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A Look Inside the Report |
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| Improving Access and Learning Outcomes |
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Expanding Access
Access expansion was the most successfully met objective in Bank-supported primary education projects: 69 percent reached their expansion goals. In the 12 field-based study countries where the Bank supported enrollment gains, gross enrollment ratios increased an average of 19 percentage points over the past 10-12 years. In countries like Mali and Uganda increases were explosive. Enrollment expansion has generally come through supply-side interventions: creating new schools within easy walking distance, hiring more teachers or activating community support. An increasing amount of Bank support for supply-side expansion programs is coming through projects not originating in the Education Sector. Also, in recent years, demand-side policies have been successfully implemented by governments, often with the support of the Bank, such as eliminating school fees (as in Uganda and Malawi), and providing girls’ scholarships (Pakistan) or conditional cash transfers (Mexico).
National equity objectives were also generally reached, at least in terms of increasing the enrollment of girls and children from poor families ( Yemen; Mali); however, equity gaps between those and the more advantaged did not always close. Improving completion rates through reducing dropout and repetition (improving internal efficiency) was often underemphasized, even in countries with very poor efficiency records ( Niger). Where it was an explicit objective, countries succeeded in only about a quarter of Bank-supported projects.
Key lessons:
- A trade-off between improved access and student learning gains can be avoided with explicit planning for improved learning outcomes and high political commitment to that goal.
- If primary school completion rates are raised by automatically promoting children to the next grade or without heeding student learning outcomes, then higher completion rates will not reflect improvements in knowledge and skills, especially among the disadvantaged, the ultimate policy objective.
- Many of the strategies used to rapidly increase access, such as “big bang” fee reductions, use of contract teachers, double-shifting, and automatic promotion, have had negative effects on learning outcomes, at least in the short run, and some are difficult to sustain.
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At a Glance:
Improving Access Highlights |
Primary education projects have been effective at expanding access
Although projects have met their enrollment objectives, gaps between the advantaged and disadvantaged often are not closing
Reducing high dropout and repetition has been underemphasized
Projects were relatively ineffective at improving educational quality
Learning outcomes are generally not measured, but they have improved in some countries, even among the poor
Though reading is the foundation of learning, few projects support improved early reading skills
The optimal strategy for improving learning outcomes depends on country conditions and institutions; in the best cases, access and learning are pursued together
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Improved Student Learning Outcomes
Little of the Bank’s recent analytical work covering primary education has focused mainly on learning outcomes and their determinants, suggesting the lack of an adequate evidence base informing efforts to raise learning outcomes. Many countries still do not generate the information they need to design solutions to improving low learning outcomes among the disadvantaged, and there has not been adequate experimentation with local solutions and their evaluation with respect to their impact on learning outcomes.
Few portfolio sample investment projects aimed to improve learning outcomes (less than one in three), but among those that did, most were successful. Sample projects showing most improvement in learning outcomes were in Latin America ( Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay) and India, all cases where national commitment to learning outcomes and their measurement is high. Among countries where the evaluation undertook field studies, only 5 of the 12 had repeated measures of learning outcomes; in three of these, Ghana, India, and Uruguay, learning improved over time, at least in part due to project interventions. There were even fewer countries where equity of learning outcomes was an objective, but where this was a goal (such as in Uruguay and India), results were positive and gaps between the more and less advantaged were narrowed.
Even in countries where learning outcomes have improved, absolute levels of student achievement are still low. For example, in Ghana only 10 percent of children reached the country’s mastery levels in math and 5 percent in English, and in India, half of 7-10 year olds were unable to read fluently a short paragraph of grade 1 difficulty.
Social fund and other community-driven projects, which have typically emphasized school construction, and are often loosely linked to sector policies. They have frequently overlooked the need for complementary investments in school quality, and do not always have adequate technical input from education experts.
Key lessons:
- More, better, and more contextualized analytical work is needed on learning outcomes and their determinants at the primary level.
- Countries need to resist the temptation to increase access first and improve learning outcomes later; expansion and quality improvement can be successfully undertaken together, and can have mutually reinforcing effects. Moreover, competing pressures may make it difficult to undertake quality retrofitting at a later date.
- Failure to provide reading skills in the early primary school year s—among the advantaged and disadvantaged—is often at the root of weak learning outcomes.
- Although the Fast Track Initiative has been a strong force in encouraging rapid increases in enrollment and completion, as the main channel of coordinated donor support to primary education, it could have much sharper focus on improving learning outcomes.
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The
Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) is an independent unit within the World
Bank; it reports directly to the Bank's Board of Executive
Directors. The goals of IEG 's evaluations are to draw lessons
from Bank experience, and to provide an objective basis for
assessing the results of the Bank's work.
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