Strengthening Continuous Professional Development for Sustainable Capacity Development of School Leaders in Rwanda

Globally, the education sector is faced with a number of adversities including recruitment and retention of qualified school leaders, enhancement of the capacity of school leaders to deliver quality education vis a vis the aspirations for sustainable development by different countries.  The National long term and short-term development trajectories for Rwanda aspire for a fast economic transformation enabled by a knowledge based society. Despite major gains by the Ministry of education in Rwanda, particularly training and recruitment of teachers and introduction of a coordination system to ensure professional development and management of teachers, the education sector is still struggling to ensure that school leaders have the capacity to lead and deliver the new competence-based curriculum in schools. Our understanding of Continuous Professional Development, building on the definition by the Rwanda Education Board is “learning continuously throughout one’s career to improve performance. CPD is an umbrella term that covers all formal, non-formal and informal professional learning experiences over the duration of a teacher’s career”(REB, 2015). We therefore define CPD programmes as certified, formal professional development programmes provided by an accredited learning institution building on existing practices and interventions in Rwanda, with formal learning and practicing activities and excluding one-off, one day or short residential trainings. In this paper, we explore how the partnership established in 2014 between URCE, REB and VVOB Rwanda developed and implemented the certified CPD programmes for primary schools. This partnership has enabled the REB Department for Teacher Professional Development and Management, to streamline the required professional development of school leaders as well as increasing the capacity of the URCE to deliver CPD certification at higher learning level, based on the academic requirements by the University of Rwanda. The partnership has enabled Leaders in Education, including sector education officers, (deputy) head teachers and teachers to acquire new competences for leading a school as well as the management and implementation of CPD activities at sector and school level. While it has been observed that best practices in the pilot initiatives in primary schools could be scaled up at secondary level, the same initiatives could be replicated by other partners in Rwanda to enhance professional development of leaders in education in Rwanda and in other countries