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2021 MTN Award for Social Change.

Thursday 14 October 2021
Save the Children and partners were proud to win the 2021 MTN Award for Social Change, which was presented at the Trialogue Business in Society Conference to reward good monitoring and evaluation practice. We’re proud to tell you that our District-Based Teacher Recruitment Strategy (DBTRS) project came out tops!
 
While need for educational reform has been extensively debated, little focus has been placed on imagining new and innovative ways to train teachers with the skills and experience required to manage their own classrooms. 
 
Quality teaching is one of the key factors influencing learner performance, which is why Save the Children developed the DBTRS project in 2015, in consultation with key partners. The project, based in the Free State’s Thabo Mofutsanyana District, supports students’ teacher training with an enhanced modality that prepares them to teach, handle a classroom and identify the different needs of children.
 
Teachers who graduate from the project are employed  in the same district where they completed their training – which helps to retain teachers in South Africa’s under-resourced areas.
 
The DBTRS project collaborated with the Department of Basic Education and the Free State Department of Education, to identify two groups of student teachers to participate in the pilot model. The first groups have graduated and already teach at schools across the Thabo Mofutsanyana district, while the second groups will graduate at the end of 2021.