• Economics and education

Economics of education

What are the different styles of long term planning? What are the processes and tools that are needed to develop long term plans for expanded access that can reconcile goals and targets with realistic resources? This paper provides examples of different approaches to planning, develops detailed discussions of the steps necessary to generate national framework plans that link desired goals and targets to resource flows, and suggest how these can be integrated with Medium Term Expenditure Frameworks (MTEF). It provides an overview and analytic guide to long term planning of education systems in the context of Education for All (EFA) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and outlines three different styles of long term planning: Planning Lite, Framework National Planning, and Participatory Planning. The paper distinguishes between aspirational and target-generating approaches.

The paper explores the nature of MTEFs as a necessary tool to manage implementation. It suggests methods such as:

• enrolment-driven projections of demand linked to unit costs, productivity gains, and quality enhancement programmes
• benchmarking against within system and cross national indicators
• best practice reviews of effective institutional practice on service delivery
• experimental reforms in school and higher level management systems to deploy resources more effectively and efficiently

The author highlights that without longer term planning, which is updated systematically and linked coherently to future needs, it will remain difficult to achieve sustained growth in participation. The challenges of EFA and the MDGs are to build capacity cumulatively in the most efficient and effective ways that make the best use of scarce resources.

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