Pacific Literacy and School Leadership Programme

The Woolf Fisher Research Centre has been collaborating with the Research Unit in Pacific and International Education, the Centre for Educational Leadership and the Institute of Education at the University of the South Pacific to raise literacy achievement in 45 schools across three countries in the Pacific.

Centre team members involved in the project were: Rebecca Jesson, Jacinta Oldehaver, Emilie Sila’ila’I, Selena Meiklejohn-Whiu, Stuart McNaughton, Alexander Kegel, Tong Zhu, Lin Teng, Daisy Shepherd and Mudgha Manda. The programme began in 2014, and ran through until 2018.

The Pacific Literacy and School Leadership Programme was an initiative of the New Zealand Aid Programme, managed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, in partnership with the Ministries of Education in the Cook Islands, the Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development in the Solomon Islands and the Ministry of Education and Training in Tonga.

The programme was being implemented in the Cook Islands, Solomon Islands and Tonga, and drew on the Woolf Fisher Research Centre’s Learning Schools Model to develop a partnership with school leaders and teachers to investigate and use the findings from research data collection in formative ways. Programme team members worked alongside school leaders and teachers to develop shared understandings about the patterns of teaching and learning, and refine teaching practices to improve literacy engagement and outcomes.

Related reading:
Jesson, R. N., & Spratt, R. (2017). An intervention in literacy in three Pacific nations: Implications of a context specific approach to co-design. International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives, 16 (1), 36-49.