A third bit about education...

Having discovered that the BECE exam performance of girls was consistently worse than that of boys, I asked people whether they knew that was the case, whether it was unique to Bawku West (or the Upper East Region or the northern part or rural parts of Ghana), and what the causes might be. 

I’m not sure whether people were already aware of the issue (you often don’t get a clear answer to that sort of question here).  What I can say is that nobody expressed the least surprise. 

I don’t think anyone knew whether it is the case throughout the country, or unique to Bawku West (or the north of Ghana or rural parts of Ghana).  I was offered quite a range of reasons to explain the phenomenon, including that girls’ attendance isn’t as good as boys; that girls have a lot more household chores to do than boys (which impacts both on their attendance at school and on their ability to do homework); that girls have to work at the market with their mothers (another obstacle to attending school and a drain on their energy and time); that families and society don’t perceive girls’ education to be important so don’t encourage them to go to school or do well there; that girls fritter away their free time watching romantic films on TV; and teenage pregnancy.  I didn’t encounter too much overt “so what” or “why is that an issue”, though I think I did detect a bit of an undercurrent of such thinking on occasion.

So I set out to do a bit of investigating.  The first thing I looked at was attendance at school.  This was reasonably easy to look into because information is contained in a “school report card” which is completed by all schools twice per year (after Christmas and after the end of the summer term) – I had helped type the data from some of these into the computer and I knew that the data for term 3 of 2012/13 and term 1 of 2013/14 were complete.  I had some doubts about the quality of the data – for example some head teachers had filled in the forms giving the impression that their schools had enjoyed perfect attendance levels; and others had written figures which claimed more attendance than was actually possible if every pupil on the register attended every day of the term – but at least there was some information to work with! 

I thought the results were quite interesting - they are shown in the table below.  These relate to the third term of 2012/13 (ie April – July 2013).

Attendance Rates (Percentage), Term 3 of 2012/13
	KG 1	KG 2	P 1	P 2	P 3	P 4	P 5	P 6	JHS 1	JHS 2	JHS 3	All Classes
Girls	56.9%	61.7%	65.6%	65.7%	67.2%	70.4%	70.7%	77.6%	74.2%	71.4%	43.8%	65.9%
Boys	58.4%	65.2%	64.3%	63.5%	64.6%	68.3%	70.1%	73.4%	68.7%	73.0%	42.1%	64.9%

 

These data do not show that girls’ attendance at school is any worse than boys’ – in fact, although there isn’t much in it, girls’ attendance is slightly better overall, and better for every year group except the two kindergarten years and the second year in Junior High School. 

It is true that the levels of attendance revealed here are not particularly good.  The overall rate is pulled down a couple of percentage points by the JHS3 figures, which I think reflect the fact that this is the exam term and these pupils don’t go to school in the second part of the term (they go to Exam Centres when they actually have an exam).  But even allowing for this, an average attendance rate of around 70% would mean that children are absent on average one and a half days every week.  In my book that amounts to a lot of missed opportunity and would be an obvious thing to concentrate on if you wanted to improve academic results.

Because it was easy to do this at the same time, I also looked at school enrolment figures.  The table below shows what I found.

Enrolment, Term 3 of 2012/13
	KG1	KG 2	P 1	P 2	P 3	P 4	P 5	P 6	JHS 1	JHS 2	JHS 3	Total
Girls	2428	1888	2446	2217	2036	1915	1571	1373	1015	830	488	18207
Boys	2344	1801	2491	2197	2107	1873	1482	1356	1166	894	634	18345
% Girls	50.9%	51.2%	49.5%	50.2%	49.1%	50.6%	51.5%	50.3%	46.5%	48.1%	43.5%	49.8%

 

Previously I had also found some census data – Ghana seems to do a population census every ten years, though I could only find year 2000 figures.  The context which the census figures provide is that something over 3,000 children are born each year in the Bawku West District, and that the birthrate is slowly increasing (as is the overall population of the District).  It was slightly disturbing to find that these figures showed there were more female children than male children at birth, but that the proportion of girls reduced quite markedly (from slightly more than 50% at birth to 49.1% the age of 4 to 47.1% at age 15 – 17).  I’d asked about it at the time and several people had irritated me by saying that, as everyone knows, female children are weaker than males and succumb more to disease and the like.  Linking that knowledge with these school attendance figures, I was encouraged that there were slightly more girls than boys in school throughout the kindergarten and primary school years.  At least during those years, it seems that if anything a slightly greater percentage of girls go to school than boys.

Also interesting, though worrying, was the way the numbers of pupils, both boys and girls, fell each year.   Only about a quarter of the children who started out in kindergarten are still in school in the final year of Junior High School.  There is a drop of varying size each year; the drops after P4 and P6 are noticeably bigger.  The drop after P6 is the first time that significantly more girls than boys drop out, and the proportion of girls drops again at JHS3, resulting in the under-representation of girls at BECE which had started me looking at these figures.  The greater wastage rate for girls is certainly a worry, but it strikes me that the fact that so many pupils of both genders progressively drop out of school might be a greater cause for concern.

