Tool 4.2: Checklist
ECE Implementation Feasibility and Capacity Appraisal for the ESP
© GPE/Carolina Valenzuela
Introduction
As you finalize the ECE components of the Education Sector Plan (ESP), ensuring coherence and consistency within ECE and between ECE specifics and the overall ESP will be essential. Using this tool will help ensure that everything fits well together and seems feasible to implement.
This tool builds on the guiding questions in MOOC Module 5 (Page 23) and the IIEP-UNESCO Guidelines for Education Sector Plan Appraisal to provide ECE-specific checklists to support the ECE TWG:
- to review and validate the ECE components
- and to check for alignment, coherence, consistency and feasibility.
These tasks are essential elements of an iterative, yet responsive planning process.
The checklists will help you to ensure and validate:
- Alignment of ESA evidence with ECE priorities and strategies and overall sector-wide priorities.
- Consistency, coherence and feasibility of ECE components across the ESP, ESP Results Framework, and operational plan.
As part of this feasibility check, it is important to assess the capacity of the education system across all levels (from national to local). Does that system –including the ECE subsector--have the capacity to implement the ECE strategies and activities and to deliver on the ECE objectives and targets? This type of “rapid” ESP ECE implementation capacity assessment exercise can help determine whether ECE objectives and ambitions need to be revised, and whether the ESP should include additional capacity development strategies to address key implementation capacity needs.
If it is determined that key capacity constraints exist, for example a need to review and revise the qualifications for actors working in the ECE subsector from national to service provider levels or enhancing data collection, monitoring and reporting mechanisms to include ECE at the national and sub-national levels, it will be important to decide whether it is necessary to include/add strategic actions in the ESP to address such needs and areas determined as requiring enhancements and strengthening.
In contexts with varying governance arrangements, such as decentralized systems, this tool may be useful to use for appraising plans at both the subnational levels and the national level and to ensure the consistency and coherency across systems’ levels.
This tool provides considerations and questions for conducting a “rapid” ESP ECE implementation capacity assessment. In some cases, you may see the need for a more comprehensive institutional capacity analysis of the education sector and/or ECE subsector, in addition to or instead of the “rapid” ESP ECE implementation capacity assessment. Such a comprehensive analysis would systematically examine and create a shared understanding of the capacity needs across the subsector in the planning and implementation of ECE priorities.
- This institutional capacity analysis may be undertaken as part of the initial ESA process to assess the functioning and effectiveness of the education system (including the ECE subsector), with a particular focus on educational planning and management.
- The results of such an exercise can serve as the basis for subsequent identification of strategies to strengthen and enhance capacities for improved education service delivery, including or specific to delivering quality ECE services.
- The ESA Methodological Guidelines Volume 3, Chapter 13 (forthcoming) provide detailed information and guidance on the rationale, framework and methods to assess the functioning and effectiveness of education systems, with a focus on educational planning and management. This Chapter may be used to guide the institutional analysis of the overall education system (including the ECE subsystem) or of the ECE subsector on its own.
Objectives
Using this tool will enable ECE Technical Working Group (TWG) stakeholders to:
Ensure coherence between the ECE findings documented in the Education Sector Analysis and the ECE components in the Education Sector Plan
Ensure coherence and consistency:
- across ECE components in the ESP, ESP Results Framework, and Operational Plan;
- between the ESP’s ECE components and broader ESP sector-wide policy priorities/goals.
Check for the feasibility of the ESP’s ECE components (including consideration of implementation capacity gaps).
When to Use this Tool
Using this tool will help the ECE TWG ensure that there is adequate alignment across the ECE and sector-wide analysis and planning phases.
This tool may be used during two intervals:
- During the ESP development process (Toolkit Section 3): Using the checklist during this interval will ensure that ECE policy priorities and strategies are based on challenges and evidence from the ESA and reflect a sector-wide perspective to achieving education sector priorities.
- During the ESP operational planning process (Toolkit Section 4): At this stage, the check will ensure that ECE strategies, activities, indicators and targets are coherent and consistent across the ESP and the operational plan. The check also considers feasibility and implementation capacity factors.
This tool may also be used by individual institutions or country clusters/LEGs that manage and/or directly provide ECE services in countries affected by emergencies to ensure alignment between policies, what is articulated in proposals or implementation plans and/or ECE components of transitional education sector plans.