Shared values, cultural diversity and education :
What to learn and how ?

Tunisia's quality learning programme ( From a local initiative to national policy on quality education )

El Kef, Tunisia

The initiative began with the agreement between the Ministry of Education of Tunisia, UNICEF and a local NGO to develop an integrated school project. It was a "basic competencies" programme designed as a small-scale local project. It aimed to identify educational stategies to improve the performance of some rural schools, with the focus on girls.
To replicate the successful approaches to other schools, the project was a link at the national policy level on improving the quality of learning achievements, and the integrated school project became the national model.
The progamme helped to build a national consensus that :
- all children can learn and failure is not normal
- all children have not only the right to access schools, but to remain there and learn
It acts as catalyst of change and is coherent with national strategies on reduction of school dropouts and quality education improvement, and enhances mobilization at national, regional and local levels.
The competency-based teaching approach impacts positively on learning achievements.

The strategies developed with the pedagogical innovations included training for parent-teacher associations in order to strenghten the school-community integration; activities centered on theatre, school radio, school clubs and school gardens.
Teaching is structured to take pupils from one level of competence to another, through a carefully defined approach based on the acquiring of intermediate competencies. Of utmost importance in the approach, is that the child is at the centre. Under this approach, learning is participatory and significantly changes the traditional roles of teacher and pupil. The teacher takes on the role of a facilitator or a resource person depending on the pupils' learning needs. Students have individual « learning contracts » and the students who are quicker act as tutors to help slower ones either individually or in small groups.

The evaluation of the initial project, and ongoing discussions, highlighted the need to stress issues related to classroom management and its pedagogical aspects. Also, the evaluation recommended to link the project at the national policy level to improve the quality of learning achievements. The framework developed stressed the importance of improving the effectiveness, equity and efficiency of the education system, to ensure that the majority of children not only have access to school, but leave it equipped with the necessary skills and competencies to continue learning at secondary school.

Moncef Moalla
Unicef Tunis
Mmoalla@unicef.org

Institutional Partners
Ministry of Education
Unicef

Financial Partners
World Bank

The initiative began in 1992, and the « probatory phase » for the nation-wide approach in 1999-2000

Internal and external evaluations by UNICEF in 1999