Policy, Systems, and Governance

This panel shared presentations from Uganda government officials and development partners which are collaboratively engaged in the efforts to improve and assess EGR in Uganda’s primary schools. Panel participants will discuss the process of gradually scaling up program activities to reach the majority of the nation’s schools by working with and through government structures. The Uganda MoES which has led the process from the begin will discuss how it has worked with donors and other development partners to mobilize resources and technical assistance by incorporating EGR in the ministry’s overall strategic plans. The Uganda National Examinations Board and the Uwezo Uganda initiative will discuss how they have been able to scale up assessment of Ugandan children’s reading skills through government ownership and civil society engagement in conducting early grade reading assessments. The GPE, SHRP, and LARA projects will share how they have worked through government structures at both the national and district levels to develop instructional materials in 12 local languages plus English and improve EGR instruction and learning in schools in a sustainable way. The panel will illustrate that attaining measurable improvements in reading scores at scale takes considerably more time and effort than smaller scale and pilot programs because interventions at scale require working through government structures and personnel, requiring systems strengthening and capacity building while also implementing program activities. This requires enormous effort and constant collaboration among government and development partners with sustainability as the ultimate objective.

In an optimally efficient education system, all children enroll and complete the primary cycle in a one year to one grade ratio, acquiring basic reading, math and critical thinking skills along the way. Unfortunately, in many LMICs, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, many children entering primary school are met with limited instructional materials and under-equipped teachers (UNESCO, 2014), which can lead to education systems that are inefficient and characterized by low primary school completion rates, high grade-specific gross enrolment rates, and under-reported repetition rates, particularly in the early grades. This presentation reports the findings from a nationally representative study of over-enrollment and repetition in primary 1 in Uganda. The following research questions are addressed: 1) What is the enrolment pattern and the age distribution of pupils enrolled in primary 1, according to school records, teachers, and parents/guardians; 2) What is the repetition rate in primary 1, according to school records, teachers, and parents/guardians; 3) What is the relationship between repetition and age of enrolment in primary 1; 4) What is the enrolment rate in pre-primary education and its relationship with primary 1 repetition; 5) What are parents’/guardians’ attitudes and expectations about pre-primary education and repetition in primary 1. Data from enrollment, classroom, and administrative records on age and repetition were gathered from 120 schools. Caregivers and teachers of 1,440 randomly selected primary 1 students were also interviewed about student age, repetition in primary 1, and past enrollment in pre-primary education programs. Information from caregiver and teacher interviews was compared with data from enrollment, classroom, and school administrative records on the age of primary 1 students and repetition in primary 1. We also analyzed the relationship between participation in pre-primary education programs and student repetition in primary 1 through an odds-ratio logistic regression. Findings show that reports by caregivers and teachers of under-age and over-age pupil enrollment and repetition in Primary 1 were much higher than official reports. Additionally, pupils with no pre-primary education were 3.8 times more likely to repeat Primary 1, even controlling for gender, age at enrollment, and SES. Finally, almost 30 percent of caregivers enrolled their children in Primary 1 early, expecting repetition. Research and policy implications include the need to understand and challenge official repetition rates, to examine the effect of pre-primary on education system efficiency, and to investigate the effectiveness of automatic promotion policies.

Over the course of four years (ending in 2016), the Department of Education (DepEd) in the Philippines grew increasingly self-sufficient at managing all aspects of early grade reading assessments (EGRAs). As DepEd’s capacity developed over time, the role of the technical assistance provided through the Education Data for Decision Making project (EdData II) shifted, diminished, and then disappeared altogether. International development professionals sometimes cite the cliché, “If we were truly successful, we would be working ourselves out of a job.” That sentiment now informs USAID’s goal to help each country on a journey to self-reliance. The EdData II project’s work in the Philippines provides some examples of what such a journey might include.

What conditions make it possible to accomplish significant capacity development without running any workshops, without requiring any explicit project deliverables, and with only three short-term technical assistance trips over the course of 19 months? The All Children Reading–Cambodia Activity has been supporting the Education Quality Assurance Department (EQAD) of the education ministry in Cambodia since February 2017. An EQAD staffer, asked about the assistance, said, “The value of the support …is more than I can express… Through collaboration with [the project], EQAD has developed remarkably.” This case study examines how a different approach to providing technical assistance helped EQAD make those “remarkable” strides toward self-reliance.

The purpose of this brief is to answer the question: What are the considerations for effective ECE programming in the Asia region? To answer, we focus on the quality and sustainability, including governance and financing, of ECE. The four subject briefs provide evidence and present considerations for the following topics: ECE assessments, including measures of child learning and assessments of the quality of learning environments; Approaches to quality teaching and learning, focusing on emergent literacy and early mathematics, with consideration given to the language of instruction; Ensuring early childhood educator quality; and Sustainability of ECE.

Assessment of learning and the quality of early learning environments is an important component of early childhood education. This brief outlines the existing early learning assessments of children and environments used in the Asia region, excluding diagnostic and screening assessments.

The quality of instruction in the classroom is key to children's learning and development. This brief looks at the dimensions of guided play, emergent literacy, emergent mathematics, and language of instruction on the quality of instruction.

Training opportunities and appropriate teacher curriculum are often insufficient, and effective regulatory frameworks for preparing, staffing, and monitoring ECE teachers are often lacking. This brief presents selected country-by-country findings on policy relating to ECE teacher quality in six countries in Asia.

Governance and financing of early childhood education (ECE) are complex, involving multiple actors, levels, objectives, and approaches, from general expansion of education access to targeted coverage of the most underserved. Coordination of actors and local community engagement in ECE are important dimensions in the governance and sustainability of ECE, above and beyond specific financing sources and arrangements. More than policies or systems alone, the quality and nature of governance is directly linked to a program’s chances for sustainability.

This report examines available evidence from the Asia region on the current state of ECE interventions, focusing on the 10 countries in the region3 that currently benefit from US Agency for International Development (USAID) education programming. In Asia, many national governments have prioritized the expansion of access and quality improvements of pre-primary education (Sun, Rao, & Pearson, 2015). USAID will support those efforts as part of a coherent approach to improved learning outcomes in primary school.