Getting Ready for School – A Child to Child Approach

Between 2007-2010, Child to Child implemented a three-year school readiness project jointly with UNICEF titled, ‘Getting Ready for School: A Child-to-Child Approach’. This programme took place in six countries: Bangladesh, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Tajikistan and Yemen.

‘Getting Ready for School: A Child-to-Child approach’ is an innovative and cost-effective approach to early education. Recognising the lack of formal pre-schools and other early learning opportunities for too many children in developing countries, this programme builds on the natural process of younger children learning from and interacting with older children. Through child-to-child interactions, the younger child develops early learning competencies and is better prepared to start school at the right age; the older child also benefits, by developing confidence and self-esteem.

Two interventions were designed to achieve this goal: “Helping the little Ones: Helping my own Learning” and “Getting Ready for School” (GRS).

For further information about Getting Ready for School please download the brochure.

Read here a summary of the final evaluation conducted by the American Institutes for Research. Detailed evaluation reports can be accessed here.

To read about the implementation of Getting Ready for School in Yemen, please click here.

Subsequent to the UNICEF pilot, UNICEF Ethiopia commissioned CtC to produce additional resources for the GRS toolkit, focusing on health, hygiene and nutrition. Following this, the programme was taken to scale by the Ethiopian Ministry of Education. It currently comprises one of four national strategies to promote early learning and was rolled out in 7 districts, reaching 500,000+ children in 2014. The University of Toronto evaluation of the scale up found that GRS was having a positive impact and that its benefits were cumulative. See the full report evaluation report here; see the summary report produced by UNICEF here.