Planning and budgeting
Core Function 1 focuses on developing strong and responsive subsector plans, across different levels of government, for equitable provision of quality pre-primary education while making efficient use of available financial, human, and physical resources.
Core Function 1
Linkages between the central, regional, and local levels are of utmost importance when considering effective implementation of the education sector plan, particularly when it comes to roles, responsibilities, and budgeting as they relate to implementation, monitoring and reporting. Ideally, multi-year costed action plans will already be in place to help with planning and budgeting. As funding for pre-primary education may be provided through a mix of different sources, both public and private, it is important to have clear responsibilities and accountability mechanisms in order to have all levels of government effectively follow through on their commitments.
Further, it is important that the national and subnational plans are coordinated and complementary in order to meet policy goals. Stakeholder ownership at different levels needs to be integrated into these plans. Possible bottlenecks and capacity constraints that may affect implementation need to be considered as well. Engaging multiple stakeholders through an annual review (ideally) or at a minimum a mid-term review provides an opportunity where successes can be celebrated and these bottlenecks/challenges reviewed in order to identify solutions and prioritize actions moving forward. These reviews are also opportunities to acknowledge the ongoing engagement of stakeholders through mechanisms such as the Local Education Group (LEG), the ECE Technical Working Group, if one exists, or the ECE subsector coordinating body.
Cross-cutting considerations
Funding for early childhood services as well as their explicit and targeted inclusion should be ensured in humanitarian, fragile, and conflict-affected settings. Targeted, comprehensive, family-centered quality early childhood services should also be included in Refugee Response Plans (RRPs) and Humanitarian Response Plans (HRPs) in order to address humanitarian-development coherence and also so they can be included in preparedness and response planning for country office teams to make sure that effective standby measures are in place.
The education sector plan should recognize that there may be significant gender differences between girls and boys and should identify and attend to gender considerations across the plan, including where gender disparities may intersect with other different sources of disparity, such as location, socio-economic or ethnic characteristics, or abilities (source). For more information, please see UNESCO’s brief about gender responsive budgeting in education.
National education policies should be reviewed and updated to ensure equality, with a focus on targeting children with disabilities as well as those from very marginalized communities. Education budgets should be allocated to support equity goals, for example by prioritizing budget allocation to disability-inclusive programming and/or multilingual ECE (source). Engaging stakeholders from the health sector and other sectors is important to ensure that early learning interventions benefit from and include a holistic approach to design, delivery, and equitable finance.
There should be a focus on local expertise to develop and best and most original solutions to challenges to inclusion. Local experts are also often better qualified to translate the inclusive vision developed at the policy level into sustainable concrete actions and commitments.