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Future Challenges in Achieving EFA / New EFA Program Development
Focusing on an Inter-Ministerial Approach
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The EFA National Plan is a framework for guiding progressive and systematic action to realize the country's commitment to the six complementary and inter-related dimensions of basic education, as reiterated in the Dakar 2000 Framework for Action: Early Childhood Care and Education, Primary Education, Life and Work Skills, Adult Literacy, Gender Equity, and Quality.
Under a sub-decree creating a National and Sub-national EFA Commissions, the EFA 2002 Plan is evolving through a process of consultations specifically planned to ensure consistency with the PRSP and SEDP II. Guided by the Secretariat General, six EFA working groups spoke with education officials, community leaders, parents, teachers and students to gather their perceptions and concerns about education, and reflected these in EFA Plan drafts. Other consultations continue across ministries, with NGOs, communities and donors. Furthermore, the National Plan will be discussed at a National EFA Seminar in June, prior to refinement and submission through the National EFA Commission to the Council of Ministers.
Congruence of the EFA and ESSP planning processes has been enhanced by access to Education Management Information System (EMIS) common databases, documents and planning assumptions, and by the broad-based consultations involved in the September 2002 ESSP reviewing process. The education reforms go beyond 'basic education' (the focus of EFA) to include TVET, Upper Secondary Education, and Higher Education. Conversely, to ensure synergy among EFA goals and sub-sectors, key partnerships and resources beyond the education sector are essential, (e.g. in early childhood, adult literacy), and are reflected in the broad composition and working modalities of the EFA National Commission and EFA Working Groups, and in the nature and scope of consultations related to the EFA Plan.
It is a core principle of EFA, reflected in the inter-relatedness of the Dakar Goals, that all parts of the education system are inherently inter-dependent. Weakness in any one sub-sector will adversely affect the ability of the system as a whole to achieve its targets. For example, universal access and learning achievement goals will not be realized without seriously tackling issues of quality, and making adequate provisions for non-formal education. Girls' educational opportunities are enhanced when mothers are educated or taking part in non-formal education programs. ECE programs enhance school readiness, instructional efficiency and effectiveness.
The ESSP currently aims toward some of the 2015 EFA targets, but does not yet have in place all elements necessary to ensure comprehensive action on all six EFA dimensions, in ways that make the targets achievable. The ESSP, as a "rolling plan", assumes ongoing analysis of its underlying assumptions, targets and implementation, taking into account the following points:
» The Government is committed to providing a basic education to grade 9 for all children of school age, which, under EFA, means all children, whether that education is delivered through formal or non-formal means;
» The potential of realizing any EFA target, including those for the formal system, will be diminished unless all six are addressed as complementary;
» Any projections for realizing EFA require plans that are reality-based and implementation-sensitive, as well as policy-led.
This rolling process of review and adjustment helps to ensure integration of medium term and longer-term education planning processes.
The consistency of ESP/ESSP and EFA policies, strategies and targets has been strengthened by the use of the same source documents and the Education Management Information System (EMIS). Both planning documents draw heavily on the Cambodia EFA Assessment in 2000, which highlighted the importance of dealing with inequities in access (e.g. girls, minorities), high repetition rates, dropout rates, and ensuring more equitable deployment of experienced teachers. The trends for these and other sector performance indicators are detailed in the ESSP Review 2002: Sector Performance Report. This report will be used as a baseline for monitoring the first phase of the EFA Plan.
Ensuring Quality in ESP/ESSP and EFA Integrated Planning
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MoEYS recognises that careful attention must be given to ensure that policy-led decisions are consonant with improved learning achievement. How do ESSP programs align with quality factors such as teacher competence, professional support and supervision, availability of materials, class sizes, and instructional time? Most schools do not fulfil expected minimum contact hours per year. Continuous classroom monitoring of individual students' mastery of essential learning competencies and skills, linked to ongoing remediation, and regular, independent 'auditing' of educational quality and standards have yet to be translated into programs that can be implemented nationwide. Building on lessons learned in successful, small-scale projects that have focused on quality improvement can accelerate the development of sound quality-linked strategies.
