These school chains have succeeded in reaching marginalised students and expanding access to hard-to-reach groups. The evidence also suggests that students enrolled in these school groups can outperform students in traditional government schools. Analysis by Education Development Trust provisionally points to some ingredients for success. These include strong social commitment; a high degree of autonomy from government control allowing adaptation to local need; strong accountability; highly effective resource management and investment in teacher training.

The scale of the challenges around access and quality of education in the global South, particularly for the most marginalised children and families, is vast. The availability of financial support globally to address this challenge is insufficient to meet the need. In this context, philanthropic, NGO-run, not-for-profit school groups appear to have a place in provision – be that in the short- or long-term.

The scale of the access and quality challenge requires a creative and inclusive approach to evidence collection. We believe that as educators, there is much we can learn from the systematic analysis of the work of effective schools of different types and the approaches and policies used by improving education systems. If we can learn something from the successes of these school groups, we should.
Tony McAleavy

Education Development Trust partnered with the Vietnam Institute of Educational Sciences to find out how and why Vietnam has been so successful. Adopting a mixed-methodology approach for an insightful qualitative view of the Vietnam phenomenon, they conducted a policy analysis, a survey of parents, reviewed available secondary data, and conducted qualitative fieldwork in contrasting four provinces in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Binh Dinh and Ha Giang). The aim of the research was to explore the country’s approach to educational improvement and our investigation has identified five key features of the Vietnamese school system that contributed to its success, each of which is explored in detail in the report:

1. Purposeful policy: the government of Vietnam has consistently stated, over many years, that education is a national priority. Vietnam’s longstanding commitment to devote at least 20% of public expenditure to education has focussed on improving both access to school and the quality of learning. Participants spoke of a two-way communication where ineffective policies are reported back up the system from the schools.
2. High levels of accountability: the Vietnamese system can be characterised by high levels of accountability at all levels. Teachers are held to account through self-review and peer review, in addition to the school principal who behaves as an in-school inspector. This internal accountability is coupled with a robust regime of external accountability, where principals are monitored by educational authorities in addition to peer review by other schools.
3. The quality of teaching and teachers: teaching in Vietnam is a highly respected profession. The teacher workforce is better qualified than before and well regarded by many parents. However, teachers are paid badly with many teachers supplementing their income by working as private tutors. Teachers are responsible for their own professional development and informally engage in professional development in subject groups within their schools.
4. School leadership that focusses on the classroom: principals in Vietnam have clearly defined roles as leaders of teaching and learning. School charters from the Ministry formally identify the principal as the key person responsible for internal management and education quality. Principals spoke confidently and consistently to EDT about what it meant to be a high-quality teacher.
5. Partnership between schools and parents: the Vietnamese government encourages high levels of partnership between schools and parents. Parents in the survey expressed high levels of satisfaction with the government school system. Parents are expected to contribute to schools financially, but also to have active involvement in their child’s learning.

It is clear that, for PSD practitioners, the usual toolbox of solutions is not sufficient to meet the challenges that exist. These include firstly a focus on macroeconomic stability, which though technically not part of a PSD portfolio is necessary to provide support to countries responding to significant instability. Reform of the regulatory environment is a key challenge in these countries, but making change happen is complicated by elite control and poor implementation capacities on the part of public servants. As a result, much PSD effort goes on firm-level activities, to support companies to survive and expand even in a problematic wider context. It is also clear that in these contexts, PSD programming needs to be very closely tied to other streams of development activity, in particular interventions on issues of governance and peacebuilding. However, factors such as education and infrastructure are also important to the longer-term development of the private sector, and therefore PSD needs to link closely to activities in these areas too. Programming needs to be flexible and adaptive and responsive to change as it happens, as well as needing to pick up and exploit opportunities as they arise. The combination of conflict and middle-income challenges often make the reform agenda seem huge and undoable. By focusing on what might be relatively small areas of reform, practitioners are in a better position to make change happen.

