Community management

Strengthening local groups can be central to improving the accountability of local schools, ensuring that parents are able to send their children to school and that teachers deliver. We therefore support community management of education, strengthening the capacity of local people to give them a greater say in matters related to the education of their children.

Statutory groups
We work with statutory groups such as parent-teacher associations (PTAs) and school management committees, ensuring that representatives are drawn from a cross-section of parents.

This is important as head teachers often have a dominant voice and use a PTA or management committee for their own ends, usually to try to raise more funds from local parents. Parents who are active are often the relatively better-off ones. Striking more of a balance in these groups ensures that poor children's parents are also heard.

Non-statutory groups
Where a large percentage of local children are not in school, promoting non-statutory bodies such as village education committees or local education groups is preferable to reforming or strengthening statutory bodies in existing schools.

These are usually organised outside the existing system and look at the education needs of the local community in a more holistic way - including adult literacy, early childhood education formal and non-formal education. In some cases these have emerged through discussions in Reflect circles or through other forms of local mobilisation.

This independent space to organise can sometimes be an effective foundation for securing more fundamental reforms in PTAs and school management committees than would be achievable working only within existing bodies.

photo : ©Elaine Duigenan/ActionAid