Escola Evandro Ferreira Dos Santos

Improving education by empowering students’ mothers

Escola Evandro Ferreira Dos Santos in Cabrobó, Brazil, helps to improve its students’ education by taking the innovative step of teaching their parents as well.

Over time, Evandro Ferreira dos Santos found that its pupils, aged 11 - 15 years old, were struggling with their education in part because their parents received little to no education and so were not able to engage with their studies or help with their homework. Very few parents could read or write. Often, when official school documents needed a signature, a stamp in the form of a fingerprint would be used instead. The situation made it hard for students to feel motivated in their schoolwork when they came home and many even took on the role of caring for their younger siblings or performing household chores, leaving little time for their studies.

So Escola Evandro Ferreira Dos Santos came up with a project that went straight to the root of the problem with a new programme to help parents progress to complete formal education. It focused on helping mothers first. Classes would take place every week, slowly nurturing and emboldening the ambitions of women who believed it was too late to change their personal circumstances. By the end of 2021, the project started to bear fruit; mothers who found themselves unable to write their own name were able to apply their signatures on official documents and started to respond in WhatsApp study groups.

The school was guided by the idea that it's possible to help foster greater inclusion by helping women become literate, thereby giving them the confidence to pursue their long-held dreams.

If Escola Evandro Ferreira Dos Santos were to win the World’s Best School Prize for Overcoming Adversity, it would continue to invest in the community surrounding the school. It will hold lectures on the importance of education in the lives of parents and children. It will promote computer courses so that families are also included in the digital universe, learning to prepare their own curricula to get formal employment, and developing skills in the electronic media. It will develop projects aimed at entrepreneurship, such as courses of interest to mothers, such as manicures, hairdressing, and sewing. And it will eradicate illiteracy so that families continue to study and motivate their children to pursue a successful academic career.