Introduction
This chapter focuses on the development of long-term plans for education and the factors that shape plans useful in mobilizing political commitment and identifying financial needs. Long-term planning has to be whole-sector in scope. Planning primary school expansion without due attention to flows and costs at higher grade levels leads to planners overlooking bottlenecks at other levels, for example, insufficient secondary graduates entering primary teacher training, unplanned changes in transition rates, such that motivation to complete a cycle may be undermined, and negative impacts on equity where opportunities become increasingly determined by household income and gender. Comprehensive approaches to planning involve projecting flows of students, identifying needs for teachers, school buildings, and learning materials, and recognizing the financial and non-financial constraints on growth at different levels.
The argument developed below offers a rationale for the use of long-term planning, before outlining three different approaches: planning lite, framework national planning, and participatory planning. It distinguishes between aspirational and target-generating approaches, before describing the processes and tools that are needed to develop long-term plans for expanded access capable of reconciling goals and targets with realistic resource envelopes. These processes are designed to promote consensus and build commitment.
Why medium- and long-term planning is needed
Governments can only finance and implement successful education development strategies to achieve greater participation in basic education if expansion is guided by medium- and long-term planning. Planning must be integrated across different levels of public investment in education, as well as balancing competing priorities, and recognizing interactions between levels and types of provision. It is clear from Chapter II that patterns of growth in participation in education have often been uneven between levels and
Educational access, equity, and development: Planning to make rights realities
have sometimes proved difficult to sustain. High rates of growth in participation can lead to reductions in quality, and to the softening of demand for school places, especially at secondary level where costs to households are higher and benefits more difficult to demonstrate. In some countries, expenditure per student has remained static or fallen in unplanned ways, teacher deployment has not kept pace with growing enrolments, and short-term gains have been compromised by falling levels of achievement.
Planning has to recognize that different inputs have different lead times that have to be planned. Procurement, construction, and the equipping of new facilities has one time scale. The training, appointment, and deployment of new teachers has another, and the development and production of learning materials in large quantities a third. Classroom construction and teacher supply are derivatives of the growth in enrolments. The number needed depends on the difference in enrolments year-on-year and not the total number. As a result, classroom building and teacher education may need much higher rates of growth than the underlying rate of growth in total pupil numbers. Similarly, growing demand for secondary places as a result of increased rates of primary completion can quickly generate unsustainable cost burdens at current levels of cost per pupil, as in much of SSA.
Well-managed expansion requires consistent investment over the medium to long term to support the costs associated with teacher salaries and teacher training, quality improvement, supplies of learning materials, the revitalization of school management, monitoring and supervision systems, and construction. This needs to be planned at sector level, and not just for primary schooling, since there are many interactions and trade-offs in public-sector investment across education budgets. Future recurrent and development costs need to be met and managed not just over one or two years, but within feasible projections extending over a 10-year period, which are revised and updated annually. Long-term planning is an essential instrument for policy dialogue and a condition for building national political commitment that can be sustained.
The kind of long-term planning which can support policy dialogue within government is also essential for effective external assistance
Approaches to long-term planning
in countries where external aid is a significant part of educational financing.19 The propositions underlying aid to education, such as the commitment made in Dakar in 2000 to ensure that ‘no countries seriously committed to education for all will be thwarted in their achievement of this goal by a lack of resources’ and that ‘no country should fail to reach the goals of universalizing access to education for the lack of resources if it has a comprehensive and credible plan’ (UNESCO, 2000), require long-term planning. Credible plans are not only concerned with short-term gains, but with long-term and sustainable outcomes. They must demonstrate that future liabilities of expansion (e.g. for teacher salaries, expanded pre-service training, and managed improvements in transition rates to higher levels) are properly anticipated and costed. Large-scale expansion, school building, and quality improvement must also anticipate urban migration and other demographic changes which have implications for the number of children of school age in different places.
Credible planning has to be financed within realistic projections of the domestic resources available. Gaps between the finances needed and those available may be supplemented by external assistance over defined periods, with the intention that, over time, it will be possible to sustain systems entirely from domestic revenue. The size of funding gaps depends on many things, including the political will of national governments, the prioritization given to investment in education at different levels, and the effectiveness with which fiscal policy is used to generate domestic resources. Most importantly, the recurrent cost implications of expansion, embedded mostly in teachers’ salaries, have to be assured in ways that do not generate unsustainable public debt.
Where external assistance is required for educational development it will need to be linked to plans with goals, objectives, targets, and indicators that are agreed by national governments and by bilateral and multilateral development partners. Historically, aid
19. The number of countries that are dependent on aid to finance their education
systems has been falling and most educational expenditure is now supported from domestic resources. There remain a significant number of fragile states and countries reconstructing their education system after war or natural disasters which continue to benefit from substantial external support to education. Most are in SSA.
Educational access, equity, and development: Planning to make rights realities
to many low-income countries has been contracted to last for short periods (three years or less). It has flowed with varying degrees of reliability and lags between commitment and disbursement. Where external assistance is a large part of the resources available for educational expansion, the uncertainty created by short-term financial commitments increases the risk to successful implementation of growth strategies. Plans need to be constructed with realistic exit routes for development partners in order to accelerate educational development.
Long-term planning has its detractors. Almost by definition, any long-term plan evaluated retrospectively will turn out to be at variance with its intended outcomes. Things can happen faster and slower than anticipated. The planner’s paradox remains relevant:
Innovation is needed in education systems that fail to deliver equitably and acceptable quality of service; innovation is disruptive, resource consuming, and unevenly implemented; as a result, in the short term it is likely to adversely affect the equitable delivery of a service at an acceptable level of quality (Lewin and Stuart, 1991).
Planned change may make some things worse before they get better (e.g. larger class sizes, shortages of learning materials, and increased numbers of untrained teachers). However, this is not a reason for retreating from managing planned change. Planning does, in some people’s minds, substitute error for risk. Planning can indeed be wrong (poor technical analysis, unrealistic assumptions, and rigid adherence to out-of-date strategies are among the causes). And, in a sense, one of its purposes is to challenge managers to prove plans wrong and improve them through a continuous process of adjustment. Without effective planning, there are more problems and a much greater risk of arbitrary judgements and decisions influenced by short-term political events, populist slogans, causal empiricism, and idiosyncratic preferences.