Tayari Programme: Longitudinal Midterm Report for the Tayari Early Childhood Development and Education Programme.

Abstract

The Tayari Early Childhood Development and Education Programme is an intervention implemented by the Kenyan Ministry of Education and four counties, with technical support from RTI International and funding from the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF). Tayari is focused on designing, piloting and testing the cost effectiveness of investments to increase school readiness for children in Early Childhood Development and Education (ECDE) centres in the four counties. The Ministry of Education selected Uasin Gishu, Siaya, Laikipia and Nairobi counties for implementation in public ECDE centres and Nairobi Alternative Provision for Basic Education and Training (APBET) centres in nonformal settlements. To better understand the combination of interventions that have the largest impact on school readiness, Tayari is testing three different interventions. Treatment 1 focuses on providing instructional support and training to teachers teaching in pre-primary 1 (4-year-olds) and preprimary 2 (5-year-olds), using the ECDE approach implemented successfully elsewhere in Kenya, but without a formal impact evaluation. Treatment 2 provides the same amount of training and support to teachers, but also supplies teachers’ guides to teachers in four subjects and workbooks to PP1 and PP2 children in the subjects of language and mathematics. Treatment 3 offers the same investment as Treatment 2, but also supports the county health system to utilise the ECDE centres as a locus for their support for referrals and health record-keeping, with particular emphasis on lowcost, locally managed hand-washing support. The Tayari intervention is designed as a randomised controlled trial, with the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) as the external evaluator estimating the effect of the three treatment groups on school readiness. To complement the external evaluation of APHRC, the Tayari team is undertaking a longitudinal tracer study of children in control and Treatment 2 ECDE centres, to better understand how school readiness skills transition over time. The longitudinal study assessed randomly selected children during the January 2016 baseline, and is proceeding to follow them by reassessing the same children at the October 2016 midterm and the October 2017 endline assessment. For the midterm evaluation, if any selected child was not in attendance at school during the day of the midterm data collection, the Tayari team used the contact information collected at baseline, plus information available at the ECDE centre, to locate and assess that child. Attrition at the October 2016 midterm assessment was 11.2%. Using weighted data and multiple regression analysis to compare the gains in school readiness between Treatment 2 and control schools, we found that Tayari had a larger impact on school readiness at the October 2016 midterm assessment round than it was expected to have at the October 2017 endline.