A former schools minister has accused a controversial for-profit organisation of “disempowering teachers” by using highly-scripted lessons on tablets in schools in the developing world.

Bridge International Academies runs more than 500 nursery and primary schools in India, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria and Uganda, and its backers include venture capitalists and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID).

It uses smartphones and tablets to allow teachers to give identical, scripted lessons, with data being sent back to the US for analysis to ensure the teachers are turning up and delivering the classes, and to check how children are learning.

Earlier this year, Bridge’s co-founder Shannon May told Tes that schools minister Lord Nash last year invited her into the Department for Education to discuss its low-cost model.

Dr May this morning gave evidence to the Commons International Development Committee’s inquiry into DFID’s work on education.

Committee member Paul Scully criticised the standard of teaching at a Bridge school in Uganda that MPs had visited, and added there was “a fundamental thing that seems to be going on because of the use of the tablet”.

His concerns were echoed by committee chair and former education minister Stephen Twigg, who questioned whether using tablets for teachers to deliver lessons was a sustainable model in the longer term.

He added: “The sense I had was that it’s quite disempowering for the teacher as a professional to be so reliant on the tablet.”

‘Scientifically driven’

Dr May said Bridge was “very scientifically driven”, and the evidence backed the use of “teacher guides or strong lessons plans formatted for teachers” in many contexts.

She told MPs: “As we take in the assessments from the children and we see how they are learning we can send different teacher guides to the teachers in response to how children have been learning, so it is more interactive than a pre-printed book, which a publisher may not re-print for three or four years.”

She told MPs there were general problems with teacher training in Uganda, and so Bridge gives its teachers induction training and ongoing support.

She added that “we are showing stronger learning gains than what is available in other schools in the same communities that we serve”.

MPs also quizzed Dr May about Bridge’s for-profit model, which aims to eventually see its backers get a return on their investments, once the organisation has grown in scale.

Pauline Latham said: “You say you are a social enterprise but you are telling everybody you are going to make a big profit.”

Dr May said Bridge was structured like this to “ensure we could attract the type of investment that is needed to treat education like a science”, and it had funded “world leading research into the field of education”. 

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