two Education Officers covering a region with nearly one hundred schools. There are also 9 ‘Cluster Monitors’ covering clusters of around 10 to 12 schools each.

I work mainly with the Principal Education Officer (PEO), Saite Saine, and sometimes with the Director, Musa Suso. My role is to offer a different perspective on the work they are doing and hopefully be able to suggest new ways in which they can tackle issues.

For the past few months, my main task has been to improve the way schools are monitored by the Education Office. Communications are difficult: there’s no regular postal service, no email in schools and, unless the head has a mobile phone he can be reached on, there is no way to keep in touch with schools other than to actually visit them. Department of Education regulations say that staff from the Regional Directorates should visit each school at least once a month. In practice this is impossible: there simply isn’t the manpower – or the vehicles – or the fuel supply! Visits in the past tended to be very rushed affairs and Education Officers would simply accept the word of the head that all was well in the school and move on to the next one. When I first visited schools I could see in fact that all was not well and so I have been devising ways of improving the way visits are conducted and trying to find out what is really happening in a school. At times I feel a little like an OFSTED inspector, which is not how I want things to work, and heads can be very defensive. It is a cultural thing in The Gambia to always say that everything is ‘fine fine’ and not to point out where there are deficiencies. Unfortunately schools cannot improve unless they first acknowledge where they are not working as well as they could be and so I’m playing the role of the nasty man from the ministry. The more positive side of things though is that I’m also working to get the Senior Education Officer and the Cluster Monitors to spend more time in

the schools that need most help, offering support and on the job training to the heads. Gambian headteachers receive very little initial training and are left to sink or swim according to their natural abilities. I feel certain that many more of them, given a little training, could actually make good headteachers. Fingers crossed!

Other than school visits, I help with drafting operational plans for the region, writing reports work done by the office and have even written a speech for the Governor of North Bank Division for the Independence Day celebrations in February (he’s a personal friend of the Principle Education Officer). Oh yes, being the only person in the office who can operate a digital camera, I’m the official photographer too!