It’s early morning in Tubong village, northern Ghana. The sun beats down on the tin roof of a rural pre-primary classroom. Inside, conversations and laughter echo as 7 mothers crouch on mats, guiding children with games made from bottle caps and cardboard.

The pre-primary teacher moves around the room, supporting and praising the women as they deliver quality play-based learning with growing confidence to their groups of young learners.

Tubong is one of over 3,500 public schools in rural Ghana re-imagining how to provide quality early learning opportunities to children living in rural or remote areas through a parenting program delivered at scale through government systems.

While it's encouraging more governments are establishing state-run pre-primary systems, access remains a barrier particularly in rural areas.

Even where pre-primaries do exist, sadly this isn’t the silver bullet to solving the early learning crisis. Issues such as overcrowded classes, limited teaching materials, inadequate teacher training and weak quality assurance systems continue to undermine the quality of early learning.

At Lively Minds we believe that the key to solving the early learning crisis is parents. They are the sleeping giants who can unlock quality early childhood education at scale.

The need for a paradigm shift

As highlighted by UNICEF reports Fit for the Future and Too Little Too Late as well as GPE policy discussions, the current delivery models for early childhood education in lower-income settings are neither rapid nor cost-effective enough to meet the urgency and scale of the early learning crisis.

In Ghana, for example, pre-schools run for around 4 to 5 hours a day during term-time. We estimate pre-primary children living in rural areas spend 75% of their time at home. So parents and caregivers have a huge opportunity to influence their child’s learning and development.

Yet parents are bypassed or at best seen as stakeholders outside of the education system.

At the same time, parents who have had little education themselves often believe they aren’t able to support their child’s learning and see this as the domain of the school, but this isn’t necessarily the case.

There’s a dearth of targeted information and support for parents on how they can still support their child’s learning, especially in areas with low literacy levels and that are rural or remote.

The barriers to parents participating in the learning of their young children can be overcome.

The power of parents for early learning in Ghana

Ghana is showing what’s possible when governments recognize parents as critical agents of change.

In partnership with Lively Minds, the Ghana Education Service has made parental activism a cornerstone of its national strategy for early childhood development and education.

With technical assistance provided by Lively Minds, the government has adopted and scaled to over 3,500 rural schools the following innovative model to promote quality early learning:

• Mother-run play schemes: Pre-primary teachers train up to 40 women from their community to run structured play schemes in the classroom in shifts throughout the week, with each mother teaching children through play in small groups for just 1 hour a week.
• Parenting workshops: Pre-primary teachers provide monthly workshops and weekly radio broadcasts to parents with practical, play-based and cost-free ways to strengthen their children’s learning and development at home.
• Continuous learning and support for teachers: District and regional officials provide ongoing training, supervision and performance management to support the pre-primary teachers to deliver the parenting workshops and play schemes.

In this way, Ghana is leveraging its pre-school system to unlock the power of parents and ensure that children are supported with quality and holistic care and education at school and at home.

To date, 11,029 kindergarten teachers and head teachers, 1,474 Ghana Education Services middle-tier staff and 127,948 parents have been trained through the program, reaching more than 258,056 children this year alone at an ongoing cost of under $3 per child per year.

A randomized controlled trial conducted by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Innovations for Poverty Action showed that even though 93% of parents in the program have less than 2 years of primary education and are not paid for their work, they powered significant and wide-ranging improvements in their children’s development including:

• Learning gains equivalent to an extra year of schooling
• Improvements in nutrition and hygiene practices
• Enhanced social and emotional development

As well as benefitting the children, the program is benefitting parents and teachers too. Mothers gain new skills, status and recognition as “teachers” within their community and report improved confidence and wellbeing.

Teachers say they feel more appreciated and valued by parents and the community.

Joyce, a mother participating in the program, described how it’s changed her daily life: “The program has taught me a lot of things I didn’t know and also developed my mind and thinking, and showed me that I am able to learn and teach my children at home. I also help other colleagues and mother’s children so they can grow and become better people in the society.”

Fathers are part of the journey too, attending workshops, tuning in to the radio and joining in household learning. This isn’t just an education initiative—it’s a policy to strengthen families and how they take ownership for their children’s learning, complementing what happens in school.

As one father says, “The program has helped me a lot. I didn’t know that every time a child stays with the parent, there’s much that the child learns from that parent.”

These small changes in practices and beliefs add up to long-term and profound impacts on their children’s lives. The government is now planning to use its GPE Multiplier grant to scale the model to all rural schools nationwide.

The Lively Minds model is also having a positive impact in Uganda across the Mayuge District where there is no state delivered pre-primary system.

Here the same model is being delivered to parents by district and sub-county team through through para-social workers and village health teams at community level.

For too long, parents—our greatest resource in early childhood development—have been neglected.

The Lively Minds model shows that it is possible to use existing government systems to support parents and place parents at the forefront of early childhood development and education solutions.