Education Matters: The Gambia Deserves a World-Class Education System (Part 1)

This is the second in a series of publications by Rohey L. Ceesay who is a teacher that is about to start her third term at Children First Academy. She is a former Head Girl at the Gambia Senior Secondary School in Banjul. Rohey is passionate about alternative education approaches and being open to new ideas in education which she believes can help transform our country.

By Rohey L. Ceesay

Children are the same around the world. There is nothing an American or European child can do that a Gambian child cannot do, given the opportunity. We have to give them that opportunity.

Children First Academy has just kicked off its 2024-25 school-visits season as guests of the West Coast schools Hope Academic Centre in Jambanwelly and the Vital Preparatory School in Bakau.

We took along two of our top students from Children First, two eight years olds that in Gambian terms have just finished Grade 2. But as we demonstrated during the three-day workshop, our top Grade 2 students do a lot more than just ABC-123.

What follows are some snippets from what we, and the children, had to say. I'll run this post in three parts to make it easier to take in.

"Don't make excuses. Be the solution!"

This is our staff motto, and as with our school motto for the children - Inspire. Enable. Empower - it is central to what we do at Children First.

And in keeping with our Director's philosophy and belief that mindset and method, not money and resources, are the key to giving The Gambia a world-class education system, nothing we do at Children First depends on funding or resources that other Gambian schools could not match.

Reading and writing of course underpins all other learning in school, so we need to get that right. Yet The Gambia is near the bottom of the world literacy tables. During the three-day workshop we showed clearly that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Obviously, the fact that we are teaching children not just to read and write but also to speak a foreign language they will barely encounter outside school does not help.

At Children First we have a clear "immersion strategy" as part of our four pillars of education: child-centric, holistic, immersive and interactive. But as we explored in the presentation, most Gambian schools do not have clear and scientifically robust instructional and broader pedagogical policies, rather using methods derived from, and that belong in, another era.

English is a difficult language to learn precisely because it is not a phonetic language, and robust science says using phonics to teach English is ineffective.

Don't take my word for it. A 2022 landmark study by University College London assessed the standard of English teaching in England, the home of the English language, and stated clearly that the obsession with phonics was "failing children." More and more British kids are leaving school unable to read and write to a satisfactory standard.

Sadly, The Gambia – with the best intentions – decided to jump on the phonics bandwagon too, and while phonics advocates will now point to phonics diagnostics results that show more children passing phonics diagnostics tests, the reality is that more and more Gambian children are unable to read, with knock-on consequences across all school subjects.

I say that having just today had a Grade 4 student from a local government school visit our summer study class, that could not read, and having seen that same school give a 90% “excellent” end of term report for English to a child that could not read.

It's all the more difficult for Gambian children who at home will likely only hear English on TV aimed at adult audiences, and where they will almost never encounter English reading material.

Of course, in most Gambian schools there is no video or internet, there is very little reading material, and the only English the children will hear is that spoken by their teacher as part of a set lesson.

An additional factor in The Gambia is that most children will, even before they start school, be learning to read, write and speak Arabic, meaning English will be their second read/write language and perhaps their third or fourth spoken language.

It’s therefore no surprise Gambia has literacy problems.

But we are amid a population explosion that can only make things even more challenging.

Take this UNESCO chart from ten years ago. The new census this year will bring us up to date, but we can safely say the figures shown below for school-age children will be much higher in 2024-5

What follows are estimates for 2025, based on the 2015 numbers, but are unlikely to be far out one way or the other.

Of course, a youthful, growing population can be a great asset for the country, if we can harness that potential, but it will also impose huge new demands on the education sector already struggling to cope.

Yes, "We're a small country... We're a poor country... We're a former colony... We don't have this... We don't have that..."

Excuses are easy, but even these seemingly oh-so-true statements don't really count for much.

This is a list of the world’s richest nations by GDP when factoring in population size, where the USA, notionally the world's richest nation, is actually not at the top when spreading its wealth across its 320 million population.

