Australia’s BEQUAL brings fun to Lao classrooms

At a primary school in central Vientiane, a teacher tells her students to face each other and form groups of four or six. In the classroom, which is full of children, group representatives take turns to point at pictures and pronounce the letters of the Lao alphabet to the others in their group.
As the children worked through the exercise, the teacher walked around the groups and stopped to help those who had difficulty pronouncing the letters of the alphabet correctly. After a while, the teacher told the children to clap their hands, to help them refocus on the exercise.
“I asked the children to form groups and to clap their hands because I want them to refocus to studying and enjoy to their lessons,” the teacher at Thongkang Primary School, Ms

Children work in groups, as recommended by the Australia- funded BEQUAL.

Keomany Khounsavanh, said, adding that these are some of the new teaching approaches recommended in a nationwide scheme to improve classroom teaching in Laos.
The new teaching and learning techniques, which place students at the centre of classroom teaching, are being rolled out nationwide thanks to a programme funded by the Australian government and its development partners. 
The Basic Education Quality and Access in Laos (BEQUAL) was introduced in 2015 as a flagship cooperation project between Laos and Australia and its partners, as part of efforts to help the Lao government fulfil its education reform agenda.
Under one of these initiatives, the Lao Ministry of Education and Sports is redesigning its primary school curriculum to meet international standards, and train primary teachers nationwide to apply the new teaching and learning techniques.
The overall objective of the project is to bring practical learning and fun activities into classrooms and help students enjoy learning by doing. The aim is not only to help students remember what they learn, but also to understand the new knowledge they gain and how to put theory into practice.
Director of the ministry’s Curriculum Development Centre, Ms Sengneune Wayakone, said that thanks to the BEQUAL initiative, the education ministry has been able to complete the redesign of the curriculum for grades 1 to 4 of primary schools.
“This academic year, we introduced the Grade 4 primary education curriculum,” she said, adding that the main change is to introduce active learning in the classroom, which shifts the focus to the participation of children.
“For example, when teaching science subjects, students can take part in a demonstration rather than just reading and repeating a section from the textbook,” she said, adding that using the new curriculum children can go outside the classroom to do an actual experiment.
Ms Sengneune, who is the coordinator of the BEQUAL’s curriculum design activities said that with positive outcomes the initiative will be extended for another five years. This will see the rewriting of the Grade 5 primary school curriculum.
Despite making great strides in education reform, Ms Sengneune said one of the main challenges was getting teachers to put their teaching knowledge into practice, adding that it would take some time for teachers to adapt to the new teaching techniques.
But she was confident that during the second phase of the BEQUAL project teachers would be able to put theory into practice, adding that the new curriculum also included new recommendations for evaluating the quality of education in Laos.
“Using the international standard education quality assessment rubric, we know what needs to be done in order to improve things in the future,” she said.
According to a report from BEQUAL, apart from the curriculum redesign and the provision of new textbooks, the project is helping to build the capacity of primary school teachers by providing trainings to large number of teachers, school principals and pedagogical advisers nationwide.
The project has also financed the production of in-service training handbooks, teacher development videos, and the introduction of new approaches to post-training CPD based on self-learning, peer-learning, and blended online/in-person modalities.
Since the inception of the programme in 2015, so far, its activities have benefitted over 630,000 people, including 599,316 students (48 percent female), 29,022 educators (50 percent female) and 3,223 education managers (42 percent female). 
Overall expenditure on these activities was AU$76 million as of June this year, according to the report.
Ms Keomany said the Australia funded BEQUAL benefited her, adding that the programme enabled her to access new educational materials and teaching technique.
She also said that she was proud to be a part of the Lao education reform, believing that the changes being made would help to improve the quality of Lao education in line with international standards.
Ms Keomany said her school won an Asean Eco-School Award thanks to the active participation of the school’s management and teachers as well as support from the BEQUAL.
Thongkang Primary School has been praised for its clean toilets, children’s playground, and the provision of facilities to enable children to wash their hands before meals.
Students benefit from the new curriculum because they have more fun in the classroom. This is a different approach from the past, when children were simply told to remember and repeat what they read in a textbook, with no consideration given to their understanding of the material.
At Thongkang Primary School, children could be seen having fun as they learnt, which seems to be a great start to the reform of education in Laos.
It is believed that with help from the Australian government to redesign the primary education curriculum, the quality of human resources will be improved and enable the students of today to make a significant contribution to the development of Laos in the years to come.

By Ekaphone Phouthonesy
(Latest Update September 13, 2022)