How EKOEXCEL’s instructional app is improving learning gains in public primary schools

To further deepen its impacts, improve its processes and ensure that head teachers and teachers maintain the highest possible standards in giving their best to pupils, the Lagos State Universal Basic Education Board (LASUBEB) introduced Instructional Leadership App for the EKOEXCEL programme.

The app is part of LASUBEB’s efforts to ensure pupils benefit from its innovative methods, plug learning gaps, and improve learning outcomes.

The Instructional Leadership App, among other benefits, allows the school leaders to monitor and respond to issues, including the percentage of lessons completed.

The App also shows every scheduled lesson on a given day and indicates if it was completed. If it was not, it lets the head teachers know the reason.

With the introduction of the app, head teachers can now see data about their school’s performance compared to the highest performing school and navigate to their own teachers’ performance details.

When queried, the app answers how much of a lesson plan was delivered as well as how many minutes the teacher spent on the lesson compared to how many minutes were scheduled. Based on the answer to the two questions, the app determines whether the lesson is completed or not.

During the unveiling of the app to LASUBEB, by NewGlobes’ EKOEXCEL support team, Sonia Ivie, a director in NewGlobe, informed the board that the newly introduced App was specifically built for head teachers. She said the app will help to capture lessons completed by teachers each day and will empower the head teachers in taking ownership of their respective schools as well as putting teachers on their toes to improve the schools’ KPIs.

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She said, “School leaders see data about their school’s performance compared to the highest performing school and navigate to their own teachers’ performance details. Supervisors see data about their performance compared to the highest performing supervisor and navigate to their assigned schools’ performance and teacher performance details. Regional managers and directors see data about all supervisors and navigate to school leaders and teacher performance details.”

Enoh Ugbona, who led the EKOEXCEL support team, also affirmed that the App will be distributed to the head teachers, which will help to eliminate complacency among teachers and that monitoring of teachers will be easier with the use of the app and could be done at the comfort of their offices.

In response, Wahab Alawiye-King, chairman, LASUBEB, commended the development of the App and expressed delight at the continuous evolution of the technology underpinning EKOEXCEL and the drive to close up learning gaps.

With the app, primary education in Lagos will further improve as all school administrators can assess teachers’ performance and benchmark them against that of other schools.

Parents recently lauded EKOEXCEL’s impacts, acknowledging its tangible gains at a parent-teacher conference, while Michael Kremer, a professor and Nobel Laureate, also commended the methodology underpinning the programme administered by technical partners, NewGlobe.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist detailed how pupils tutored with EKOEXCEL’s methodology gain almost an additional year of learning (0.89), learning in two years what their peers in traditional schools learn in nearly three.

For early childhood development (ECD), the gains were even bigger. ECD pupils using the same methodology as EKOEXCEL gained almost an additional year and half of learning (1.48) in two years, which is what students in other schools learn in three and a half years.

The findings in Professor Kremer’s study put the learning gains in the top 1% of learning gains ever rigorously studied at scale in low and middle-income countries.