Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER)
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The Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) initiative produces comparative data and knowledge on education policies and institutions, with the aim of helping countries systematically strengthen their education systems. SABER evaluates the quality of education policies against evidence-based global standards, using new diagnostic tools and detailed policy data. The SABER country reports give all parties with a stake in educational results—from administrators, teachers, and parents to policymakers and business people—an accessible, objective snapshot showing how well the policies of their country's education system are oriented toward ensuring that all children and youth learn. All of the papers benefit from a rigorous review process involving World Bank staff, academics, development practitioners, and country assessment experts.
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Publication
Kosovo Early Childhood Development: SABER Country Report 2021
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07-01)Early childhood development (ECD) has become a high priority for the government of Kosovo in the last decade. Kosovo has a relatively well-established legal framework supporting early childhood development (ECD). Systems Approach for Better Education Results - Early Childhood Development (SABER-ECD) collects, analyzes, and disseminates comprehensive information on ECD policies around the world. In each participating country, extensive multisectoral information is collected on ECD policies and programs through a desk review of available government documents, data and literature, and interviews with a range of ECD stakeholders, including government officials, service providers, civil society, development partners and scholars. The SABER-ECD framework presents a holistic and integrated assessment of how the overall policy environment in a country affects young children’s development. This assessment can be used to identify how countries address the same policy challenges related to ECD, with the ultimate goal of designing effective policies for young children and their families. -
Publication
Armenia Tertiary Education: SABER Country Report
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019-10)This report aims to help the government of Armenia and its stakeholders develop a strategy for the tertiary education sector. It uses the methodology of SABER – Tertiary Education (SABER-TE), which is a diagnostic tool to assess how education systems perform and to identify priorities for reforms at the national level. The methodology and this report are part of the World Bank’s systems approach for better education results (SABER), which benchmarks education systems at the country level. SABER uses an extensive questionnaire to collect data on the policy environment for tertiary education. The questionnaire is populated through an analysis of the most recent versions of relevant legislation, policy documents, and reports on the sector. The SABER team also carried out fieldwork in Armenia between July 2018 and March 2019 with visits to several universities, government agencies, and other stakeholders. After data collection for Armenia was complete, the policy dimensions were scored on a rubric. This report proceeds as follows. First, the authors describe the context of the tertiary education system in Armenia. In the seven sections that follow the authors proceed with scoring each of the seven policy dimensions in turn, and in the conclusion they offer a few general observations and recommendations about tertiary education in Armenia. -
Publication
Making Great Strides Yet a Learning Crisis Remains in Tanzania: Results of the SDI and SABER service Delivery Surveys
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10)This report is organized as follows. Chapter one analyzes the emerging trends in the evolution of student’s learning outcomes in Tanzania’s primary schools and explores variations by region, ethnic-group and gender. Chapter two describes different dimensions and trends of teacher quality, such as teacher absence, content knowledge, pedagogical skills and teaching practices. Chapter three provides descriptive evidence on school governance and school management quality using the Development-World Management Survey. Chapter four presents detailed information on school inputs and infrastructure, as well as emerging trends. Chapter five provides a more general description of the different types of support available to students and their engagement to learning. Chapter six analysis the correlation between service delivery indicators and learning outcomes and provides suggestive evidence on key observable factors associated with highest gains in test scores. Chapter seven concludes by providing some clear lessons and priority areas for action. -
Publication
Is there a Learning Crisis in Punjab?: Initial Data Release from the SABER SD Survey
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-08)In 2018, the World Bank released World Development Report which showed that the world is facing a ‘Learning Crisis’. Following up from that report, the Bank has launched the Human Capital Project to mobilize more resources, including for the improvement of learning outcomes. Subsequently, global leaders have been increasingly focused on solving this learning crisis and have renewed attention for Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education. Pakistan is an early adopter of this Human Capital Project, and the new government is taking the lead to address the root causes of the learning crisis. This report aims to help the government with that agenda, by quantifying the extent of the learning crisis, and to highlight the main causes of the crisis. According the World Development Report, the ‘Learning Crisis’ consists of three main elements. The first is that access to schooling is still unequally distributed. While there have been huge efforts to expand schooling, there are still countries (including Pakistan) with millions of children out of school. Children living in regions with violence, children from poorer families and children with physical or mental disabilities are still often excluded. The second element is that even those who are in school are often not learning anything at all. In Malawi and Zambia, for instance, 89 percent of students could not read a single word by the end of Grade 2. In India, that figure is 85 percent. These numbers are important, as children who do not master basic literacy will probably never catch up with the curriculum. In other words, schooling is not necessarily the same as learning. The third element of the learning crisis is that the proximate causes of the learning crisis, low quality teaching, student school readiness, school leadership and school inputs, are not systematically addressed by actors in the system. One of the reasons behind this is that there is no systematic data collection on these factors. -
Publication
Romania Early Childhood Development: SABER Country Report 2019