EFA Plan strategies will build on projected efficiency gains, leading to increasing national primary grade enrolments that provide an opportunity, in the medium-to-longer term, to ensure that quality components are further addressed. ESSP reviews enable data based annual adjustments. Quality-linked options include: a) reducing class sizes; b) reducing reliance on double-shifts; c) increasing instructional time; d) in-classroom monitoring of essential learning competencies, linked to ongoing remediation; e) providing adequate funds to ensure all teachers develop professionally;
f) encouraging child-friendly learning environments; g) building further on Cambodia's experience with school clusters to ensure that all teachers benefit through regular professional interactions; h) regular 'educational audits' and analyses of children's learning achievements. EFA monitoring processes will focus on assessment of student performance and learning outcomes, drawing on new minimum tests of standards to be introduced in 2003/04.
EFA implementation will draw on lessons learned from the ongoing ESSP implementation process including:
» Measures to improve predictability in the timely resourcing and management of programs, especially capacity building for technical and financial planning and management at central and provincial levels.
» Consolidation and extension of current change management strategies, including consultative and decision-making processes which draw on field level realities and small scale operational research.
» Extension of measures to ensure equitable deployment of more experienced and qualified teaching staff to remote and disadvantaged areas including drawing on lessons learned from the new targeted incentives programs for teachers, possible piloting of new multi-grade teaching strategies and new pre-service teacher training programs for less well qualified entrants from remote and ethnic minority areas.
» Continual review of language of instruction policies and strategies including the potential for expansion of bilingualism and biculturalism in primary education in ethnic minority areas drawing on lessons learnt from ongoing small scale initiatives.
The annual ESSP review process will provide a vehicle for this broad based consultative and strategic negotiation process and ensure that medium-term and long-term reforms perspectives are effectively integrated.
A related challenge and opportunity will be to ensure that elected commune councils can play increasingly important roles in decentralized education governance, underpinned by anticipated new education legislation in 2003. It is anticipated that commune councils will help highlight education issues and encourage dissemination of their views of educational challenges and opportunities. Commune councils will possibly become more involved in addressing education quality concerns and the oversight of education services.
In their responsibility for maintaining birth and death statistics, commune councils are well placed to ensure the right of every child to be registered, and to have a name and identity. They can also play vital roles in 'tracking and tracing' children, to ensure no child is 'missed', every child is immunized, every child has access to health, growth and development monitoring, and, by following cohorts of children, to document later outcomes of early life experiences. The councils in cooperation with Commune EFA Commissions (CEFACs) may also prove invaluable in assisting incentives programs to target the poorest families in local communities who might be eligible for scholarship assistance. These opportunities can assist in developing strategies for community-based planning and implementation for ECCD and ECCE as well as improved access initiatives to be undertaken by Government.
The extent to which community-based programs are developed will influence EFA efforts to achieve goals related to ECCD, NFE for out-of-school children, and adult education. These goals go beyond the formal schooling system, may not be funded by line ministries, and will require strategically focused additional human and financial resources. Commune Councils will be encouraged to take an ongoing role in monitoring equity and quality issues affecting the various inter-linked basic education programs, both formal and non-formal approaches.
New EFA Program Development
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The EFA Plan complements ESP and ESSP, by addressing the right to education of adults and out-of-school youth, and the right to a better start to life and learning for all infants and young children through more detailed planning in non-formal education, adult literacy, life-skills and livelihood skills training, and integrated early childhood care and development, and through the cross-cutting EFA goals related to gender equity and quality.
The EFA Plan will address three core NFE challenges. The first concerns providing at-risk, over-age and recently dropped-out children with the opportunity to return to the formal system. A re-entry strategy has been factored into ESSP projections, assuming 100,000 children in 2003 being absorbed into the formal primary education system, and the remainder of the estimated total of 400,000 absorbed into grades 4, 5 and 6 over the ensuing six years (to 2009). However, the requisite curricular, teacher development and management conditions for re-entry are not yet in place. The time and resources to develop and expand these will need also to be factored in, including building a basis of collaboration between the formal and non-formal sub-sectors. The re-entry strategy and phasing will be reconsidered in the EFA Review.
