The New 2022-2023 School Year Begins in Malawi

Our students are back at school and ready to learn! We are welcoming 650 primary students back to Grace Primary School this week. Our teachers have prepared awesome lesson and some super fun extracurricular activities for the students. We are off to a great start on a new year!

At Grace Primary School, we have 650 students enrolled in grades 1 through 8. Our Primary School stands out significantly from other primary schools in Malawi for two reasons: our students must begin in our Kindergarten program and all our classes are taught in English.

We’ve been working on these standards for a few years, but it wasn’t until we did our school assessment this past July and learned the importance of using our data to assess our progress that we really began to understand the significance of these two standards.

How data helped us understand the importance of Kindergarten: last year, when our kindergarten students began first grade, our teachers were immediately impressed with their ability to learn and their bank of knowledge coming into first grade. There was a significant difference between students who attended kindergarten and those who did not. At the end of the year, 20 children failed to pass first grade. 5 of those children were previously kindergarten students and 15 were students who had not attended kindergarten. No students passed who did not attend kindergarten.

The importance of teaching in English at every grade level was very clearly revealed in our data, also. In Malawi, all students must take a written exam in English at the end of 8th grade. All teaching is done in Malawi schools in 1st - 4th grade in Chichewa. In 5th grade, teachers begin teaching in English. It is a HUGE jump for the students to make and most 5th grade students are already beyond the age of optimal language learning. Last year 50% of our 5th grade students failed. 50%. Ouch! It became clear very quickly that we are doing a terrible disservice to our students to wait until 5th grade to begin teaching in English. From this year, all teaching will be done in English from Preschool up to 8th grade.

We anticipate an incredible increase in our students performances on the 8th grade exam in the years to come, but we are already celebrating our students who passed the exam this year. Last year, 2 students from our class were selected to national boarding schools (proof they did well on their exams). This year 5 of our students were selected to national boarding schools! Let’s keep watching and praying for that number to continue to increase and that our students will soon be among those selected to the best secondary schools in the nation!