The devil is in the details: Assessment and Certification of Education in Difficult Circumstances
When an education system is set up or restored after an emergency, a war or a major population movement, it cannot be long before the twin questions of assessment and certification arise. Assessment may be to establish the quality or the ‘quantity’ of achievement and past learning. It may be for many reasons, from a loss of certificates to a need to identify the right entry point on a new education ladder.
The demand for this assessment may come from the pupils, students or parents; it may also come from education authorities, education committees (official, or representing the affected community) or from a potential benefactor.
Once assessment is possible, certification is usually needed. However, this in itself may not be sufficient unless it is too ‘local and neither internationally recognised nor ‘portable’.
Frequently, even when a system is actually available there are obstacles, bureaucratic, financial or otherwise, which can prevent the usually poor, and certainly powerless candidate from being able to use them.
To give a recent example, the tripartite agreements signed in 2006 between Sudan, UNHCR and former host country like Kenya all contain a small paragraph stating that qualifications obtained while in exile will be recognised in Sudan. However, in practice when the returnee gets back to Sudan, absolutely nothing is in place to ensure that his or her qualification is automatically recognised. No official has been briefed. It can take typically one year of fruitless, and costly, bureaucracy involving both Juba and Khartoum to obtain entry to university or to a college.
To take another pair of examples, the Kenyan education system insists that everyone, foreigner or national must study Swahili and take it in the examination. No exemptions are granted. The Sudan school system insists that you must be a Muslim or a Christian, but provides the Islamic paper only in Arabic (which most returnees don’t know, havng studied Islamic knowledge in Engish in their host countries.)
Finally, to illustrate that sometimes policies can even be contradictory, Congolese refugees in Tanzania followed the Congolese curriculum with the blessing of their hosts. However the authorities in Congo itself would not allow Sudanese refugees to follow their home curriculum!
A common theme in all of these is how easily these problems could have been solved with some effective lobbying and a little good will on each side.
Equally important though, is the need to follow through. Signing something at well-organised ceremony in front of the cameras is certainly not enough. There must be a mechanism to ‘accompany’ the people concerned.
This paper presents a rough analysis of this practical level as it is perceived by the refugee, returnee or displaced person. It seeks to show that ‘the devil is in the details’.
Refugees
especially if they are
- Unable to prove their level of education before exile
- Not following the syllabus of their host country (e.g. Somalis in Djibouti)
- Not willing (or able, usually for language reasons) to use the syllabus of their host country (e.g. Southern Sudanese in DRC who can see no reason to learn in French )
- Not using the language of examinations in their home country (e.g. most Southern Sudanese refugees)
Returnees
- Who need their education in exile to be recognised when they go back (e.g. Somalis in Ethiopia and Djibouti or Southern Sudanese in Uganda).
- Who, like temporary teachers, or trained on the job health workers, need evidence of training they have done while in exile.
People studying by correspondence or distance education
They are usually adults, such as teachers doing upgrading courses, or health workers, or untrained volunteers in camps or remote areas
Teachers do these courses both for their own reasons and the welfare of the pupils. Upgrading is a tradition in the teaching profession which goes some way to compensation for low pay and difficult work and conditions. This applies to teachers in rural schools, in slum schools and in refugee camps. It also applies to the increasing number of teachers who have never been trained.
Students
- In an area under an authority with no international recognition such as in Southern Sudan (then) and Southern Somalia.
- where there is no authority at all.
- studying alone
- who need certificates in subjects or through languages, not provided by the authority they live under (such as the Southern Sudanese in Khartoum or refugees in Ethiopian primary schools). This also applies in the reverse where students are required to sit for a subject they have no interest in -- such as Swahili at primary leaving level in Kenya.
- Those who require certification of 'interrupted' education so they can proceed up the education ladder without too much repetition, the so-called 'stranded students'
- Those who need a certificate to proceed up the educational ladder, e.g. to certify the end of primary
- Those trying to catch up: Youth out of school, Older people
Certification of teachers being trained in the field
Certification of the standard of English
This is also known to be in great demand for specific types of employment and for entry to tertiary education.
Diagnostic tests:
Enabling students to know their own standard, and placing them accurately on the 'ladder' of the new country are regarded as high priority.
The certification of Single subjects, such as computer, driving or business studies.
Issues
In providing certification there are several issues to be considered:
Portability, Compatibility and External Validity
Many pupils and students are learning in systems that have self-assessment or internal assessment only; no external validation is available. To get employment or to proceed up the educational ladder the students need a certificate which is valid anywhere; this validity will have to be long-term. A method of establishing compatibility with other certificates is usually necessary.
Students who already have certificates need them to be recognised. They may have prior studies which they would like to be assessed so they do not repeat years in school.
All of these imply providing an answer to the question: ‘Will my certificate be recognised universally, especially when going home from exile?'