It doesn’t seem easy to draw any conclusions from these data, unfortunately, either about why the numbers of girls in school drops in the early teenage years, or about why those who don’t drop out perform less well than their male counterparts.

Meanwhile, something has struck me about market days.  There is a market every three days in Zebilla (and also, and on the same days, in the next large towns, Bolgatanga and Bawku).  That means that there is a weekday market five times every three weeks – ie on five days out of fifteen.  If a pupil stayed away from school every market day, his/her attendance rate would be 66%.  Could it be mere coincidence that the male and female attendance rates in term 3 of 2012/13 were 65.9% and 64.9% respectively?

I decided to investigate that question by taking a close look at the pupil attendance registers at the Junior High School where Jane and I help out every Monday.  This is (to give it its full title) the Hamdaniya English/Arabic Junior High School.  It is on the edge of Zebilla, on the north side, on the same site as a primary school (including kindergarten) of the same name.  With 189 pupils, it isn’t a particularly large school, though it is among the larger JHSs in Bawku West District (there are 45, 11 of which only came into existence this year).  As far as we can tell, it’s pretty typical of Junior High Schools in this district.  There are equal numbers of girls and boys overall.  There are 82 pupils in the first year, 69 in the second and 38 in the third and final year – so the trend of reducing numbers in the higher classes is clearly visible here. 

The head-teacher has split the JHS1 class into two streams, something that I think he was able to do because he could borrow a classroom from the primary school, and because there are four student teachers on site for the first two terms, plus two “national service” teachers, which gives a bit of slack in teacher resources.  (Ghana operates a system of national service, whereby people who have benefited from tertiary education subsidized by the government have to do a year’s “national service” at the end to repay the state.  One hears very mixed comments about the scheme – apparently many people find themselves doing something that isn’t related in the slightest to the qualification they have obtained, and there are stories about them doing very little work.  However, the two individuals at Hamdaniya JHS seem to work hard and are good members of the team.)  Without the students and national service personnel, the school would have 6 teachers; I’ve recently heard it stated that the Government allocation for teachers in a one-stream JHS is 5, including the teaching head-teacher – which, obviously, means that most teachers have to teach more than one subject.  With only five teachers, I don’t think splitting the class would have been possible, so the teachers would have been dealing with 82 pupils in the JHS1 class – quite a thought (and I’m sure it happens elsewhere)! 

So, I copied down lots of figures from the class registers, typed them into Excel, and had hours of fun calculating averages and creating pretty bar charts.  The main things I found were:

·        In every class, the girls’ attendance rate was slightly higher than the boys’;

·        On market days, attendance rates were slightly higher than the average for the whole term, and this was true for both boys and girls except for JHS3 boys – but the differences were small (for JHS3 boys, the overall average was 88.9%, with 87.8% on market days);

·        Attendance rates were noticeably worse on Fridays – the average for the whole school was 80.4%, but 81.4% on market days and 75.8% on Fridays.  The head teacher had said that attendance on Fridays was poorer, and there is also the problem that lessons don’t continue after midday on Fridays, because of Friday prayers.  Once every three weeks, Friday is also market day, and attendance rates on these days were lower than on other Fridays;

·        There were 78 pupils in the school (ie 41.3% of all pupils) whose attendance rate was 90% or better, and 120 (63.5% of pupils) whose attendance rate was 80% or better (including the ones with 90% or better).

·        In the whole school there were only 8 pupils whose attendance was below 50%.  Some of these had dropped out early in the term but their names hadn’t been removed from the register; some had arrived towards the end of the term and had good attendance records. 

This final point alerted me to another potential data problem.  When head teachers are asked to provide attendance data, they aren’t given any guidance about how to deal with drop-outs and late arrivers, so I suspect that all are included as though they should have been present for the whole term.  Obviously that will make the attendance statistics appear a bit worse than they actually are.

So, here was another interesting little piece of research, which seemed to scotch pretty comprehensively the idea that girls’ poor attendance at school lay behind their poorer academic performance.  In the process, perhaps it also exploded the idea that pupils staying away from school on market days is part of the problem.  Then again, maybe not – the registers are only marked in the morning and there is nothing to say that pupils don’t turn up at school, maybe stay for the first few lessons, and then disappear off to the market around midday when trading starts in earnest.  It certainly is the case that there are lots of children of all ages at the market; and it’s also the case that many children, perhaps particularly older ones, are expected to earn money to contribute to their own schooling (not to mention pocket money for themselves).  I asked the head teacher about this.  He confirmed that the registers would not show if pupils were absenting themselves at some point during the morning on market days, and he agreed that it would be interesting to ask the teachers if they noticed it.  I don’t think a coherent answer to this question has emerged yet.

The data from this school also made me think that the figures reported through the School Report Card might give an unduly pessimistic picture, because of the effect of pupils who drop-out shortly after the term has started, and those who arrive later.  The 80.4% average attendance rate for the school was certainly good compared to the average of 65% reported via the SRC (admittedly for the previous terms and thus not strictly comparable.  I have since had the chance to look at the average attendance rates for the District for the first term of 2013/14.  These were boys 73.33%, girls 74.54% - so actually quite a bit better than in the exam term.  It has also occurred to me that term 3 includes the start of the rainy season, when a lot of work has to be done in the fields and perhaps results in more absences from school).

