This may not be of huge interest to anyone who is not involved in teaching (and may not be of interest to teachers either for that matter, so do stop reading here if you wish!) I just thought I would record a few thoughts on the teaching so far.

As I think I have already said the girls have huge drive and a great capacity for hard work as they know only too well that they are really lucky to be here. A place in an EFA boarding house is now so sought after that they have to pass a test to demonstrate that they really have an aptitude for learning, and are likely to pass the baccalaureate and go on to university rather than just go back home and most probably get married. They are also more likely to get a place if they live far from a school and their parents could not otherwise afford to send them to the state boarding house for which they have to pay. While a few girls would seem to be a little better off than others there are certainly a significant number whose fathers are farmers and I would imagine are not that well off. They probably have enough to live on as far as food, housing, clothes and immediate living expenses are concerned but would certainly not be able to afford extras such as school books or boarding house fees. Only a few of them have phones, and one girl told me that her birthday present from her mother was money so that she could actually use it. When we did a past tense exercise talking about the weekend and I asked them how much money they had spent the majority hadn't spent anything.

So while they are really motivated to work hard and get good marks they do also face a lot of obstacles. Many will have gone to a village primary school where the teachers may have often been absent so their basic education could have been distinctly patchy. I find it fascinating to see the type of school work they are doing in English and have noticed that while the text books are pretty good they seem to move through them very fast and often have real problems putting words together to make sentences (in both French and English). However, I guess this is perhaps not surprising given that these are their third and fourth languages after Berber and Arabic. But I do sometimes wonder if they have really been drilled in the basics. They are sometimes given ludicrously difficult homework such as reading and summarising four stories EACH when they have only just learnt the present tense, the family and food. It is tempting to speculate that there is some lazy teacher lurking in the background …! From what I have observed there is still a lot of learning by rote and reciting without really understanding.

But of course the great thing about this is that it gives me lots of scope for communicative activities and loads of talking and games to try to build their fluency, in as entertaining a way as possible as they are often tired with the quantity of homework which they get. I am actually finding it a lot more interesting working with the younger girls who are still in the early stages of learning the language as they are super keen and don't have nearly so many problems with pronunciation. Also the older Bac girls really only have time to do revision for tests as they actually have very few free periods and I have to say that going over modal verbs and gerunds for the 6th time is getting just a little wearing and really tests my ability to make grammar interesting - I have done just about every communicative activity and game that I can think of! I have also tried to set up short 'conversation/discussion sessions' but a lot of them struggle to express opinions, though there are a few wonderful exceptions. In the meantime I am still hoping to be able to visit the school but am treading sensitively for the time being…!

But they certainly do spectacularly well compared to the overall results at the lycee, in that 8 out of 9 girls passed their baccalaureate and went on to university last session which is a fantastic result and almost twice the national average. This year there are 19 girls taking the bac so the numbers are really growing, and judging by their commitment and enthusiasm I would imagine that a similar proportion should make the same step next September.

While seven years ago Hajj Maurice, one of the founding members of EFA, had to beg families to send their girls to the first boarding house there are now far more applications than there are beds. In 2007 there were 12 girls and by 2016 there will be 180, so the statistics really speak for themselves.