Executive summary
This is the final report of UNRWA Education Reform (2011-2015), as although work must continue to embed, sustain and build upon its achievements in the Medium Term Strategy (MTS) period, the funded implementation period of the Reform ended in December 2015. The Education Reform Strategy (ERS) was designed to bring about transformational change to classroom practices and thus improve children’s learning outcomes through the adoption of a systemic and interrelated approach. It was formally endorsed by the UNRWA Senior Management and the UNRWA Advisory Committee in 2011.
Over the past four years, the Reform has been vehicle for change at three key levels – policy level, strategy or structural level, and individual capacity development level – and in eight interrelated programmatic areas, addressing teachers, curriculum, student assessment, student inclusion and well-being. All levels were underpinned by strengthened planning, monitoring and evaluation, and measurement of impact. This systemic approach reflects global evidence that educational reform cannot be achieved by concentrating on one element only, as articulated in the call to “strengthen education systems” (World Bank, 2010) and to “promote education in a holistic manner” (BMZ, 2010).
There have been numerous achievements of the Reform, from the clearly articulated strategic direction, through the Agency-wide policies – Teacher, HRCRT, and Inclusive Education (IE) – to the strategies that guide the policy implementation – HRCRT, IE, the Common Monitoring Framework, Research Strategy, the Curriculum Framework, and the TVET Strategy. Within this clearly articulated direction there has been much achieved with regard to the strengthening of the capacity of teachers, school principals and other education cadre, to better enable them to deliver quality education; this has been through key professional development programmes, e.g. School Based Teacher Development (SBTD) programmes I and II, Leading for the Future (L4F) and Core Knowledge, and Skills and Competences for Strategic Support Staff.
The ultimate test of the effectiveness of the Reform design and implementation is, of course, education-system-level change where students drop out less frequently, do not repeat grades and their learning outcomes improve; this leads to a more efficient and effective system. The key indicators of an efficient and effective system are: student dropout; student survival; co-efficient of internal efficiency; and student achievement. This 2015 Reform progress report shows that across all fields there have been gains in these areas, with:
• Student survival rates at the highest they have been in the last five years in the basic education cycle (93.5 per cent for boys against the target of 91.8 per cent and 95.5 per cent for girls against a target of 95.5 per cent).
• Cumulative dropout rates for elementary boys and girls and preparatory boys are at their lowest rate in the last five years, with a slight decrease in the preparatory girls’ rate, despite a small increase in Jordan since the last reporting period. Overall, the rate still remains lower for girls than since the beginning of the Reform. Agencywide dropout for elementary boys is 1.95 per cent and the 2015 Reform target was 2.4 per cent; for elementary girls, the dropout rate is 0.96 per cent against the Agency target of 1.4 per cent. For preparatory boys Agency-wide, the dropout rate is 3.55 per cent against a target of 5.5 per cent, and for preparatory girls, it is 2.92 per cent against a target of 3 per cent.
• The coefficient of internal efficiency is at its highest since the Reform began (0.91). This means that the UNRWA education system has become more efficient with more students graduating on time; this exceeds the reform target of 0.90.
With regards to the achievement of students, the Monitoring and Learning Achievement (MLA) of 2013 showed an increase in student mean score, but most crucially as part of the Reform, the MLA has become a means of providing far greater insight into how the UNRWA education system is impacting on its students’ learning outcomes. The design of the MLA test and the way in which it is subsequently analyzed now generate information about student performance levels, i.e. in relation to the expected performance at the tested grade levels; about student learning skills and competences, i.e. if they are able to reason and apply knowledge or if their competencies are limited to knowledge recall; and about the way in which a subject is taught with regard to its content domains, for example grammar and dictation content domains in Arabic and geometry, numbers and operations content domains in math. The findings of the 2013 MLA were disseminated to all fields with each school receiving a ‘School Sheet’ which detailed its own students’ performance in these key areas. Baselines and target indicators have also been generated from the 2013 MLA and the 2016 MLA, which will be implemented in all fields, including Syria, which was not included in 2013 due to the conflict, and will give a very clear indication of how UNRWA is supporting its students with regards to quality, equity and inclusiveness of the education provision.