The second NFE challenge concerns providing those out-of-school youth who cannot go back into the system because of age or life circumstances, but who have a right to a basic education, alternative channels through which to acquire competencies recognized by themselves, the labour market and society as equivalent to school-based qualifications. These numbers should reduce in the medium-to-longer-term as the formal system expands, but for both EFA and national development priorities, NFE equivalency programs are urgently needed. Equivalency programs have yet to be developed, and this will be planned and phased realistically. Estimates of the numbers to be reached are currently being prepared and will be included in the ESSP Review.
The third NFE challenge concerns the task of providing, for vulnerable families, at-risk adolescents, demobilized soldiers and their families, and isolated communities, access to the knowledge, life-skills and livelihood skills needed to create and sustain sound environments for themselves, and their families. Existing levels of adult illiteracy in Cambodia remain unacceptably high, with rural poor communities and women most adversely affected. These are the people whose capacity to work, generate wealth and participate in social development programs aimed at reduced fertility, improved health and child care, income generation, and democratic participation are the focus of poverty reduction strategies.
The EFA Plan will also focus on detailed ECCD policy, strategy and programming, which will incorporate broader social development concerns beyond the narrower pre-school approach. The EFA working groups have recognised that for many Cambodian children, ECCE in the form of pre-schooling is 'too little, too late'. Many do not survive infancy, and, of those who do, more than 50 per cent have been irreversibly stunted and their development compromised before they reach their second birthday. Many are immature at age six in their physical, social, linguistic and cognitive development, and this is reflected in delayed enrolment and high repetition rates in grade 1. Sadly, the long-term consequences of adverse pre-natal, peri-natal and early childhood care also emerge in adverse mental and physical health in adolescence and adult life.
As a shared inter-ministerial responsibility, the MoEYS' role in ECCD will be to encompass not only 'pre-schooling' in whatever form, but also the technical inputs to psychosocial components of community-based programs aimed at enhancing parental nurturing as part of everyday living, and to combine health, nutrition and all-round developmental activities. A positive first step was taken with the declaration of a National ECCE Policy in June 2000, committing the Government to support the education of 'unreached' 3-5 year old children in disadvantaged areas. This was followed by a (draft) Master Plan (2002-05) outlining critical programming challenges.
In the short-to-medium term, inter-ministerial ECCD mechanisms can take several important actions. It is critical to extend the range of 'who counts', to include all children from birth to age five within the ambit of early childhood concerns, and broaden the ECCE /ECCD framework to include all-round development, health, nutrition, as well as early education. The MoEYS can assist related ministries (e.g. Ministry of Health) to jointly develop, trial and expand the use of integrated health, growth and all-round development child records to be used and retained by parents. The psychosocial development milestones component is currently lacking.
The EFA Plan will recommend broader links to comprehensive, community-based ECCD programs in the short-to-medium term, so that improved developmental status will also be observable in children within the communities served. The widespread use of parent-retained integrated health/growth/development records can facilitate this and help parents to appreciate the synergies among the many aspects of good care.
In ECCD, a broad policy target will be to increase net enrolment of five-year-olds to 75 per cent by 2015 through an incremental expansion, while exploring strategies to ensure that ECCD becomes increasingly a shared community, NGO, private sector and inter-ministerial responsibility. Parent education related to comprehensive ECCD is a key component of EFA and pro-poor national development goals, and goes beyond the more limited focus of 'reception classes' in the ESSP. As ECCE programs expand in scope and coverage, it will be critical to develop community capacity, to increase the non-public share of costs and management, and to progressively document the impact of various approaches on improved basic education access, equity and quality indicators.
The EFA plan will include innovative and sustainable approaches, including proposals for new public and private cost-sharing mechanisms that also ensure increased access for children from poor communities. The basic financing principle will be that MoEYS will focus on quality assurance and targeted assistance for poor families.
By addressing gender and quality as cross-cutting issues in all EFA dimensions, including NFE and ECCD, the EFA Plan complements the ESSP, and encourages a continuing focus on the inter-relatedness of EFA Goals.
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