Lack of knowledge among candidates about examinations and about their own standard
Those working with such students report that lack of knowledge about examinations is a major problem. Many students have an inaccurate picture of their own standard and ability and waste their efforts (and money) on inappropriate examinations.
Certain private institutions in Britain or USA with grandiose names (‘Oxford Colleges of Smallville’) exploit this lack of knowledge.
Accessibility and Flexibility
This can be said to be simply: ‘How to get the candidates and the examination together in the same place’. This includes how to get examination to the candidates as well as how to get the candidate to the examination.
Further there are many constraints to taking examinations, such as
- The rigidity of examination rules and timetables; exam bodies have legitimate concerns about security of their examinations, but sometimes the rules seem too rigid.
- Subjects often cannot be taken separately; a certificate cannot be accumulated in a modular fashion
- There are restrictions, such as age limits or nationality rules, which may not be necessary in the context
- There are no optional questions offered (such as, say home country history) even though this would e a very simple thing to do.
Flexibility
Taking all subjects at one sitting, say in just two weeks, is very damaging to students.
Option papers both in subject and medium.
Reducing the constraints by
- allowing more flexible times,
- allowing the subjects to be taken separately,
- allowing the certificate to be made up in a modular fashion over two or three years.
- allowing options (eg in geography or in medium of instruction)
This includes allowing the candidates to take single subject at a sitting.
Language
Language is a big issue, both in subject and medium, for refugees and others, particularly the language used in the examinations (the medium of assessment) which may differ from the language used in learning.
The will
In many cases the student's desire for a certificate is strong, but there is little will in the system to help. Having a central place to look to will be important.
Cost
Last but not least is the cost of examinations, both in money and time. This can be very high. In the Dungu experience listed below, the cost per student was in the range of $300 for registration alone. The delivery costs were extremely high also.
Validation of existing qualifications
Where examinations are given or certificates have become old.
Security
The security of examinations from source to candidate and of the answer papers from candidate to examining body is of prime concern
Examples of the need and some solutions
Some stories:
Uganda 1990
About 200 refugee students did not sit the Uganda primary leaving examination because no one produced the $100 needed to register them (US 0.50 cents each).
Sudan 1993
When the Sudan government allowed Ugandan refugees to be returned to Uganda by a special airlift, the majority who went back were students who had spent some years in the Sudanese education system. As they lined up at the airport in Juba, security officers systematically removed their examination certificates and other documents and destroyed them saying, 'you will not need those in Uganda'.
They did need them - to establish their place on the educational ladder -- and were set back at least two years in their education, having to be assessed again in the camps in Uganda.
Note: when this started happening well-wishers in Uganda alerted UNHCR in Juba and asked them to accept the certificates before the students got to the airport and 'pouch' them to Uganda. They refused to do this!
Uganda 1992-94
An NGO and the Uganda government set up a simple assessment system to allow Sudanese refugees (and organisers) to know which class in the Uganda system they should enter. This revealed that many intermediate (junior secondary) students would be better off returning to primary schools. Though the students were not happy with this, in the long run obtaining a primary leaving certificate was of help. Importantly, they entered secondary school with a more solid background. There is firm evidence that these students did much better in their final examinations than those who placed themselves in secondary schools at the level they had nominally reached years before in Sudan.
This was analysed as being the result of (a) too many years out of school and (b) the difference in practice (6 years primary in Sudan against 7 years in Uganda a generally longer school day and school year) and philosophy (more practical work in Uganda) of the two education systems.
Congo 1993
Southern Sudanese students in exile in Dungu, then Zaire, set up a self-help secondary school but could not find a certificate to sit for. They had no access to the world and no way of judging what would be most useful for them.
In one year Cambridge Overseas examinations were provided for them by an educational NGO devoted to Southern Sudanese refugees, but it was a very expensive and difficult process, both to pay for the exam registration and to deliver the exams to them. And they all failed, because they had chosen wrong combinations of subjects.
Southern Sudan in the sixties
Pupils from Southern Sudan who were near enough to the Uganda border registered in sympathetic Ugandan schools for the primary leaving examination and marched through the night to sit the papers the next morning. This was repeated on a much larger scale in the 90s and into 2000s.
Guinea '90s
In an excellent example of co-operation the West Aftican Examination Council papers were made available to Liberian refugees in Guinea. It must have helped that W AEC was used to providing examinations' offshore', operating as it does in 5 countries and providing examination centres in London and New York.
Malawi early '90s
Refugees from Mozambique were not fleeing trom the government but from the rebels. It was
possible for the Mozambique government to supervise the education provided in the camps. Therefore the education could be in Portuguese.
Congo 1999
In September 1999 at the signing of the peace accord in Lusaka, the UN flew all the 1997 school leaving examination papers from Kivu to Kinshasa for marking -- thus starting to unblock the way for large numbers of school students stranded on the educational ladder as a result of the civil strife.
