A partnership with UNICEF to support children in the Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh
Since 2019, Cambridge Partnership for Education has been working with UNICEF to support teaching and learning for children in the Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh.
Quick read
- The Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh hold about 390,000 children whose education has been critically disrupted
- UNICEF sought our help in its mission of providing a coherent model for educating Rohingya refugee camps
- We have supported the roll-out of the Myanmar National Curriculum in the camps; we produced an accompanying assessment framework and provided training so teachers can use it effectively
Education for Rohingya refugee children
The displacement of more than one million Rohingya people from Myanmar since 2016 has created not only a vast body of stateless people, but a crisis that threatens to lock the community into long-term cycles of poverty while cutting off access to education completely.
Camps in Bangladesh alone hold about half a million children whose education has been critically disrupted, and whose future looks uncertain.
UNICEF sought our help in its mission of providing a coherent model for educating Rohingya refugee camps, and to lay the foundations for their future reintegration into a national education system.
Cambridge’s role
In 2019, UNICEF engaged Cambridge to help improve education for Rohingya refugees from ages 4 to 18.
Part of our first task was to evaluate and identify challenges in education provision in the camps. Education for Rohingya refugee children in the camps is provided in 3,400 learning centres – 2,800 of which are supported by UNICEF, alongside other aid partners. In complex conditions and with limited services, children are taught English, Burmese, mathematics, science and life skills.
We saw first-hand that problems included:
- The existing curriculum, the Learning Competency Framework Approach (LCFA), was not a formal education curriculum or aligned to any national standards.
- A lack of agreed and measurable learning outcomes.
- Limited quality assurance of teacher professional development.
- High levels of teacher inexperience.
- Classroom resources and materials of variable quality and usefulness.
- An inconsistent approach to assessment.
- Little evidence of formative assessment being used in the classroom, and some indications that teachers occasionally applied inflated marking.
- A need for teacher development: roughly 85% of teachers had no prior teaching experience and there was a frequent lack of subject knowledge, particularly in science and English. Their training had been limited, with typically just five days of initial training followed by occasional workshops.
The new Myanmar National Curriculum
Following our review work, our focus has been to help with the implementation of the Myanmar National Curriculum in the camps. This was an important objective to the Rohingya community, to enable their children to study through a formal education system connected to their country of origin.
We produced an assessment framework, matched to the learning outcomes as set out in the Myanmar National Curriculum.
Steve King, Head of Education Reform for Europe and Asia at Cambridge Partnership for Education, says:
“This enabled us to produce a system for the students to be able to gather records of learning. This means the students can produce work, it can be stored and they can get a transcript of what they’ve done, so they have an outcome.”
Training
Alongside the development of the assessment framework, we reviewed teaching and learning materials and quality assurance.
Then, in 2022, we travelled to Bangladesh to provide training on formative assessment and the use of the framework we had developed. Steve says:
“The beneficiaries of our training were Rohingya teachers themselves, as well as host community teachers and trainers.”
At Cambridge Partnership for Education, we are adept at tailoring our services to conditions on the ground, and that has certainly been the case in the Rohingya camps. As Steve says: “In camps, the use of Wi-Fi connectivity isn’t allowed, there’s no mobile reception and no electricity in learning centres. So, we deliver training on flipcharts and posters.”
We often collaborate with local organisations on our education transformation projects. In the Rohingya camps, we worked closely with BRAC, a Bangladesh-based international development organisation, to deliver the master training. A BRAC representative said: “This training is… essential for teachers and master trainers… to make the learning effective and assess children in the classroom.”
Our partnership with BRAC has been so successful that we have since worked together on other initiatives to help Rohingya children. Steve says: “We’ve worked with BRAC independently on a review of the life skills curriculum for Rohingya youth.”
Of course, we also work closely with UNICEF. Anika Tanjim Konoc, education officer at UNICEF, said of the 2022 master training:
“This is the first time we’re bringing the assessment training into the camp and the way they have accepted the training, in spite of the language barrier, and the willingness to learn has blown my mind. I’m really inspired”.
Helping girls to continue to study
While education provision in the camps is slowly improving, there remain problems to overcome. These include high levels of teacher inexperience, classroom resources and materials of variable quality and usefulness, and student drop-outs, particularly girls.
Social and religious norms mean that girls in the camps often face greater barriers to education than boys.
Steve says: “Students in the camps tend to drop out after age 11-12 as their parents and carers often don’t think it is worth them continuing. The majority of that attrition is girls”.
He adds: “The work we’re doing is designed to motivate the students and their caregivers in terms of producing measurable outcomes that they can document and demonstrate. We think this is particularly beneficial for girls as it allows them to provide and have a clear rationale for continuing study.”
We hope to continue to support UNICEF’s mission of widening and improving education for the Rohingya refugee children, as part of our goal to use our experience and expertise to provide education excellence for everyone.
If you’re working to improve the quality of your country’s education system, then please contact us to find out how we can help you achieve your goals.
