Education Notes

24 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9403

Education Notes is a series produced by the World Bank to share lessons learned from innovative approaches to improving education practice and policy around the globe. Background work for this piece was done in partnership, with support from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID).

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

School Fees : A Roadblock to Education For All

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004-08) Bentaouet Kattan, Raja ; Burnett, Nicholas

There is increasing momentum on the road to Education for All (EFA), but school fees are still a roadblock for too many children. Several African countries have recently abolished school fees outright. The dramatic surge in enrollments that followed, is strong evidence that the payment of fees can be a major obstacle to enrollment. The note examines the prevalence of fees, and their impact worldwide, and draws lessons involved in attempts to eliminate user fees, and to provide alternate sources of financing. Some important lessons are being learned from these efforts, namely, that fees cannot be abolished without consideration of whether, and how, they should be replaced by an alternative source of income. Replacement revenues can be provided by simply increasing expenditures on education, by improving the efficiency of education spending, or by use of debt relief funds to close the financing gap.
Getting an Early Start on Early Child Development

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2004-06) Eming Young, Mary ; Dunkelberg, Erika

The children born this year, 2004, will be eleven years old in 2015-the age of primary school completion in most countries. This is the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) generation-for whom the international community has pledged that by 2015, all children will be able to complete primary schooling. Ensuring good early child development is the first essential step toward achieving these goals. The note reviews the benefits of early child development (ECD), its options, and coverage by country and region, and provides lessons as follows. A strong institutional framework should be complemented by local capacity, and community participation, while ECD programs should be federally funded. Monitoring and evaluation mechanisms should be in place, as an interactive process, responsive to local needs, and for effective outcomes.
Education for All : Building the Schools

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08) Theunynck, Serge

Putting all children worldwide in school by 2015 will constitute, collectively, the biggest building project the world has ever seen. Some 10 million new classrooms will be spread over 100 countries. At current costs of about $7000 per classroom in Africa, $8000 per classroom in Latin America, and $4000 per classroom in Asia, the total price tag for construction will come to about $72 billion dollars through 2015, or about $6 billion annually. In the 1960s, most World Bank education projects focused on construction and were managed by architects. Over time, this "hardware" approach evolved into a "software" approach, with a much greater focus on teaching and learning issues. Most projects are now managed by education specialists, but construction still represents the single largest share of World Bank lending to education (45 percent of education lending).
Bringing the School to the Children : Shortening the Path to EFA

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08) Lehman, Douglas

Recent education planning initiatives in West and Central Africa show that the path to EFA may be shortened considerably by reconsidering the way basic education is delivered in isolated rural communities. Since independence, education systems have been expanding rapidly and are now serving most of the easy-to-reach population. For progress to continue, the focus must be shifted toward the sparsely populated areas, which means adjusting the type of schools used, and building them close to where children live. Most out-of-school children live in rural areas. Unfortunately, few rural schools offer the complete primary cycle. A number of factors contribute to the incomplete-cycle phenomenon. The most significant is that the potential student population is insufficient for a three- or six-teacher school. Having children walk to school from neighboring villages also contributes to low enrollment and low student-teacher ratios. Since teachers generally do not teach more than 1 or 2 grades at a time in a classroom, rural communities usually have low student-teacher ratios, and education system administrators cannot justify sending additional teachers to the school. In addition, schools with incomplete cycles tend to have extremely low survival rates.
EFA in Indonesia : Hard Lessons About Quality

(Washington, DC, 2003-05) World Bank

Indonesia has seen vast improvements in access to education over the past thirty years. It is a good example of a country that has followed a disciplined linear approach to EFA: Indonesia focused first on primary school access, next on lower secondary school access, and is only now attempting to address key policy issues to improve learning outcomes. However, many long-established precedents that have a negative impact on quality are proving very hard to change. Indonesia's struggles to improve quality demonstrate the importance of tackling such issues from the very beginning, as initial efforts are put in place to expand access. The Indonesia school system is characterized by startling contradictions. It has seen great gains in primary and lower secondary enrollment as a result of strong political will, but educational quality remains very low. The school year in Grades 3-6 is among the longest in the world (over 1400 hours annually for single shift classrooms), but the potential impact of this extraordinary effort is lost in part because the school year in Grades 1 and 2 is among the shortest in the world (under 500 hours annually in most cases).
Big Steps in a Big Country : Brazil Makes Fast Progress Toward EFA

(Washington, DC, 2003-05) World Bank

By the year 2000, Brazil had almost achieved universal primary enrollment for Grades 1-4, and more than 50 million Brazilians were enrolled in the country's education system. From 1970 to 2000, 32 million additional students entered school, two-thirds of them during the last two decades. Over a five-year period (1996-2000), while primary schooling continued to make important gains, enrollments in secondary and tertiary education in Brazil grew at the astonishing rate of 43% and 44% respectively. Many developing countries face problems with age-grade distortion. Largely because of high repetition rates, age-grade distortion in Brazil is about 10 percent country-wide, and almost 40 percent in the northeastern part of the country. An innovative program called Accelerated Learning has been implemented to address this issue. Under this program, the federal government finances the creation of special classes for over-aged students with the objective of reducing the age-grade distortion and freeing up space in public schools. By year 2000 there were already 1.2 million students enrolled in accelerated learning programs in all Brazilian states.
Guinea : A Steady Growth Path to Achieve Education for All

(Washington, DC, 2002-04) World Bank

Guinea is one of the few countries world-wide to have sustained over an entire decade the primary school enrollment rate increases necessary to achieve the key Dakar education-for-all goals without degradation of quality. Gross enrollment rate increased almost 10% annually from 1991-2001, with girls' enrollment increasing at 12% annually each year. Gross primary enrollments increased from 28% to 61% over this ten-year period, in spite of a weak macroeconomic environment. The Guinea case, then, provides guidance on how resource-poor countries can plan and follow a steady course toward Universal Primary Education through policy change and hard work, even where conditions, on the surface, are not particularly favorable.