Only five of these are rich through oil.

In our presentation we singled out a few for closer inspection.

Just to be clear here: the 11th richest nation in the world by GDP/Population is San Marino, a tiny principality in Europe that has a population the size of Wellingara. It has no oil, diamonds, or other resources, and is dependent on services and tourism.

At #17 comes a volcanic island in the Atlantic Ocean where it is too cold to grow crops, so it relies on fishing, tourism and services. Iceland's population is about the same size as Serrekunda.

Luxembourg at #1, has barely twice the population of Serrekunda. It depends on tourism and services.

The land area of The Gambia is 11,300 square kilometres. Luxembourg has a land area of just 2,600 square kilometres. Monaco has - and no, this is not a typo - land area of just TWO square kilometres.

So no, population and country size are not excuses. Nor is being a former colony.

The USA, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Brazil, Nigeria, Morocco, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Singapore... All former colonies.

Speaking of Cote d'Ivoire, this year Cote d'Ivoire is scheduled to launch its first satellite into space.

Over twenty Africa nations now have space programmes. In The Gambia, children first learn about space with two whole pages in the Grade 4 Integrated Studies textbooks. How will this inspire our next generation to embrace the space race?

At Children First, our young astronomers are this term working a schools project following the new Artemis Moon-Mars mission that will see man return to the Moon this decade, and on to Mars in the next decade. The project is led by our Primary 2 students, but all classes from Nursery 1 to Primary are involved.

Three year olds learning about the planets? But this is not appropriate! This will overload them! Their brains will explode and... At least, that's what some Gambian teachers tell us.

At Children First we approach ECD (Early Childhood Development) from a modern, 21st century pedagogical perspective.

We believe that ECD (ECE in America) is the cornerstone of education. 3-6 are the magical years for children's learning. Primary can be too, if it's done right. By Secondary, it's too late. The damage is done.

In the First World, nursery-school-aged children have their minds opened up to the excitement of learning about the world - and the universe - around them.

This book, for example, is written for 5-7 year olds.

This talking telescope lets children as young as four see the craters on the Moon, the rings of Saturn and the four largest moons of Jupiter.

These images are part of the Children First Professional Development (Teacher Training) course designed to help Gambian teachers understand that little children can do so much more than just ABC-123, but only if we give them the opportunity and make it fun.

And as out Grade 2 kids demonstrated during the workshop. And that by changing the way we teach, to make things fun and accessible, Gambian kids can learn about pretty much anything.

Our Grade 2 kids told the teachers about the Shakespeare play Antony & Cleopatra, the Solar System and the Milky Way, the Periodic table and the discover of sodium, magnesium, calcium and potassium. They explained why the Mali Empire’s Mansa Musa never ate domada or tomatoes or potatoes or chocolate, about square numbers and prime numbers, and they did fractions using atomic symbols in lieu of numbers, and showed how we at Children First teach the Periodic Table and the human skeleton to our nursery school students. They talked about the Earth’s interior, continental drift, dinosaurs and the evolution of man, nutrition and healthy eating, the six simple machines, and so much more.

And we explained that the kids do all this in a three hour school day, because contrary to the popular educational myth that the more “contact hours” the better, less is actually more.

Most importantly, we said that, in every class in every school in this country, there will be kids like these two that can reach heights most Gambian teachers do not even imagine possible. But the factory model , one-size-fits-all siloed education system means most Gambian kids will never get the opportunity to show what they can do.

Cramming children into classrooms and making them sit in silence in rows of desks facing the almighty teacher as if we were still in the nineteenth century, and wasting their most important developmental years learning to make Jolly Phonics chimpanzee noises, is not giving them that opportunity.

And that is the theme of Part 2 of this series.

Here's a teaser of what is to come.

This photo is of a Gambian classroom in the 1920s, one hundred years ago.

Let me finish this post with this sobering thought:

If we put those children in a modern-day uniform and put the teacher in long trousers, this could be almost any school in The Gambia in 2024.