Bagota: Unitary schools – multi-grade classrooms taught by one teacher – were established in the early 1960s in Colombia’s isolated rural areas with a few students.

According to Vinjevold and Schindler (1997), the Escula Nueva, the scheme of rural schools in which one or two teachers offer all five years of primary education in one or two multi-grade classrooms, was created in 1976 as an official attempt to improve the unitary school system.

A study by Psacharopoulos et al. (1993) found that by 1989, the enrolment had increased to 800,000 in 17,948 schools along with a significant reduction in the drop out from primary education. Teacher training, resource provision and government support characterized the scheme.

The Escuela Nueva (meaning the “New School”) is, in fact, designed to respond to the need for a complete and good primary education in rural areas with initial external funding. This new school system integrates curricular, community, administrative-financial and training strategies to improve the effectiveness of rural schools.

According to a report (UNESCO, 1994), the system provides active instruction, a stronger relationship between the school and the community and a flexible promotion mechanism adapted to the lifestyle of the rural child.

Flexible promotion system allows students to advance from one grade to another at their own pace. In addition, children can leave school temporarily to help their parents in agricultural activities without jeopardizing the chance of returning to school and continuing their education.

The report further states that the Escuela Nueva has proved its viability over the years. The greatest difficulty encountered, however, was on the administrative level: to integrate the innovation in a hierarchical bureaucracy. With this problem solved, the Government of Columbia adopted this innovation as a strategy to universalise primary schooling in all 27,000 schools in rural Colombia.

According to Hayes (1993), Escuela Nueva or Colombia’s New School represents the most successful and most widely implemented educational innovations in Latin America. The roots of the New School are found in the Unitary School promoted by UNESCO as a methodology to address the myriad of problems faced by educators working in rural areas.

The Unitary School was designed to permit a school to operate with only one teacher who used instructional cards that facilitated him or her to work with several groups of students at a time.