This study shares many of the conclusions of the 2016 study looking at lower-middle-income countries. These include: challenges with elite control and the impact this has on the growth of the private sector; a poor and opaque regulatory environment; and the need to see PSD programming as part of an overall approach in a country, in particular with interventions focused on good governance. However, this study has also identified significant additional issues stemming from the addition of conflict dynamics. First, the regional context in which a country exists is extremely important, meaning programming needs to consider the regional as well as the national context. Second, the implications of conflict may lie as much in the fear of instability as much as in the reality of it. Third, and most importantly, the conflict dimension means that the stakes are much higher. The skein of interests and networks that prevents a fragile situation getting worse is complex and often opaque. Development programming needs to be very sensitive and undertake detailed and appropriate analysis to ensure that interventions improve the situation or at the very least do not destabilise the status quo.

The current world population is the youngest it has ever been with 1.8 billion people in the 10–24 age group. The figures have spurred enthusiasm about the potential demographic dividend that will possibly accelerate economic growth. However, almost 43% of the global youth labour workforce is either unemployed or working but still living in poverty, which means there may not be a demographic dividend. This realisation has driven interventions that seek to get large numbers of youth into formal employment or become productive citizens in other ways. At the same time, large youth populations are presented as a ‘ticking time bomb’. Un/underemployed youth are considered a major security risk, especially in urban areas, and more recently, unemployed and disaffected youth have become associated with youth recruitment to extremist groups. It is thus not surprising that youth employment interventions have gained immense popularity in the last two decades and that they are needed to serve economic as well as security
purposes, such as countering violent extremism.

1. Invest in good teaching, as the most critical factor affecting learning in schools
2. Back system reform which delivers results in the classroom
3. Step up targeted support to the most marginalised(children with disabilities, children affected by conflict and crisis, and hard-to-reach girls).

The ‘vision for change’ includes commitments for DFID to hold itself, as well as other governments and partners, accountable for improving the quality of teaching and learning. Nowhere is there a timeframe in the document to indicate when all the commitments will be fulfilled. Nor is there any promise to increase allocations of UK aid to education, either in amount or as a share of total UK aid. In this respect, the new policy paper is not a direct response to the International Development Committee (IDC)’s report – DFID’s work on education: Leaving No one behind? published in November 2017. This new paper was commissioned by the then Secretary of State, Priti Patel, much earlier last year. It has been many months in gestation within DFID, and subject to limited external consultation in draft form.

The new policy does respond more directly to the call from the IDC for a strong focus on the most marginalised children, including refugees and displaced children. It includes a very ambitious commitment to ensure that hard-to-reach girls learn the basics and progress through 12 years of quality education and learning.

The analysis underlying these new policy priorities is presented in a section on ‘the case for action’, drawing on recent experience and research evidence, with a very extensive set of references. DFID’s approach is described as one of ‘tackling the learning crisis at its root’ through a strong focus on the training, motivation and performance of teachers in primary and junior secondary schools, to ensure that children acquire basic foundational skills.

There are two brief references to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 in the document but no mention of climate change or environmental sustainability, or even of science in the secondary school curriculum. Nor is there any mention of the unfinished business from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – some countries still have a long way to go before achieving universal access and enrolment in primary education and gender parity at all levels.

Each of the three main priorities is elaborated in a separate section, and the paper ends with a section on Britain’s role on the world stage. This boldly claims that the UK ‘leads the world on international development’ and that ‘DFID will take on global leadership on education for children with disabilities’. One paragraph calls for more and better spending on education by national governments and international partners, and for an increased share of donor funding to be allocated to education, without any such commitment on the part of DFID itself or the UK government. There is surprisingly little emphasis on Value for Money in education, given DFID’s emphasis on this issue since 2010.

DFID wants to help national governments to reform their education systems, including the systems for recruitment, training, deployment, and management of teachers. It wants to strengthen tax systems to increase domestic investment in education and to challenge the disproportionate amount spent on higher education in many countries. Whether DFID has the authority and capacity to deliver such reforms, however laudable they would be, must be doubted and remains to be seen.

The new policy document does acknowledge that when and where there is no national leadership to turn things round, then DFID will ‘look beyond stagnant public sectors’ and seek to invest ‘through alternative channels’, including ‘non-state providers’. But this is not a blanket endorsement of private schools and there is also recognition of the need for strong regulatory and accountability mechanisms.

