Jolly Futures News

Ms Neeti Nagarkar and her team of trainers have been engaged in Jolly Phonics district rollouts in Gadchiroli and Jalgaon of Maharashtra, India. They have been training teachers in the multi-sensory approach to teaching English, specifically Jolly Phonics, and yielding great results. After the successful roll-out of the programme in Akola District in the last academic year, the CEO of Akola, Saurabh Katiyar recommended the project for Gadchiroli and Jalgaon Districts. The training team delivered the first part of training in the months of June and July, 2023. This has impacted 2889 teachers from Gadchiroli and 3128 teachers from Jalgaon. The teachers have embraced the method and are enjoying implementing it in their classrooms.

A total of 54,381 students have benefitted from this programme with 14,253 students in Gadchiroli and 40,218 students in Jalgaon. The engagement through WhatsApp groups and the sharing of teaching videos have shown the dedication and enthusiasm of the teachers, as well as the positive response from the children already. It is truly heartening to know that children are already making progress, reading words, formed from Group 1 letter sounds, in just three weeks of starting the programme.

Beyond Ourselves Zambia (BOZ) have partnered with Jolly Futures and the Ministry of Education (MoE) to support the advancement of English Literacy across Zambia by providing Jolly Phonics teacher training. Together, we have scored huge successes in helping pupils to transition from literacy in Zambian languages to that of English. In Zambia, Jolly Phonics has been rolled out across the Copperbelt Province in all 515 government and community schools in Grade 3, the point at which pupils are expected to start to read and write in English as guided by the Zambian National Curriculum. With the approval of Jolly Learning and support from Jolly Futures, BOZ has developed the Jolly Phonics Teaching Aid (JPTA), a contextualised resource for the teaching of Jolly Phonics in Zambia, which was approved for use as a supplement throughout the country by the Curriculum Development Centre (CDC) in 2021.

Jolly Phonics was first piloted in 2018 in Ndola and Lusaka districts. After proving to help learners achieve rapid improvements, it was expanded to all districts in the Copperbelt Province in 2020. Children in pilot classes achieved significantly higher scores in their reading and writing when compared to children in control classes. The pilot teachers found Jolly Phonics methodology and lessons fun, easy to use and highly effective in developing reading and writing for children with a variety of learning abilities. Unanimously, teachers that used Jolly Phonics were enthusiastic about continuing to utilise the tool to teach literacy in English.

Since 2018, BOZ, with the generous support of Jolly Learning and Jolly Futures, has been training and mentoring teachers, school leaders and education officers in Jolly Phonics. In 2022 and 2023 the Copperbelt Provincial Education Office (PEO) has supported provincial rollouts of Jolly Phonics by providing training venues in all the 10 districts of the province, teacher transport and feeding for all attendees. This has enabled even teachers working in remotely located schools to attend training.

Over the last 6 years, over 3,500 teachers have been trained in Jolly Phonics, which has enabled them to go on to develop the literacy of over 150,000 pupils using this revolutionary teaching methodology. During this time, BOZ has tracked improvement in the reading performance of these pupils. Consistently, pupils using Jolly Phonics have scored two or three times higher than pupils in non-Jolly Phonics classes!

Dolen Cymru Wales Lesotho Link, in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) and Jolly Futures, have been working towards a National Rollout of Jolly Phonics. Jolly Phonics, a fast track English literacy programme for early reading and writing, has been successfully piloted in several districts across Lesotho.

Over the past few years Jolly Phonics has been becoming a widely used term across the country. Grade 1 pupils in the pilot schools have been consistently achieveing highly and able to read and write in English. In additon to this, the skills from Jolly Phonics are very transferable and there has been noticeable improvement in Sesotho literacy skills too. Behind these great results were passionate and dedicated teachers who found joy teaching reading and writing with Jolly Phonics.

Dolen Cymru recognised these talented teachers and invested in their professional development journey to become official Jolly Phonics trainers. Lesotho has 12 local Jolly Phonics trainers who have been busy building up to the long awaited National Jolly Phonics Rollout.

The dedicated Together We Learn team, in and out of country, have been collaborating with the Regional Education Bureau for several years piloting Jolly Phonics. After impressive results it was agreed that Jolly Phonics, a fast track English reading and writing programme, would be rolled out to 200 schools in Amhara region, across 8 centres. Together We Learn, in partnership with the Amhara Regional Education Bureau and Jolly Futures, trained Grade 1 teachers in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia in October 2022.

The talented Ethiopian trainers Elsa Kebede and Zemene Mersha were able to ensure that the training was accessible for all teachers through translation into Amharic where needed. The teachers rated the training highly and reported enjoying being active participants during the sessions. A sample of teachers, before and after the training, completed a skills test. The results indicated a significant increase in teachers abilities to identify and count sounds in words as well as explain the key skills for reading and writing.

The Regional Education Bureau (REB) supported the rollout by catering for the venue, teacher transport and feeding which maximised the impact of the training for the 400+ Grade 1 teachers who attended. The strong support from REB has continued post training through their diligent monitoring and mentoring. The training team sensitised REB Officials in Jolly Phonics as well as how to use the revolutionary smartphone monitoring app, the Jolly Monitor.