Educators International

Michael Stark

Michael Stark

I have twenty-five years’ experience leading educational change in the UK and overseas, both developed and developing countries. My particular passion is reading and literacy – both teacher training and assessing of learner outcomes, mainly for formative but also summative and normative. In the 1990s I championed and introduced in England the unique pupil number system, which enables the impact of educational interventions at every level – including in the individual teacher’s classroom – to be more easily tracked and compared across populations and over time.
In 2005-7 my wife (an early years and adult reading specialist) and I lived and worked in the Kalahari Desert (Namibia) establishing early schools for semi-nomadic peoples. More recently my work has focused on West Africa, where our charity Educators International has developed the Phonics By Phone teacher training course. This audio course – which draws on best pedagogical expertise – can be accessed and stored (free) by teachers on a basic mobile phone, and they can feed back their experience using it almost in real time. The next steps are an assessment programme linked to the course, which will be piloted in Ghana in 2015 with over 5,000 teachers from remote and deprived districts.
My objective in joining with IFERI as a Supporter is to contribute whatever I can to the sharing of this good practice. Reading is a universal human right but across Africa according to EGRA data, typically fewer than 10% of children can read fluently by age 10 – even after regular school attendance for five years; the equivalent figures across the OECD are all above 80%. Good levels of literacy don’t happen by accident and we all have a responsibility to equalise this key opportunity to transform teaching and thereby change lives.

Phonics by Phone project in Ghana