School and Community Development

A team of 12 facilitators which includes, school supervisors, principals, teachers and community members is selected in each district to support the school and community training program. They are trained by a team of experienced national trainers in School Based Management, Community Participation and PAKEM. The training is practical and includes visits to schools to view good practice. The PAKEM training is based around modelling good lessons and practising them in schools.

These facilitators then train School Principals, School Committee Members and Teachers to make school plans and budgets and raise the level of community participation. The school principal and all the teachers in primary schools and ten teachers (5 core subjects x 2 teachers) in junior secondary schools are trained in PAKEM / Contextual Learning. Training for the facilitators and schools is ongoing - at least twice a year for each. It is supported by on the-job-monitoring and training by the facilitators and regular activities in the Teacher Working Groups (KKG for primary schools, MGMP for Junior Secondary Schools).

Local Program Support

The program is supported by a program coordinator in each district, who works in the local government offices. These coordinators play a vital role in ensuring that results of training and other activities are implemented by offering support and regular monitoring. They have also been quick to identify problems enabling consultants based at province or central level to intervene to overcome the problems. Teams of technical consultants are stationed at central level and in each of the two project provinces to support the districts.

Sustainability and Dissemination

The MBE program is building for the long term. It works only with local governments who are committed to developing the quality of their education services. It builds models for them to disseminate. It develops teams of facilitators/trainers which local government can use to train other subdistricts and schools outside the program. A wide range of stakeholders are involved in all activities and local governments and schools have a large say in how and what activities are organised. Local level activities are low cost.

Several districts have already started to do school mapping in non-project subdistricts and to disseminate the SBM and PAKEM programs to other schools using their own funds. Other keys to success include:
* Study visits to other successful districts to enable the various stakeholders to see innovations in action. In many cases they have returned to their own districts and immediately tried to apply what they have seen, often with considerable success.
* Training a variety of stakeholders together is essential. This disseminates knowledge widely and builds a broad base of local support. For example, training school committees, supervisor and principals alongside teachers helps everyone to 'buy into' the processes and commit themselves to support their teachers as they adopt innovative approaches.

Publications and Website

The program publishes a regular quarterly newsletter, "Suara MBE". . It is also published on the program website: mbeproject.net. The following materials are expected to be available in the second half of 2004:
* A school mapping manual
* Support materials for teachers
* Studies of the (i) role of the school committees, (ii) the role of school principals, and (iii) the implementation of change in Probolinggo district.
To obtain any of these publications please contact us. Details are set out below.

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