Educational plans can be developed in three ways, requiring different processes and timescales (Lewin, 2007d). Briefly, planning lite takes a broad-brush, macro approach to make order-of-magnitude
Approaches to long-term planning
estimates of the financial demands created by commitments to enrolment targets and quality-improvement programmes. Costs per student can be used to identify what proportion of domestic revenue needs to be committed to achieve and sustain the defined educational
goals and levels of participation. Framework national plans use
scenarios based on education management information system (EMIS) and census data to project enrolments, infrastructure, and costs systematically at national or regional level. Long-term plans can be linked to medium-term expenditure frameworks commonly used to profile financial needs over a period of three to five years. Participatory planning generates plans shaped by inputs from a local level, for example from schools or districts, which are developed using consultative methods before being aggregated and harmonized at a national level in order to form part of affordable and feasible programmes of development.
If estimates are needed quickly, planning lite may be helpful. However, planning lite cannot provide detailed projections which respond to a range of policy options. Framework national plans are flexible tools that disaggregate flows of pupils, demand for teachers, types of school, and so on, and use these to allocate resources through unit-cost estimates of different kinds. These can be used to develop scenarios that identify and respond to different policy options. To be robust, they require adequate baseline data, technical competence, and imaginative programming that generates flow projections linked to costs and educational goals and objectives.
In systems where planning responsibilities are devolved to provincial and district levels (e.g. for teacher deployment or school admissions), the development of national plans involves the collation and integration of lower-level plans with national-level responsibilities and competencies (e.g. for curriculum development and teacher education). Decentralized planning may be viewed as a limited form of participatory planning if it involves consultation at the local level. Alternatively, it may simply replicate national planning processes with most inputs coming from above rather than below.
Participatory planning is generally too cumbersome and complex to be useful for long-term planning precisely because it
Educational access, equity, and development: Planning to make rights realities
involves many actors with different agendas and priorities, and different grasps of system-level opportunities and constraints. It requires cooperation and conflict management when trade-offs have to be addressed. To be effective, it needs systematic management and skilled animateurs. It also takes a lot of time and capacity to develop effective implementation strategies above the level of the smallest component parts.
All three methods can be approached from two different perspectives. First, they can be developed with time-bound targets for key indicators and their values at future dates (e.g. gross and net intake rates, age-specific completion rates, transition rates, and GPIs). This is aspirational planning. It may result in unrealistic pathways between the current state of play and the desired outcomes. If the targets are not coherently inter-related it may also generate unbalanced investment priorities that emphasize short-term goals at the expense of other valued outcomes and sustainability. Drawing a line back from a desired outcome (e.g. all children of school age completing primary school) generates a linear path of necessary inputs and activities indicating that certain numbers of schools, teachers, and textbooks need to be provided each year.
In practice, what often happens is that financial constraints (time-slippage related to agreeing plans, signing-off agreements, disbursing tranches of funding, etc.) and non-financial constraints (lead times on construction, teacher training, softening of demand to enrol and progress, etc.) lead to achievement falling below the line indicating that progress is on-track (Figure 5.1). The gradient of what needs to be achieved then progressively steepens to the point where the planning and implementation system enters a ‘zone of improbable progress’. Either the goals fall into disrepute because they are unachievable, or the goals are redefined and time shifted (as with gender parity goals).
If a non-linear approach is taken (which is more realistic), the gradient of achievement needed becomes concave and steepens as time progresses. This is only sustainable if increasing rates of change (increasingly rapid school-building, more teacher training, textbook supply, etc.) are feasible and there is capacity to keep on-track. Conventional linear modelling with almost inevitable slippages
Approaches to long-term planning
often leads to calls for a ‘big push’ as deadlines are missed. This is a sure recipe for longer-term failure if it invokes frenzied activity to accelerate development without any concern for the legacy of unsustainable liabilities being created.
Figure 5.1 Gradients of achievement
100
75
50 Performance below ‘on-track’ line creates increasing gradient of expectation
Off-track line On-track line Desired goal Indicator of achievement Initial conditions 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 Zone of improbable progress Source: Author.
Target-generating planning is an alternative to aspirational planning. It starts with estimates of the highest sustainable rate of expansion that does not degrade educational quality to unacceptable levels. This depends on forward projections which draw attention to critical limitations of capacity, infrastructure, and finance. Target-generating planning offers a greater probability of identifying achievable targets. It takes known financial constraints (e.g. projected growth in GDP, domestic revenue collection, and government budget allocated to education) and non-financial constraints (e.g. capacity to procure and build classrooms, and capacity to train new teachers) on expansion into account from the outset. It avoids the trap of agreeing targets to which many stakeholders pay lip service knowing full well that they will not be achieved. It can help planners avoid being on the steepest part of an s-curve of implementation as target dates
Educational access, equity, and development: Planning to make rights realities
for goals approach. It can strengthen the link between target-setters and target-getters. And it allows targets to be set for incremental improvement on a rolling basis.
Less positively, target-generating planning sits uneasily with goals which are prescribed by political systems without reference to the chances of the desired outcomes being achieved within a specific timeframe. Goals that can be used for planning cannot be independent of starting points or likely rates of progress. Target-generating planning offers the prospect of managed growth at rates which do not degrade system quality, using continuous monitoring to ensure supply-side inputs keep pace with demand. There will always be rates of change that are unsustainable and this should be recognized from the outset. This may be the best way to support planned growth which is sustainable.