Teachers are crucial to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4.2—ensuring that all children have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they’re ready for primary school.

Because there is a shortage of at least 6 million early childhood education practitioners to reach universal enrolment for 1 year of pre-primary education by 2030, it’s vital to upskill and support those working in early childhood, including under- or unqualified educators.

In order to strengthen early childhood education around the world, educators need to be supported in a systemic way, including through changes to education policy that support teachers and their profession in a comprehensive manner.

The importance of early learning and its powerful impact on children’s futures is undervalued and often not recognized. There is therefore a tremendous need to sensitize all stakeholders to this, ultimately resulting in an increase in funding for early childhood education.

Since 2019, the Roger Federer Foundation has focused its ‘School Readiness Initiative’ on preschool education by building capacity among educators by supporting them in their everyday work.

The Foundation strongly believes in imparting people with knowledge so that they can use it to improve the quality of their teaching. Together with its local partner organizations, the Foundation is implementing the School Readiness Initiative in Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe in over 15,000 schools.

Taking the tools and knowledge provided through the initiative, over 26,000 teachers have motivated their communities to raise funds and resources, build classrooms and playgrounds, and to become active in their preschool-aged children’s education—in short, to make a sustainable investment in their little ones’ futures.

The main tool the Foundation uses to support early learning teaching is the Early Learning Kiosk: a tablet preloaded with apps and resources in the form of PDF files that is suitable for low-connectivity environments, only requiring an internet connection for updates.

Promoting group learning among teachers

One of the core tools in the Early Learning Kiosk is a course on early learning that facilitates self-guided peer-to-peer quizzes educators complete at their own pace at home or at school without having to travel long distances—what they would need to do otherwise to attend a similar standard course offered by an institution. This is particularly relevant to educators who come from isolated rural settings where travelling long distances often poses both a financial and logistical challenge.

Teachers who are part of the School Readiness Initiative participate in learning groups to work through the course together. Peer learning allows teachers to share knowledge based on previous experience within their own culture and context. Members of the learning groups motivate and support one another to improve their teaching.

Further, the Early Learning Kiosk offers educators a wealth of how-to manuals on topics ranging from how to increase parental involvement and make toys to constructing playgrounds.

Using the open-source African Storybook feature, also available in the Kiosk, the teachers can read to their classes in an array of local African languages which is important for supporting early child language development, especially when a child’s first language/what they speak at home differs from that of the national curriculum.

Assessing children’s holistic development

One of the apps on the tablet, ChildSteps, allows teachers to continuously track each child’s development over the course of the preschool year in various domains (physical, social-emotional and cognitive) based on how children complete different assessments in the app. The teacher then scores each child.

While school curricula do refer to these different developmental domains, the link between subjects and domains is often not made explicitly. In ChildSteps, the domains are clearly linked to subjects to emphasize how each subject contributes to the holistic development of the child. Existing assessment procedures and tools in countries, when available, were used to develop ChildSteps content.

When such resources weren’t available, official manuals or guidance (like the UNICEF Early Learning Development Standards) were used to define content. The app also provides teachers with strategies on how to address any identified development gaps, working with children to catch up.

ChildSteps can enhance an educator’s teaching experience whether they are fully qualified or not.

Qualified teachers benefit from tracking children’s development in a structured way and a lighter administrative load through automatically generated reports and by using the digital attendance register. These reports allow the teachers to engage in dialogues with parents or caregivers on their child’s development more easily.

In addition to these benefits, underqualified teachers use the assessments as inspiration for useful examples of how to create play-based learning activities across the different developmental domains.

Building partnerships between teachers and parents

The School Readiness Initiative also emphasizes the role of parents and caregivers in early childhood education. As such, the Early Learning Kiosk includes a guide for teachers on how to interact with parents and caregivers to engage them in their child’s early learning.

Another element of the initiative was initially introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic when lockdowns forced schools to shut. It’s a series of visual ‘Bridge to School’ booklets containing very little text to accommodate users who may not be fluent in English or are even illiterate.

These booklets contain simple exercises that parents can do with their children, such as sorting household items by color or making toys from items that can be found around the home. The teacher is in charge of the mini ‘library’ of booklets and ensures they are rotated among the children on a regular basis.

An internal evaluation done by the Foundation found parents indicated playing with their children more frequently after this initiative, becoming more aware of the importance of early learning. Parents also tended to appreciate a preschool teacher’s role more as they became aware of which skills their children were developing.

Improving the school environment

The training content on the Early Learning Kiosk also focuses on factors that contribute to a child-friendly school environment, including appropriate water and sanitation facilities and sufficient ventilation.

Content on the Early Learning Kiosk also promotes the construction of school playgrounds. Beautiful playgrounds not only boost school enrolment, but can also serve as outdoor classrooms in which children develop motor skills as well as social and cognitive skills as children communicate, roleplay and engage in positive competitive behavior through games.

Thousands of teachers who are part of the Foundation’s School Readiness Initiative have motivated their communities to source raw materials and volunteer their labor to build multifunctional, stimulating playgrounds.

The need for financing teacher support in early learning

While training teachers in early learning has had a meaningful impact on shaping the learning environment of young children across Southern Africa, there is a strong call call for early learning to be prioritized and for spending in this sector to be increased.

Multi-sectoral innovative financing mechanisms such as the GPE Multiplier, the International Finance Facility for Education (IFFEd), Education Outcomes Fund and the Global Business Coalition for Education can enhance financing for education by diversifying funding sources, promoting collaboration, and ensuring that investments are strategically aligned with the needs of teachers and students.

For example, in Lesotho, a multi-stakeholder partnership has resulted in a comprehensive project that will also train teachers and supervisors to improve classroom observation, data collection and instructional quality, aiming to enhance teaching effectiveness and student learning outcomes.