happens it is more often a product of teacher absenteeism than of design. Yet much
useful learning does not depend on the continuous presence of a teacher. Opportunities
to exploit peer group learning, self study, and the involvement older children in
collaborative learning with younger children, are often under utilised. Practice differs
greatly in the extent to which community resources are mobilised to supervise and
assist with learning.
Many countries have had experience of projects that seek to enhance access and
maintain quality through changes in the organisation of teaching and learning. Project
Impact is one of the most well known of these. From its origins in the Philippines and
Indonesia derivatives have spread to Malaysia,' Jamaica, Liberia and Bangladesh. The
project uses self instructional material and peer group learning strategies which include
older children teaching younger children. The original goals of Project Impact included
increasing student teacher ratios to as much as 150:1. Though it is clear that these
projects have had positive outcomes, cost savings have generally been less than
originally anticipated. In the Philippines 40%. cost savings were projected as a result of
fewer teachers and more use of self-instructional materials but did not take materialise.
Part of the problem was that those savings which were made produced no financial
benefits to the schools. In the Liberian project unit costs for project schools exceeded
those for ordinary schools as school size remained too small for economies of scale to
become apparent. In Indonesia there were useful cost savings but these were less than
initially planned. Materials costs per student were 25% higher than in conventional
schools, though this was offset by lower staff costs with the result that overall savings
in recurrent unit costs of between 2 and 12 per cent were achieved (Cummings 1986).
The evaluation studies of the Impact projects indicate that learning achievement does
not necessarily suffer if reductions are made in the time students spend with teachers
provided that self instruction and peer learning opportunities are used as a substitute.
There are many other projects which use changes in the organisation and delivery of
teaching to reach out of school children. Several of these have succeeded in reducing
unit costs by employing educated community members who are given short
introductory training courses and are paid at rates below those of government teachers.
Two examples of this are the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee's non-formal
primary education project and the Shiksha Karmi project in Rajasthan. In both of these
achievement levels are comparable or better than in government schools in the same
areas (Lovell and Fatema 1989, Anandalakshmy 1991). Lewin with Stewart (1991)
provide more case study examples of attempts at planned change which vary delivery
systems.
2.6.2 Achievement and automatic
promotion