Algeria is experiencing a time of education reform, with the aim of addressing and increasing employability prospects for its young people.
The British Council is working in partnership with the Algerian Ministry of National Education (MoNE) to support their overarching school education reform agenda. Now coming towards the end of its second year, the project will run for three years and is funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office through the North Africa Good Governance Fund.
In Algeria, around 40,000 new teachers are being recruited into the school system every year. Deemed a particularly urgent issue, school pedagogical inspectors alone are responsible for providing their in-service training and professional development.
One of the focal points of the project therefore is to support the capacity-building of Algeria’s school inspectors and leaders in order to improve the quality of teaching and learning in schools and support better learner outcomes.
To achieve this, the British Council recruited UK-qualified education experts who worked closely with a core group of inspectors to co-create a framework of professional standards and competencies for new teachers, as well as associated training content and approaches. The framework draws on UK and international best practice, but has been developed specifically for the Algerian contexts. Prior to the project, no such framework existed in Algeria.
To enable the new teaching approaches to be implemented effectively in schools, the project has now also begun to address school leadership and the quality assurance of school systems, again working through groups of school inspectors and leaders.
To date, over 200 inspectors and school leaders have been trained and have used the new framework and associated pedagogies to train over 40,000 new teachers. The MoNE now view this group as being at the vanguard of their drive to develop and implement new teaching, leadership and quality assurance approaches in Algerian schools.
The MoNE’s ambition is that these inspectors will also cascade the new training approach to all Algerian inspectors who, in turn, will use the approach to train new teachers, allowing the improved teaching and learning approach to become embedded in the system.
The project is monitoring and evaluating impact in the classroom by working with and observing clusters of schools from across Algeria.
The project, worth in the region of £2 million, began in August 2016 and will continue until March 2019. For more information, please contact Rebecca Ingram.