Transforming Policymaking into Action: Lessons from STA-DEEP’s Decentralized Teacher Development in Sindh, Pakistan

• In Event: Supporting Teacher Education: Reflective Learning, Inclusive Resources, and Decentralized Teacher Development

Proposal

The Sindh Technical Assistance—Development of Enhanced Education Programme (STA-DEEP), implemented from 2019 to 2025, supported the Sindh Education and Literacy Department (SELD), Government of Sindh, Pakistan, to build an education system that is adaptable, data-driven, and equity-oriented. The programme pursued three objectives: (1) establish evidence-based planning and financial management within SELD; (2) improve data integration and use for effective planning and service delivery; and (3) enhance decentralized education delivery through school clustering, with an emphasis on capacity building and sustainability.

Situated within principal-agent theory, this presentation focuses on Objective 3 and investigates the fidelity of policy implementation of a cluster-based model of continuous professional development (CPD) that grouped 400 schools into 20 clusters to promote collaboration, resource sharing, and ongoing learning. The intervention created Guide Teachers and Subject Coordinators to facilitate peer learning, delivered CPD training cycles in core subjects, and provided leadership development for head teachers and administrators to sustain CPD at the cluster level.
Policy context: Following Pakistan’s 18th Constitutional Amendment (2010), which devolved curriculum development and education policymaking to provinces, Sindh leveraged its expanded mandate to adopt the Sindh School Clustering Policy (2021), clarifying provincial and district roles, financing, and accountability for cluster-based CPD; STA-DEEP’s work is assessed against this enabling framework.

We employed a convergent mixed-methods design that allowed us to integrate and compare the findings from a desk review of policy and program documentation with key informant interviews (SELD officials, district education managers, head teachers, and guide teachers), focus group discussions with teachers, and a teacher survey (Cresswell 2022). We apply thematic coding to qualitative data and descriptive statistics to survey results, triangulating across sources to assess implementation, perceived effects on instructional practice and school management, and conditions for sustainability and scale.

Study main question: What STA-DEEP design features and implementation practices should inform the design and delivery of high-quality, equitable, and inclusive school-clustering policy and cluster-based CPD in Sindh?

We identify design features (e.g., peer facilitators, protected time, cluster governance), enabling conditions (data use, leadership, financing), and bottlenecks (workload, geographic dispersion, turnover). We offer policy recommendations for SELD, teacher education institutions, and internal development partners on institutionalizing cluster governance, budgeting for CPD, and strengthening monitoring, providing transferable lessons for decentralized teacher-development reforms in comparable systems.

Authors

• Imdad Ali Baloch, International Education Policy Department, University of Maryland, College Park

• Daman A. Bozdar, The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst)