Whole Child Model Endline Results
If you’ve been following STS’s work in Tanzania, you know we’ve been operating in the Arusha Education District since 2018. And if you were in the room at our 2023 board meeting, you’ll remember the moment someone said plainly: “We need data.” We had documentation from Guinea showing the Whole Child Model was working — but Tanzania was an open question. We knew we were doing good work. We didn’t yet have the numbers to prove it.
So we went and got them.
Quick refresher on the Whole Child Model for anyone newer to STS: it’s the framework at the heart of everything we do. The premise is straightforward — children don’t learn well when they’re hungry, unwell, unsafe, or unsupported at home. So rather than focusing only on what happens in the classroom, we work across three interconnected areas: education (better teaching and learning), health (making schools physically and mentally health-promoting), and community engagement (bringing parents and caregivers into the picture). It’s holistic by design, because the evidence says that’s what works.
The endline evaluation we conducted this past year gave us a structured look at what’s changed in our two intervention schools—Olemedeye Primary School and Laroi Primary School—compared to two comparison schools. We used tools like the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA), the Early Grade Math Assessment (EGMA), classroom observations, student interviews, parent and girls’ focus groups, and attendance records. It was a real effort, and the findings were genuinely encouraging.
Here’s the headline: students’ literacy and numeracy improved, teaching practices got better, and the life of the school—parents visiting more, girls supporting each other, teachers coaching peers—is more vibrant than when we started.
We’ll dig into each of those areas in the next two posts. But the big takeaway from a research standpoint is this: we now have documentation. We can point to something. And in this field, that matters: both for our own learning and for making the case to partners and funders that this approach is worth investing in.
More soon. In the meantime, if this work resonates with you, we’d love your support: sts-international.org/donate