Reading Secrets

Over the last decade, Bangladesh has made notable progress in expanding access to education. In a country of over 18 million primary school students, Bangladesh has achieved near universal net primary enrollment, with over 97.9% of children of primary school age enrolling in school. Bangladesh has also achieved gender parity in access to education, and 50.9% of all enrolled students were girls in 2016. Nonetheless, the quality of education in Bangladesh remains low. The most essential measure of quality in a school system is whether its students are learning the foundational skill for all future learning: reading. In Bangladesh, most children are not acquiring basic reading fluency. A US AID-funded assessment by Save the Children in spring 2018 found that 44% of students finish first grade unable to read their first word, and 27% of third grade students cannot read with comprehension. These poor learning outcomes contribute to grade repetition and dropout, and 20% of all students drop out before completing fifth grade. Poor literacy in the early grades also inhibits Bangladesh’s economic growth, as the pipeline of youth workers lack the foundational skills to be productive and engage in a knowledge-based economy.

A growing body of evidence suggests the learning crisis is, at its core, a teaching crisis. For students to learn, they need good teachers—but many education systems pay little attention to what teachers know, what they do in the classroom, and in some cases whether they even show up.

Data from Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics (BANBEIS) showed that the dropout rate 19.2% recorded in 2016 was just a single percentage point lower than that of 2015. The executive director of the Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE), Rasheda K Chowdhury, said there were socio-economic reasons for children dropping out of school. “Although primary education is free and the textbooks are provided by the government, a large number of children from ultra-poor areas – such as char areas, haor areas and the Hill Tracts – are barely enrolled in the public school system,” she said. “Things like poor teaching methods, incompetent untrained teachers, lack of encouragement has caused children to not continue their schooling.

Grow your Reader’s vision is for all children and youth to be learning and acquiring the Reading skills they need to be productive, fulfilled, and involved citizens and driver of their own life. Our focus is on helping teachers at all levels become more effective in facilitating learning, improving technology for learning, strengthening management of schools and systems, while ensuring learners of all ages—from preschool to adulthood—are equipped for success.

So that we have designed “Reading Secrets” the curriculum of teaching easy techniques to School beginning children on English reading.