I was, though, conscious that one school is a pretty small sample.  So I decided to repeat the exercise at another local school.  This time, for base reasons of convenience, I picked the one closest to the office.  This is a large primary school and we were introduced to the head early in our placement and have run into him a few times since and found him friendly.  The only disadvantage was that this was also an Islamic school (this time designated as such – Hariya Islamic KG/Primary School – don’t ask me what the difference is between an Islamic school and an English/Arabic school, I’m sure there will be a sensible one).  So the school might once again have particular and unrepresentative problems on Fridays, which would distort my data.  About a third of the population in this region are Muslims, so I would have to be careful about drawing conclusions about Fridays based on two schools with Islamic connections.

Hariya Islamic KG/Primary School has 667 pupils on its register.  There is one class for most year groups, but two for Primary 4 and Primary 6.  The two smallest classes (KG2 and P1) each have 57 pupils, whilst the biggest (P3) has 87.  There are 308 boys and 359 girls and every year group except P1 and P5 has more girls than boys (P5 has one more boy than girls).  The registers were not kept quite as neatly as in the JHS and as I copied down figures I spotted (and corrected) some arithmetic and transcription errors.

The main points to emerge from the Hariya data were:

·        Overall, girls’ attendance is slightly better than boys (82.2% compared to 79.7%);

·        Market day attendance is slightly better than average (82.8% compared to 81.0%);

·        Attendance on Fridays is consistently worse (73.6%);

·        The attendance rate is better in the Primary classes than in Kindergarten (84.2% compared to 68.5%);

·        As at Hamdaniya JHS, a significant proportion of the pupils are very good attenders (over 40% attend more than 90% of the time – almost all of these are in the Primary classes), but there is a larger proportion of pupils who attend less regularly;

·        A rather larger number of pupils dropped out shortly after the start of term – particularly in the Kindergarten and Primary 1 classes, which contributed to but did not entirely explain the poorer attendance rate in these classes.

My conclusion – the data from this second school were entirely consistent with those from the first school and showed the same broad patterns.  Caution is still needed in drawing broad conclusions from these data because of the small sample size, the fact that both schools are located in Zebilla (so will not illustrate the particular features of village schools, if they are different), and because both are Islamic schools (and thus, for example likely to show distinct characteristics on Fridays).  Was I any closer to understanding why the girls’ BECE results are poorer than the boys?  To be honest, I wasn’t.

Before we leave this subject, the eagle-eyed among you might have reacted to a statistic revealed earlier.  I said that the census data showed that something over 3,000 children are born each year in Bawku West District.  If that is true, how is it that there are over 4,000 pupils per year in the Kindergarten classes and in Primary 1, 2 and 3?

There are, no doubt, several components to the answer to this question.  One undoubtedly is that there are children from Burkina Faso who walk over the border to attend school in Ghana – apparently because some would prefer to be educated in English than in French.  But the numbers are not large, I think.  The main component of the answer hits you in the face when you walk into any class in any school in Bawku West District.  There appear to be pupils of a very wide range of ages in all classes.  So, whilst undoubtedly some of the children in P1 and P2 are aged 6, 7 or 8 – which is the age for which government policy would indicate that these classes are intended – there are also numerous children who are older, and some of these are a lot older.  In the Junior High School, where policy would lead you to expect to find pupils aged 12 – 14, there are in fact pretty few who are as young as that.  Fifteen is a fairly typical age for a pupil in JHS1, and it is not uncommon to find pupils aged 18, 19 and 20 still in the Junior High School (and fully intending to continue their education in Senior High School, which in theory they should have left by age 17-18!)

I haven’t yet succeeded in getting hold of data which illuminate this issue a little more, but I will continue to try.  Meanwhile, one conclusion that should be drawn is that the proportion of children attending school is smaller than the figures would suggest.  There are 32,700 children between the ages of 4 and 14 (inclusive) in Bawku West District – who are catered for by the basic education system in which 35,872 children are enrolled (according to figures sent from this office to the Ghana Education Service HQ in Accra within the last few weeks).  Given those figures, you wouldn’t immediately think that there is a problem of children not attending school.  But if you come here and walk around the towns and villages on any school day, you will see all those children, and I promise you it is not just the odd one here and there.  How many?  So far, I haven’t managed even a half-decent estimate from the official figures that I can find, and I haven’t run into anyone who is putting much effort into calculating it (or even collecting the data from which it could be calculated).  My wet finger in the air tells me that it might be as many as half of all children – but I couldn’t prove it. 

Does it matter?  Well, it seems to be generally accepted that access to education is a basic right of all children.  But you couldn’t reasonably argue that these children are being deprived of that right – they are simply exercising the right not to take it up.  Perhaps the question is whether they are doing so in an informed way – my strong suspicion is that they aren’t.