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During the last decade Brazil's economy has boomed. One of the last countries to enter the recession, it was also one of the first out and has now brought itself so far out of debt that it has sent US$14bn to the International Monetary Fund. There are predictions that the country will overtake Germany as the world's fourth largest car market by the end of the year and while many types of production are being halted all over the world, Brazil's car factories are operating around the clock and the country is receiving huge investment from all over the world.
However, there is another side of the story. According to the World Bank, the distribution of income in Brazil is among the most unequal in the world and vast areas of the country remain in extreme poverty. While Brazil's economy is extremely stable and has indeed grown in recent years, without an increase in the speed of growth it could fall far behind the rest of the BRIC family. At the heart of these challenges and one of the main barriers to enabling the strong growth that it still desperately needs, is the quality of the Brazilian education system.
The System
Phil Hawkins is deputy headteacher at a school in Croydon and the founder of charity Aprender that works to improve the quality of education in Brazil. In his words , Brazilian education "has improved but is still pretty bad". The Brazilian government has invested a huge amount of time and money into education system in recent years, including establishing the aim to get all children enrolled at school, but there is still scope for much more to be done.
The government initial drive has been largely successful. According to UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, attendance at primary school level was up to 96.4% in 2000 and secondary school attendance has also been significantly expanded. This has partly been achieved through the introduction of financial incentives for poorer families to send their children to school rather than to work, as well as a huge investment in school buildings and resources.
But the facts still remain that 25% of Brazilians attend school for less than two years, 20% drop out each year and 25% of people over the age of ten are illiterate. According to scores from SAEB, the Brazilian education evaluation system, in 2007 only 9.8% of students reached the minimum accepted level in mathematics and only 24.5% reached the minimum in Portuguese.
The background to these poor statistics is that, despite the drive to increase the number of children being educated , very little has been done to improve the quality of that education. Sending a child to school is one thing, but helping a child to learn is a different challenge.
Coupled with this problem is the huge inequality present in the current education system. About 25% of children go to private schools in Brazil, and these institutions house the best teachers and the best facilities. Ironically , once a child reaches university, the best vast majority of students reaching this level are those who previously attended private schools. State school educated pupils stand very little chance of gaining the adequate grades to attend university. This is the vast challenge that Aprender is eager to take on.
Aprender , named after the Portuguese verb "to learn", was set up by Phil five years ago and has recently achieved charitable status. The charity's aim is to "see young people move out of poverty through receiving a higher quality education". It is Phil's firm belief that by improving the quality of education, the country as a whole can be improved. He says:" The link between educational outcomes and poverty indicators such as health, crime, gang involvement and child prostitution is very clear and education is one of the biggest keys to having movements on those fronts.
Aprender currently consists of three experienced teachers in the UK, including Phil, and a team of volunteers out in Brazil. The long term plan is to get enough funding to employ full time workers, but the charity is still very much in its infancy.
With the realization that the charity needs someone full time in Brazil to get the charity moving, Phil has decided to take a bold step of taking a two year sabbatical from teaching and will move to Brazil with his wife and children this summer.
Phil has been visiting Brazil every summer for the last five years in order to collect facts about the quality of education. One of the key barriers he has observed is the system by which children must repeat a year if they don't achieve the right grades. About 25% of children fail each year , which means they must repeat.As a result, children become extremely demotivated and student age can be considerably higher than it should be.
Standards are also poor in other areas. "The quality in state school is just shocking," Phil says. "The teachers lack knowledge, they lack resources, they lack motivation. Learning is extremely passive and there's a lot of filling in the blanks in generic ' student jotters'.
" A key problem is that teaching jobs are very badly paid and a lot of teachers take on extra jobs in the evening.They get home at 11:00pm at night and start work at 7:00am in the morning., so they're not going to be motivated.
" If you're a high quality teacher you're to try to get a job in the private school because it's better paid and the condition are better. So the teachers in state schools feel that they are at the bottom of the pile, the kids think there's no way they'll make it to university and so the poverty cycle continues."
The Projects on the Ground
It is striking that very few organizations are working towards the same aims as Aprender-Phil founded the charity because there wasn't an existing body he could join. UNICEF carries out some similar work under a project titled EducAmazonia where it focuses on the quality of basic education in Brazil's Amazonia region. Similarly , the World Bank is carrying out work to improve tertiary education in Brazil. Many charities work with street children , including education initiatives, but Aprender's work is, by and large, unique.
The first challenge for Phil and his team was the mindset of the teachers and school themselves. Brazil is still a relatively young democracy, having been a dictatorship until 1985. And in Phil's words:"the legacy of the military dictatorship is still there today."
While the Aprender team is buzzing with enthusiasm to innovate,change methods of teaching and reorganize schools, Brazilian teachers are still in the mindset that they need permission of the area supervisor to act. But one factor clearly to the advantage of Aprender is that the Brazilian government is keen to work towards the same goal. In 2009 at an annual education congress at which Aprender presents, Phil met the Brazilian secretary of state for basic education.
"The meeting was extremely fortunate,"says Phil. " When I spoke to him about our projects he knew exactly what we're aiming fro. He said, "We want our teachers to innovate, to experiment and to be creative but the legacy of the dictatorship is still there, particularly in the older generation of our teachers".
