To successfully scale up early childhood development interventions, it’s often necessary to integrate programmes into existing organisations and infrastructure and hand over implementation to the service provider. Through studies and qualitative and quantitative surveys, this project will identify the dimensions of practices and culture within local government education services that are critical for success in Ghana.
Knowledge around the key features required to enable the successful scale-up and delivery of high-quality early childhood education is still limited.
This project aims to make significant progress in this area by identifying which dimensions of practices and culture within local government education services are critical for the successful delivery and scale-up of early childhood education programmes shown to significantly improve child outcomes when implemented by an NGO, Lively Minds (LM).
We will study the relationship between management practices and organisational culture within local government education services and several measures of quality of early childhood education, child development, and programme fidelity and effectiveness.
As part of the randomised control trials (RCTs) Control Trials of the ongoing Ghana Education Service (GES) LM randomised rollout in Northern Ghana, measures of child development, quality of classroom environment, fidelity and effectiveness of GES-LM programme delivery are already being collected from 2,280 children and their households in 60 districts.
We will combine this information with a survey on district culture and management practices, collected through qualitative and quantitative surveys of key officials responsible for the delivery of kindergarten services at various management levels.
This will allow us to determine which dimensions of management practices and culture are most strongly associated with child development and programme outcomes. It will also help us to understand the main enabling factors and challenges in securing a successful handover of early childhood education programmes to government service providers.