There are very few references to particular countries in the new policy, apart from examples in text boxes, but the distribution of UK aid for education ‘by benefiting country’ over recent years is shown on a map as an Annex to the document. This reveals that 34 countries have received DFID funding for education, suggesting that such spending is now more widely and more thinly spread than it was in the past, but perhaps more highly targeted to fragile states and priority groups of children.

The outcome of the DFID education ‘policy refresh’ is reflected in this new document. It replaces the Education position paper: improving learning, expanding oportunities of 2013 which itself stated that it stopped short of being ‘a full education strategy’ and did ‘not contain new policy’. The new 2018 paper is a more comprehensive and formal statement of DFID Education Policy. Its release on 2 February was timed to coincide with the replenishment conference of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) last week, at which the UK pledged to increase support for education in partner countries through the GPE.

By Don Taylor (UKFIET Executive Committee)

This blog was originally posted on UKFIET on 06 February 2018. Reposted with permission.

These questions are related to a second query covered in a separate helpdesk report that examines childhood development stages; specifically, when is the best time to influence children’s and young people’s thinking on global issues? These helpdesk reports are designed to help inform a business case and guide DFID’s thinking for a new approach to delivering development education in the UK when the current phases of Connecting Classrooms and the Global Learning Programme (GLP) ends.

International partnerships between schools in the UK and schools elsewhere in the world have been an increasingly popular feature of British education practice for more than thirty years. These partnerships have often been developed as a result of personal contacts, the influence of government policies especially between 1997 and 2010, support from non-governmental organisations and enthusiasm and interest of individual teachers.

The UK has been the leading country promoting such partnerships although there is evidence of other examples in other European countries, notably Ireland (Toland, 2011) and Australia. There have been a number of networks supporting such linking activities, most notably the United Kingdom One World Linking Association and its off-shoot BUILD – Building Understanding through International Links for Development.

The FRA finds that the Public Financial Management (PFM) reform of the Government of Jordan (GoJ) continues to see steady, albeit slow, progress, and several positive developments have taken place since May 2016.

These include:

• New Organic Budget Law prepared and submitted to Parliament for approval;
• Macro-Fiscal Unit established at the Ministry of Finance (MoF);
• Further roll-out of the Government Financial Management Information System (GFMIS) so it now covers almost all GoJ entities and all modules (except for budget preparation);
• Public Investment Management (PIM) unit set up in the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation (MoPIC);
• Budget transparency improvement;
• Initiation of a mid-year budget review process
• Annual financial reporting now in accordance with international standards
• Expenditure arrears being monitored and reduced;
• Withdrawal of the Audit Bureau from pre-audit activities in ministries/departments; and,
• Electronic procurement system under implementation.

However, many weaknesses remain across all elements of the GoJ’s PFM system, and for some areas there have been few, e.g. procurement, or no developments, e.g. external audit.

On this basis, the overall fiduciary risk level is assessed as moderate (pre-mitigation), similar to the 2016 FRA, which means that the trajectory of change overall is considered stable.

This review summarises available evidence on the relationship between higher education, developmental leadership and good governance in developing and conflict-affected countries. It draws on examples from a variety of countries, including Ghana, the Philippines, Oman, Lebanon, Cote d’Ivoire and Botswana among others. Most of the literature considered in this report is academic. A large proportion was produced by the Developmental Leadership Programme (DLP) based at the University of Birmingham, which is currently in the process of publishing a summary report.

The existing literature suggests first that there is no established causal pathway connecting higher education, developmental leadership and good governance. Recent studies have found a general pattern of positive correlation between levels of enrolment in higher education and indicators of good governance, but debates continue as to:

• the ability of individual leaders and developmental coalitions to affect change in the presence of powerful structural constraints to reform;
• the extent to which education alters individual values and socio-political participation visa-vis other factors, like family, religion, peer group and socio-economic background;
• the impact of higher education independent of other factors. Case studies of Ghana and the Philippines produced by the DLP, for example, show convincingly that the contribution of higher education to developmental leadership is also a function of secondary and primary education.

Second, the relationships among higher education, developmental leadership and good governance are highly complex and context-specific. The evidence is sparse and anecdotal, but it appears that some kinds of higher education promote developmental leadership, while others hinder the emergence of dynamic leaders committed to development.