NN39, October 2007
Best Practice in Education and Training: Hype or Hope?
A Good Thing? The Creation Of New Best Practice: The Origins Of School Development Planning In China
By Andy Brock and Hu Wenbin, Cambridge Education, Beijing, China
KeywordsBest practice, School Development Planning, China
Summary
This article looks at the development of School Development Planning in Gansu and its influence in China and beyond, as a practical example of how best practice informs new initiatives, which in turn may become benchmarks in their own contexts.
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The attempt to define ?best practice? reminds one of the famous saying coined by the authors Sellar and Yeatman in their book ?1066 and All That? in which English history was reduced to a series of events / movements that were either a ?Good Thing? or a ?Bad Thing?. These phrases and others were always used with capital letters to denote their tongue-in-cheek nature e.g. The book?s subtitle was: "103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates". Clearly therefore, in this tradition, it seems ?Best Practice? must be a ?Good Thing?.
The story below, of the development of School Development Planning (SDP) in Gansu and its influence in China and beyond, is a practical example of how best practice informs new initiatives, which in turn may become benchmarks in their own contexts.
In 1999 Cambridge Education Consultants (now Cambridge Education) was asked by DFID to design the Gansu Basic Education Project (GBEP) (Brock was a member of this team). The educational problems faced in this poor rural area of China were not materially different from other developing countries; differences were more of a contextual nature. The interventions proposed stood on two main planks (there were 15 components in total) ? one of which was improved school management (especially improved school-community relations) through School Development Planning.
This was DFID?s first post-1997 project in China and the first to explicitly target poverty reduction as the principal goal. As such it was seen as a flagship for DFID?s work in China. The real novelty in the Chinese context was SDP. SDP in the Gansu project was seen as a vehicle for delivering many of the desired improvements in school management ? better school-community relations ; more autonomy for schools to solve local issues (like increased access for minority girls) ; a more participative and less hierarchical approach to school development.
At that time SDP had a respectable history of about 15 years in developed countries (especially New Zealand and the UK where the most far reaching attempts had been introduced), but there was little track record in developing countries (though there was experimentation in South Africa, Tanzania, the Caribbean and some states in India). Although the impetus for SDP in developed countries was very much driven by attempts to devolve funding to schools and reduce the power and political control of intermediate public bodies such as Local Education Authorities, the underlying principle of giving schools more control over their development and more flexibility to allocate resources was central and seen to be the most successful element of the initiative.
Interestingly, in proposing to initiate SDP in the Gansu project the project memorandum made no reference to ?best practice? in any of the above mentioned countries, but that experience ? and most importantly, the principles that underlay it ? most certainly informed the proposals. In the first two years of the project study visits to the UK and to Shanghai reinforced this connection.
Despite concerns about SDP among some local officials in Gansu ? that it was a thinly disguised attempt to introduce democratic concepts in rural China; that it would fail because of the hierarchical nature of the education and social systems; that the quality of the headteachers was too low to benefit from it ? SDP became, within the first two years, probably the most successful element of the project.
It was successful primarily because it took the principles mentioned above and through cooperative working between international, national and local experts allowed them to be contextualised to the local situation. For example, the principle that better decision making comes with wider consultation with school communities was done through informal means rather than formal Governing Bodies such as are found in the UK. Likewise, the principle that devolving some financial power from education bureaus to schools can release considerable initiative was accepted but, unlike New Zealand, this was done modestly in Gansu and under fairly tight control.
The experiment in Gansu also spawned interest in other parts of China with other donors (UNICEF and Plan International) sponsoring it and the Ministry of Education starting to support it. To date there are at least four multimillion dollar projects in poorer provinces in China promoting SDP in one guise or another ? and all of them use the Gansu model as a reference, in some cases as a template. Three of these projects are in part or whole funded by DFID who have explicitly stated their support to disseminate SDP and the experiences of Gansu.
Partly, as a result of the positive experiences in Gansu, DFID have also, directly or indirectly, supported SDP in other projects internationally. For example, in South Africa, Jamaica, Bangladesh and Vietnam. There have been several exchanges both of information and personnel between GBEP and these other initiatives, though whether GBEP has done more than act as a reference point and resource is debateable. Nevertheless, a successful and practical reference point.
SDP in Gansu, though by no means perfect, has thus become an example of ?best practice? at least in its own, Chinese context, and perhaps further afield, partly through its own success and partly through repeated references to it. It has led to initiatives which may perhaps, in time, create other examples of ?best practice? for SDP. In that sense ?best practice? in this context has become shorthand for a mode of transmission of at least the fundamental principles and structures of the original initiative, and in some cases perhaps more. It is also now part of the received wisdom (which it helped to create) that SDP is a ?Good Thing?.
Further reading
All material including project reports and multi-media materials can be obtained from Cambridge Education China (edu@camb-ed.com.cn). Most material relating to GBEP can also be found on our website at: www.camb-ed.com.cn (Chinese),
www.camb-ed.com (English), or http://gbep.legend-net.cn/en/
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