Chapter 6: Concluding remarks
6.3 Main findings
6.3.1 Reasons for engaging foreign consultants
The discussions in the previous chapter show that the main reasons for engaging consultants to assist in design and development of integrated curriculum in Lesotho are:
a) Curriculum specialists did a bad job on developing curriculum.
b) It was taking too long to develop the curriculum because curriculum specialists were not meeting deadlines.
Data reveals that the local curriculum experts lack experience in curriculum design and development. These include college and university lecturers and NCDC curriculum specialists.
All curriculum specialists, including the few that have gone for relevant training, do office clerk work not related to curriculum innovations. They do not research, nor monitor curriculum implementation and assessment in schools, the job which is done by inspectors and examination council of Lesotho (ECoL)’s subject officers respectively (Ntoi, 2007). They have many years of working at NCDC not doing the work related to curriculum design and development and hence do not gain knowledge of curriculum development.
Curriculum specialists were not familiar with the curriculum and assessment policy framework which informs the reform of the integrated primary curriculum because they were not involved with the design and development of the policy because of the way NCDC operates. Curriculum specialist 4 illustrates that: The whole academic staff of NCDC was divided into working groups, so if you were not a member of that curriculum & assessment working group, you wouldn’t know clearly what the thinking was behind or their school of thought in regard to this model.
Therefore, curriculum specialists have no idea about the vision of the curriculum and assessment policy framework (2009). The policy framework was developed at NCDC by curriculum specialists without the assistance of consultants. All the members of the group who were involved in the policy development are no longer working at NCDC. Some have retired, some resigned and others left for different reasons but most of them are still in the country. I think these could have been the correct people to be involved as consultants rather than foreign consultants.
6.3.1.2 Lack of training for curriculum specialists
Truly speaking, we don’t have the capacity to do work we are entrusted to do which is to develop the curriculum of this country (curriculum specialist 4).
The National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) has suspended training of curriculum specialists on the job. This means that newly employed curriculum specialists are not trained on the job anymore. Therefore, if newly employed curriculum specialists are not adequately qualified, and they are not provided with training on the job anymore, they fall short of competencies of curriculum design and development. The Lesotho curriculum is therefore
designed and developed by unqualified, inexperienced curriculum specialists who joined the Centre with the hope that NCDC would train them on the job. This means there are many curriculum specialists at NCDC who do not have a sound knowledge of the content of the curriculum theory (Shulman, 1987). This is against the Lesotho education policy which states
“… The quality of education shall be improved by equipping schools and educational centres with the requisite skills through investing in teacher training and professional development and providing improved teacher supervision and support” (MOET 2005, p.26). But “This used to be the common practice of the Centre (NCDC) to give people short term training and long- term training, but this has stopped for many years now” (Director-NCDC). With unqualified and incompetent curriculum specialists mandated to design and develop the curriculum of Lesotho, there is only one result, certain failure of curriculum reform and unsuccessful curriculum reform (Hammond, 1997; Raselimo, 2010, p.90; Wilks, et al., 2008).
Therefore, there are only two options for NCDC to save money and produce a quality curriculum for the country. These are either to train curriculum specialists or deploy them in other departments and use consultants for the development of Lesotho’s curriculum, to always engage experts with grounding in knowledge of curriculum design and development. But if the department is to be kept with the same operating systems, the curriculum specialists should be capacitated in order to produce a quality curriculum for the country. The diagram below illustrates minimum areas of development that should be targeted as discussed in chapter 3 and chapter 5:
Figure 6.1: Types of training curriculum specialists may need
In chapter 3, figure 3.3, I presented a Barnett’s (1992) quality measurement model that I modified in Nhlapo (2014). In this model, it is evident that quality curriculum depends on the quality of staff development. According to Barnett (1992), the recruitment of consultants or outsourcing is the last resort a company does as it is in the outer ring of the model. I also presented a quality Concept-web (figure 3.1) inspired by the ideas of Wilks, et al. (2008). The model shows that in order to empower curriculum specialists to design an effective curriculum, institutions must provide process quality and structural quality (space, training and group size).
All these are in agreement with data as it has been revealed that curriculum specialists were not provided with adequate training whereas the company employed less qualified candidates.
According to Darling-Hammond (1999), if states are interested in improving the quality of education they are advised to attend to the preparation and qualifications of teachers they hire and retain in the profession. Similarly, if NCDC is interested in improving the quality of curriculum design and development, they should employ highly qualified curriculum specialists and train them to assist them to produce quality curriculum programmes at national, school, and classroom levels.
6.3.1.3 Lack of resources for specialists (see sub-section 6.3.3.3)
I have discussed the issue of resources, that both consultants and curriculum specialists considered a barrier towards curriculum design and development, in section 7.3.3. Data from interviews show that there was lack of resources at NCDC especially reading materials and internet connectivity. Similarly, the analysis of documents also concurs with the fact that there is lack of materials at NCDC (or in Lesotho) because the terms of reference for the consultants (see Appendix H, 2.1) states that the consultant should “Bring Curriculum Materials from other countries to share with curriculum developers at the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC)”. Figure 6.2 below illustrates the minimum physical resources required by curriculum specialists in order to perform their work:
Figure 6.2: Minimum requirements of physical resources for NCDC.
In chapter 3 (figure 3.1), I discussed the Eight-point Template model for evaluating the quality of programmes in higher educational institutions. Eight-point Template Model is adapted from Levine’s (2006) Nine-point Template Model I used in Nhlapo (2012). In this model, one of the templates is finances. Levine (2006) claims that in order for a high educational institution to have
quality programmes, there should be adequate resources to support educational activities. Using this information and the one on table 3.2 in chapter 3 together with data from interviews and document analysis as mentioned above, I have designed a diagram indicating the minimum resources required by NCDC to assist curriculum specialists to design and develop a quality curriculum. No matter how highly qualified curriculum specialists are in the curriculum field, if they do not have resources and tools to work with, the quality of their work will be negatively affected. It is not surprising that they were “not meeting deadlines and were doing a bad job”, which was the justification used to engage foreign consultants. The proof is that the very consultants who were engaged, had to bring reading materials to curriculum specialists to read about other countries’ curriculum models. This is where they were able to recognize and appreciate the Jamaican curriculum model that used “windows of opportunities”.