Education Lessons Learned Exercise – Baseline Education Peer Review

The Basic Services Fund uses as one of their monitoring tools a peer review. The first peer review was conducted in November 2008 by all grant recipients with a health component. The peer review was considered as a very useful tool and it was therefore decided to use the tool as well in the education sector. But, in view of the early stage of Round 3, the Secretariat considers a full peer review exercise to be too much of a burden at this stage and it was therefore decided to start with some kind of a baseline/ bench marking exercise, which can be later on used for the peer reviews.

The purpose of the exercise is to look at what is going on, and how it is evolving, in schools assisted/to be assisted by BSF investments. This will mean looking for a set of characteristics that are generally acknowledged to be conducive to good educational outputs, drawing on INEE, UNICEF and MoEST checklists – at whatever level the actual programming was pitched, and whatever its specific contents. In particular, this will focus on:

o Outturn MDG 2 progress – the number of children accessing education, on an empirical basis, rather than, as, is often quite reasonably done, on an assumed ratio of pupils to teachers trained/classrooms built/etc, and an estimate of the quantity of pupil contact hours; this will include looking towards the three MDG 2 indicators, of net enrollment, proportion of pupils starting grade 1 that reach grade 5 and literacy rate of 15-24 year olds, while being extremely realistic about how available this information really is

o Transition plans, including to greater and/or more effective state and local (county and payam) government involvement and participation in education management; this will involve understanding the capacity and capability of local government and local organisations, such as the churches and local NGOs, to sustain and build on investments

o Role of PTAs, and investments in them

o Basic elements of school administration - financial management, operational management (registers, monitoring teacher performance)

o How infrastructure is being used

From the 28th of April is Charles Goldsmith part-time working with the secretariat. He will visit some of the schools that have received/are to receive BSF investments, and will follow up with the education specialists of each of the partners, so as to produce a written information resource.

A meeting will be organised for a half-day meeting in late June or early July, to review this material, share information, and develop plans for the sharing of further information.