By Habib Kamara
As part of its commitment to contribute to improve education, in Freetown schools, the Mayor, Councilors and staff of the Freetown City Council (FBC) has launched the School Leaders Support Program, which aims at providing on-field training and mentoring of school administrators to help them meet minimum standards that the Council has set for running schools in Freetown.
This project, in collaboration with EducAid and The Rising Academy Network, was created to meet the Transform Freetown Education Target 1, which seeks to ensure 100% of schools by 2022, which the FCC has responsibly covered by a monitoring framework that includes teaching, learning and school leadership and management.
This project is being piloted in 550 schools and each school will be given one of three different types of support: training for school leaders each term, training for school leaders each term plus one school visit each term and training for school leaders each term plus school visits every other week.
Vary the support to schools will allow the project team to understand which type of support is most effective to improve school standards.
In her statement, Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyer stated that collaboration is key in transforming the education sector, and that, even though the costs are high, “We can take the changes needed in our classrooms and transform the lives of children in our care through our collaboration.”
In attendance were representatives from the Freetown City Council, Ministry of Education, DSTI, Rising Academy, representatives of the Free Quality Education, Head Teachers Council, Conference of Principals and the Sierra Leone Teachers Union, amongst others.