"He was thrilled that we're going to be working in partnership with the government and build on its aim to have a place in school for every child. He even said in his presentation that the government's next major issue is the quality of teaching and schools."
So with the Brazilian government on their side, Phil and his colleagues have started a number of projects in school around Brazil. One example is a project to increase a student motivation. Phil explains:"At secondary school, when kids arrive for the day they go to their classroom and stay in that room for all of their lessons. Because it's the teachers that move around, the room becomes the kids' space which doesn't help a culture of learning or behavior management.
" Kids are the same the world over-they need movement and to be active to be engaged. Brazilian teachers can't believe that over 1, 000 pupils in school in US and UK move around every hour, but we're now piloting this idea in three schools, measuring he impact and reporting this to government."
Aprender also runs workshops to help children to learn how to review. In Brazil children have to take exams and if they don't pass they are held back a year. Without exam skills they stand absolutely no chance of gaining a place at university.
Another of the charity's focuses is teacher training- without these crucial skills, the quality of education will never improve. "At the moment, the government provide once -a -year training and teachers often have to pay for anything else out of their own pockets," says Phil. We've begun to run good quality workshops in schools with skills that actually work in practice explained by real teachers. Other projects include headship mentoring where I pass on skills I've been taught.
"We're sharing best practice and adapting he fantastic methods of teachers in UK who have worked with disaffected youths and behavior issues. This work very well because they understand where we're coming from, rather than being thought theories from the books.
"We're also addressing ICT training with teachers and connecting them with local businesses who can train them to use technology. Very little ICT training in state schools at the moment, but we want children to have the ICT diet they need given the way the world is changing."
"One school I visited had a lovely IT suite with 12 or so computers, covered in dust sheets. When I asked why there weren't being used, the answer was they had run of ink for the printers and rung the government to ask how to change it. The children were champing at the bit to get in there, but they couldn't."
All Aprender's project are clearly measured and results are then fed back into the projects. On of the first important appointments Phil will make when he gets to Brazil is to ask an undergraduate in the education sector to undertake independent monitoring and evaluation of Aprender's work as part of tits quality assurance process.
At the moment the focus is on short- term measurement to see changes. Phil explains: Kids vote with their feet and their is a lot of truancy , but if their classroom experience is better this should impact their attendance rate. We also measure teachers' attendance rate as their absenteeism is also very high. If they feel cared for and enjoy their experience this should drop.
"Other measures include the number of children repeating years and surveys carried out during the year to see how pupils and teachers feel about the changes and about their personal experiences in the classroom. Ultimately, our long term target is to increase grades to give children the chance to lift themselves out of poverty."
The Bigger Picture
Starting a charity and implementing projects has not been an easy process. Phil says:" Sometimes the enormity of the challenge makes us wonder what we are trying to do here." As well as the teacher's mindset and the lack of resources, another hurdle was to understand the approach that Phil and his colleagues should adopt in order to work well with the Brazilian culture. "An unavoidable early mistake was not spending enough time really sussing out the culture,"says Phil. "For example, five years ago I spent time in Brazil talking to government representative. When I returned to the UK I started firing off emails expecting replies within a week, but months on I had heard nothing.
"When I returned the next year, they laughed and pointed out that Brazilians just aren't event-oriented people; they are more people oriented-something that I think that I can learn a lot from. They don't do diaries. Meetings start when everyone has turned up."
"In the UK everything is planned to the nth degree, but we had to learn to just roll with it and not fight the culture."
Aprender has also built a strong network of Brazilian non-governmental organizations and churches who are partnering with the charity, and this has been key to adapting to the local culture. Next the team had to start looking at how to use their cultural insights to adapt UK best practice for introduction in Brazil.
For example, concepts such as Learn to Learn-a UK campaign to help pupils understand how best they individually learn -had to be "translated" into the Brazilian culture in order to work. And winning teacher's trust was vital in order for Phil to develop what he terms his "sustainable model".
"Teachers in Brazil are blown away by the idea hat someone from overseas is taking an interest in them, " says Phil. "This has been a big motivator for us. Teachers need steering, mentoring and encouraging a huge amount to begin with,which is why I'm now going out for two years.
"We're hoping to create a sustainable model in that teachers begin to see improvements and the impact of these new methods and can then help to train other Brazilian teachers."
And as well as spreading best practice throughout Brazil, Phil already has his sights set on adapting his system for other developing economies. He explains:"My school in the UK already has links with schools in Thailand and South Africa -countries with similar problems with poverty as Brazil.
"Our much longer -term goal is to refine a model of intervention that takes into account local culture and can be adapted for other countries. Contacts in those countries are already waiting to receive any help we can give , although right now we're concentrating on Brazil.
"Hopefully UNESCO will take notice of what we're doing.It's all about sharing our approach , helping others to learn from what went well and what went badly."
So already tasked with huge task of improving education in such a vast and varied country as Brazil. Aprender is not willing to stop there. It seems Phil and his team are already setting their sights on a much larger goal. And when asked what motivates him and why he's prepared to take on the challenge, Phils has doubts.
" The real silver lining in the cloud- because there are still times when we wonder what the point of starting is the amazing Brazilian spirit."
"Despite all of their hardships and their poverty they are so friendly , embracing and hospitable that we know it's worth carrying on."
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