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NORRAG NEWS 43 - AVAILABLE HERE!!
NORRAG NEWS No. 43 ABSTRACT
A WORLD OF REPORTS?
A CRITICAL REVIEW OF GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT REPORTS WITH AN ANGLE ON EDUCATION AND TRAINING
Global Reports have become a critical ingredient in the public face of international development cooperation,whether they are one-off World Summit/Conference/Commission Reports such as the Jomtien World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) in March 1990, the Dakar World Forum on Education for All in April 2000, The Delors Commission (Paris, 1996) or the Millennium Project Report five years after the Millennium Summit (New York, 2005), or Serial Reports such as the Education for All Global Monitoring Report (EFA GMR), the World Bank's GMR, the Human Development Report (HDR) with separate regional editions, or the World Development Report (WDR). There are other one-off reports that emerge primarily from single countries but they have a much wider reach than one country. Examples would be the Commission for Africa (London, 2005), the Africa Commission (Copenhagen, 2009), Partnership with Africa (Stockholm, 1997), or China's African Policy (Beijing, 2006). Most have an angle on education. Despite the Paris Declaration's encouragement to harmonise and pool donor activities, this activity of developing major one-country reports and white papers, as well as sectoral reports e.g for the Education Sector seems to continue unabated. Thus the UK has had no less than four White Papers on International Development in the last 12 years, as well as a whole range of Target Strategy Papers, including on Education. Many readers of NORRAG NEWS will recall the interest with which international educators used to acquire the latest World Bank Education Sector Policy Papers whether on education in general (e.g. 1978, 1995); or on primary (1990); vocational and technical education and training (1991); or on higher education (1994, 2002). Not to mention the regional reports, e.g. on Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (1988), or Skills Development in Sub-Saharan Africa (2004). This global and regional reporting is not restricted to bilateral and multilateral agencies, but is also commonplace with international NGOs, see for instance The Oxfam Education Report (Oxfam, 2000). Covering the OECD countries and some middle income countries, there is another set of major reports such as the IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) [MA, 2008], or the OECD¹s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) [Paris, 2009], which rank countries by dimensions of educational achievement, and there is the Education Development Index (EDI) currently ranking 129 countries by four basic education indicators in the EFA Global Monitoring Report. Also OECD¹s Education at a Glance.
Who are the real targets for this battery of reports? How do these reports impact on academic thinking and policy? Can they influence country priorities? Do they alter national targets or goals? Or is their role sometimes to change the discourse or introduce a new term such as 'Education for All', 'Knowledge Societies', 'Learning to Know', 'Basic Education', 'Knowledge for Development', 'Education for the Informal Sector', 'Skills Development', or 'Life-long Learning'??? Policy makers are of course interested in those particular reports which have global rankings such as TIMSS, PISA, HDR or EDI. For instance Norway is No. 1, Nigeria No. 158, and Niger No. 182 out of 182 countries in the HDR 2009. Kazakhstan, by contrast, is ranked No. 1 on the Education Development Index, above Norway at No.4 but Niger is still No.128 out of 129 countries.
In this special issue of NORRAG NEWS, we are interested to explore how our different constituencies of NN readers (such as policy makers, development partners, academics, and NGOs) actually use these reports for their work if they have time to read them! Often these Reports are very substantial volumes of some 450 pages, and frequently they have a wealth of commissioned and supporting papers behind them. Of course there are often executive summaries and even regional summaries, but there is still a challenge of translating the essence of these reports at the point when they are most needed. Given the very different kinds of time pressures that academics, policy makers, agency and NGO staff are under, how do they mine this massive resource of potentially valuable report data?
We shall pay particular attention to reports which principally focus on Education such as the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, but also the role of education in other world reports.