Delivering Education Reform: Delivery Approaches

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

While ample evidence exists on the types of interventions that effectively improve learning outcomes, less is known about the effectiveness by which these interventions are implemented. The 2018 World Development Report on education outlines how low learning traps in countries are often related to delivery challenges, and a review of 118 high-quality studies for the RISE program finds poor governance and accountability to be a primary barrier to translating inputs to outcomes in developing country education systems.



Governments around the word are responding to this problem by adopting Delivery Approaches, innovative structures or set of processes that improve the way that bureaucrats implement policy, to achieve desired outcomes. Delivery approaches can take a variety of forms and in the past three decades, they have become increasingly popular and applied in a range of contexts. Their application can be traced back to the 1990s, when the New York City Police department introduced a new central management accountability model which successfully reduced crime rates. In the same decade, the UK’s Department for Education piloted a similar model, which in the early 2000s evolved into the UK Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit.



Interest in and use of this type of model has spread, first to other high-income countries but quickly to developing countries including Malaysia, Pakistan, and Tanzania as well. Since then, governments at a national and subnational level worldwide have established more than 40 delivery units. Complementing this model, some countries have also utilized delivery labs as a tool to set agendas and agree on priorities and implementation strategies. Consulting and expert advice on how to improve delivery and implementation is a common theme for non-profits and private firms working with governments, and these models are often explicitly recommended.



Yet these approaches have rarely been the subject of peer-reviewed academic research, especially in developing countries. The little scholarly work that does exist is primarily focused on cases in the UK, US, and Canada. For decision-makers, there is also no objective policy-oriented evidence base of the conditions under which a delivery approach will succeed in different contexts. In addition, the proliferation of applications of these approaches has led to a variety of perceptions of delivery. There is no broadly accepted understanding of it or definition of its varied approaches. This matters particularly for the many countries (and donors) concerned about ensuring reforms reach marginalized groups that often see fewer improvements in learning outcomes.



The Education Commission and the University of Oxford, with funding from the FCDO, have partnered to fill this gap in the evidence literature, launching the ‘How to Deliver Education Reform in Developing Countries” (DeliverEd). The programme aims to generate evidence on effective Delivery Approaches and the mechanisms by which they enhance management practices among bureaucrats and therefore implementation of national priorities. The DeliverEd research defines a delivery approach as “an institutionalized unit or structured process within a government bureaucracy that aims to rapidly improve bureaucratic functioning and policy delivery by combining a set of managerial functions in a novel way to shift attention from inputs and processes to outputs and outcomes.” Delivery approaches typically introduce a new set of management practices or reconfigure existing practices in order to shift attention to a defined set of measurable results. These management practices commonly include:



· Target setting and prioritization

· Measurement and monitoring

· Political sponsorship

· Accountability for performance (via incentives)

· Vertical and horizontal problem solving and organizational learning



Most research on delivery approaches draws on single historical case studies, where there is limited use of systematic process tracing and outcome data; and few structured cross-national comparisons. For this reason, our understanding of how delivery approaches change administrative routines, practices and cultures along a delivery chain from central government to individual schools is weak – despite mounting concern internationally with the implementation challenges that characterizes efforts to improve learning outcomes in many educational systems in low and middle-income countries.



The panel will present 5 working papers from the research programme. The first is a conceptual working paper that sets out the conceptual framework and its theoretical foundations for Delivery Approaches. The second paper presents a summary of a global scan of Delivery Units around the world and the trends and patterns they exhibit. The third working paper outlines the methodology used for the DeliverEd comparative empirical research across five country cases: Pakistan, Ghana, Tanzania, Jordan and India. The fourth and fifth working papers will be presenting initial quantitative and qualitative findings from the research into Pakistan’s Punjab Roadmap.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Clare Leaver, University of Oxford

Individual Presentations

• Delivery Approaches to Improving Policy Implementation: A Conceptual Framework - Martin J. Williams, University of Oxford; Clare Leaver, University of Oxford; Karen Mundy, Toronto University; Zahra Mansoor, University of Oxford; Dana Qarout, University of Oxford; Minahil Asim, University of Toronto; Sheena Bell, OISE, University of Toronto

• Global Mapping of Delivery Units Around the World - Dana Qarout, University of Oxford; Zahra Mansoor, University of Oxford; Kate Anderson, the Education Commission; Martin J. Williams, University of Oxford

• Methodological Paper for Cross-Country Delivery Approaches Research - Karen Mundy, Toronto University; Sheena Bell, OISE, University of Toronto; Minahil Asim, University of Toronto

• Assessing the Role of Information and Accountability in the Performance of Centralized Delivery Units - Daniel Rogger, World Bank

• Understanding the Impact of a high-stakes accountability reform on bureaucratic practice in education in Punjab, Pakistan - Rabea Malik, Lahore University of Management Sciences; Soufia Siddiqi, LUMS