Promising Practices in Refugee Education: Little Ripples case-study

Little Ripples aims to build the capacity of refugee women to implement and manage early childhood education in their community. It aims to improve the social-emotional, cognitive, and physical development of refugee children.

Little Ripples is hosted across each camp in the home spaces of refugees, reducing the upfront costs for education and increasing community participation and ownership of education. A simple structure is built inside a refugee’s home space, becoming the Little Ripples classroom or “Pond.”

The Little Ripples curriculum and structure is a pre-established outline of evidence-based, early childhood education developed by experts in ECD, trauma recovery, and mindfulness.

As a result of the intervention, trained teachers have reported improved relationships with their students, increased attendance, increase in children’s excitement and positive feelings for preschool, and improvements in student educational milestones.

From surveys conducted with 134 Little Ripples students and their caregivers, at baseline and one-year follow-up:

-The number of students able to name colors increased from 27% to 51%.
-The number of students able to count to five or higher increased from 43% to 73%.
-The number of students able to identify four or more animals from pictures increased from 21% to 63%.
-The number of students able to recite at least the first ten letters of the alphabet with no mistakes increased from 45% to 83%.

Promising Practices in Refugee Education is a joint initiative of Save the Children, the world’s largest independent children’s rights organization, UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, and Pearson, the world’s learning company.