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019)Romania has clear separate legal frameworks for the health sector, requiring provision of services for pregnant women and young children; for the social and child protection and education sectors, including a mandatory pre-primary year of attendance. In recent years, early childhood development (ECD) has received broader attention from the Romanian Government as the early ages become a priority at the European Union and global levels. Systems approach for better education results (SABER) - ECD collects, analyzes, and disseminates comprehensive information on ECD policies around the world. The SABER-ECD framework presents a holistic and integrated assessment of how the overall policy environment in a country affects young children’s development. This assessment can be used to identify how countries address the same policy challenges related to ECD, with the ultimate goal of designing effective policies for young children and their families. SABER-ECD identifies three core policy goals that countries should address to ensure optimal ECD outcomes: establishing an enabling environment, implementing widely and monitoring, and assuring quality. -
Publication
Delivery of Education Services in Lao PDR: Results of the SABER Service Delivery Survey, 2017
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-04-26)The SABER Service Delivery (SABER SD) survey instrument was developed as an initiative to uncover bottlenecks that inhibit student learning in low and middle-income countries and to better understand the quality of education service delivery in a country as well as gaps in policy implementation. SABER SD was created using knowledge and expertise from two major initiatives at the World Bank: SABER (Systems Approach for Better Education Results) and the SDI (Service Delivery Indicators) tools. The instrument collects data at the school level and asks questions related to the roles of all levels of government (including local and regional). The new instrument collects data at the school level and enables analysis on: (i) teacher effort and ability, (ii) principal leadership, (iii) school governance, management, and finances, (iv) community participation, (v) classroom observation, and (vi) student performance in math and language. -
Publication
Romania Teachers: SABER Country Report 2017
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-04-18)Evidence on the impacts of many teacher policies remains insufficient and scattered, and the impact of many reforms depends on specific design features. In addition, teacher policies can have very different impacts, depending on the context and other education policies in place. Systems approach for better education results (SABER) - teachers is a tool that aims to help fill the gap by collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, and disseminating comprehensive information on teacher policies in primary and secondary education systems around the world. To offer informed policy guidance, SABER-teachers analyzes the information collected to assess the extent to which the teacher policies of an education system are aligned with policies shown by research evidence to have a positive effect on student achievement. SABER-teachers collects data on 10 core teacher policy areas to offer a comprehensive, descriptive overview of the teacher policies in place in each participating education system. The eight teacher policy goals are functions that all high-performing education systems fulfill to a certain extent to ensure that every classroom has a motivated, supported, and competent teacher. This report presents the results of the application of SABER-teachers in Romania. It describes Romania’s performance for each of the eight teacher policy goals, alongside comparative information from education systems that have consistently scored high results in international student achievement tests and have participated in SABER-teachers. -
Publication
Slovenia Teachers: SABER Country Report 2015
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03-01)Evidence on the impacts of many teacher policies remains insufficient and scattered, the impact of many reforms depends on specific design features, and teacher policies can have very different impacts depending on the context and other education policies already in place. Systems approach for better education results (SABER) teachers aims to help fill the gap by collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, and disseminating comprehensive information on teacher policies in primary and secondary education systems around the world. SABER-teachers is a core component of SABER, an initiative of the World Bank education global practice. SABER-teachers collects data on ten core areas of teacher policy to offer a comprehensive descriptive overview of the policies in place in each participating education system. To offer informed policy guidance, SABER-teachers provides an analysis of these data to assess how well each system’s teacher policies promote student achievement based on the global evidence to date. By classifying countries based on their performance in each of the eight teacher policy goals, SABER-teachers provides a diagnosis. This report presents the results of the SABER-teachers tool as applied in Slovenia. -
Publication
Guinea-Bissau School Autonomy and Accountability: SABER Country Report 2017
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-01-15)In 2011, the World Bank Group commenced a multiyear program designed to support countries in systematically examining and strengthening the performance of their education systems. Part of the World Bank's Education Sector Strategy, the evidence‐based initiative called SABER (Systems Approach for Better Education Results) is building a toolkit of diagnostics for examining education systems and their component policy domains against global standards, best practices, and in comparison with the policies and practices of countries around the world. By leveraging this global knowledge, the SABER tools fill a gap in the availability of data and evidence on what matters most for improving the quality of education and achieving better results. This report discusses the results of applying the SABER School Autonomy and Accountability (SAA) tool in Guinea‐Bissau. -
Publication
Norway Teachers: SABER Country Report 2015
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-01-15)All high-performing education systems fulfil these eight teacher policy goals to a certain extent in order to ensure that every classroom has a motivated, supported and competent teacher. These goals were identified through a review of research studies on teacher policies, as well as an analysis of policies of top-performing and rapidly improving education systems. Three criteria were used to identify the teacher policy goals, which had to be: (1) linked to student performance through empirical evidence; (2) a priority for resource allocation; and (3) actionable, meaning they identify actions that governments can take to improve the education policy. The eight teacher policy goals exclude other objectives that countries might wish to pursue to increase the effectiveness of their teachers, but on which there is too little empirical evidence at present to allow for specific policy recommendations.