Corporate report

FCDO response to ICAI recommendations on assessing UK aid's results in education

Published 9 June 2022

The UK government welcomes the Independent Commission for Aid Impact’s (ICAI) assessment of the impact, effectiveness, and equity of UK aid on education, with a particular focus on girls’ education.

The UK government is a major donor to education and has led the international community in championing 12 years of quality education for every girl. In 2021, as G7 President and hosts of the Global Education Summit and COP we led the world in prioritising girls’ education as part of the global COVID recovery.

Under our G7 Presidency, we secured G7 support for two ambitious Global Objectives, to get 40 million more girls into school, and 20 million more girls reading by the age of 10, in low- and lower-middle-income countries, by 2026. The Prime Minister and G7 leaders also committed to prioritise girls’ education in the recovery from Covid-19. We will continue to prioritise learning for all, particularly the most marginalised girls, including, in 2022, through the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, and the Transforming Education Summit. Our 2021 Girls’ Education Action Plan sets out the UK approach.

We welcome ICAI’s recognition of the government’s strong commitment to and investment in global education and their acknowledgement that:

• FCDO’s education policy is ambitious, well implemented and meeting the needs of most children, particularly girls
• a sample of bilateral and multilateral programmes supported by DFID/ FCDO largely met overall expectations in delivering their planned activities effectively
• DFID/ FCDO has been influential in strengthening multilateral education programming, including through the Education Cannot Wait (ECW) fund and the Global Partnership for Education (GPE)
• FCDO has implemented programming relevant to the needs of marginalised children, especially hard-to-reach girls, and is seen as a global leader in this area

ICAI’s report rightly recognises the challenges around ensuring that education spending results in children learning better and the lack of common metrics for tracking the quality of children’s learning during the review period. As highlighted to the Committee, FCDO is working on developing an approach to better track the improvements to learning and the quality of education supported by our programming. Accurately measuring children’s learning outcomes and tracking their progress over time requires concerted action across the sector and globally and we are already using our leadership role accordingly. Our response to ICAI’s specific recommendations is as follows:

Recommendation 1

Future FCDO aid for education should have a greater focus on children’s learning, based on evidence of what works that is relevant to the context.

Response: accept

The Covid-19 pandemic has deepened a pre-existing learning crisis, with greatest impact for the most marginalised children. Understanding students’ learning levels, as they return to school, and helping them recover any learning lost has never been more urgent. As set out in our 2021 Girls’ Education Action Plan and embodied in our new Global Objectives endorsed by the G7 last year, the FCDO is firmly committed to improving children’s learning outcomes, particularly for the most marginalised girls.

Whilst significant challenges remain to improving learning at scale, FCDO will focus on building consensus across the international community on what works. We will support the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP), a group of leading international experts, to provide succinct, usable, and policy-focused recommendations to support policymakers’ decision-making on education investments, including in response to Covid-19. We will continue to invest in and share evidence of what works in education for different contexts, building on our flagship research programmes, such as RISE (Research on Improving Systems of Education).

The FCDO’s new What Works Hub for Global Education, launched in 2021 alongside our Action Plan and our wider portfolio of bilateral and multilateral investments in education will support governments to select, test, adapt and scale the most cost- effective reforms to ensure all children are learning, with a focus on marginalised girls. We will support national governments willing to tackle the learning crisis head on, so that they can test, adapt, and scale education reforms and cost-effective interventions most likely to improve teaching and address learning losses.

Recommendation 2

FCDO should accelerate its work with partner governments to improve their ability to collect and use good data on children’s learning.

Response: accept

In many low and lower middle-income countries, reliable information on what children learn, especially in primary school, is not collected frequently, or at all. This limits our understanding of children’s learning levels globally and limits the evidence we have on the impact of both government-led and donor supported programmes.

Since 2018, UK support to UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics and Global Education Monitoring, including expertise from England’s Standards and Testing Agency, has contributed to the development of a new global framework for learning proficiency. It provides national governments with a vital tool for curriculum reform and learning assessment design. It sets clear expectations for what children should reasonably be able to achieve in maths and reading from primary grades 1 to 9, if provided with good learning materials and instruction. This framework and other global tools developed with UNESCO can now be used by countries to detect gaps/misalignment, and support the revisions of educational standards, curricula, learning materials, teacher training, and assessments.

Following the pandemic’s school closures, FCDO’s firm focus is to support partner governments’ recover and improve children’s foundational learning. This will include working with partners to generate more and regular data on children’s learning levels, and using it to drive better policy decisions, and improve the implementation of education reforms and to scale the most cost effective interventions to improve learning.

In 2021, we secured G7 endorsement to two new Global Objectives for girls’ education. FCDO is developing a new results framework to track the UK’s contribution to the G7 goals on access and learning through our programming and diplomacy work. This will enable the UK to better report the impact of FCDO’s education portfolio on improving the quality of education and ultimately children’s learning. Given the current challenges with internationally comparable data on learning, we anticipate the new framework will contain a mix of quantitative and qualitative measures, to better capture the full breadth of the UK’s support to improving education.

Recommendation 3

FCDO should ensure that all its aid to education maintains a consistent focus on girls in its design and implementation.

Response: accept

As ICAI reported in its 2018 follow-up to its 2016 education review focused on marginalised and disadvantaged girls, DFID ‘had made impressive improvements to address the shortcomings’ identified by that review. We have therefore made progress but agree there is still more to do. As set out in the 2021 Girls’ Education Action Plan, we will redouble our efforts to ensure all girls are supported to go to school and learn. Following publication of the International Development Strategy in May 2022, the Foreign Secretary will launch a new Women and Girls’ Strategy and restore funding to key priorities such as girls’ education. To accelerate progress against our G7 endorsed Global Objectives, we will also establish a new centre of excellence for education to i) further improve the quality of UK programming and (ii) bolster UK influencing so that governments and education partners are also supported to deliver more evidence-based policy and planning.

A consistent focus on girls does not mean we do not care about boys and most of our programming will continue to support both girls and boys. Our approach to girls’ education is embedded in a wider goal to ensure education systems are more inclusive for all children and contribute to more gender equal and fair societies. By involving boys and men in our education programming, we can address the harmful gender stereotypes and improve the restrictive situation and discrimination holding girls and women back. Teaching which challenges discriminatory values and beliefs and expands children’s horizons is as important for boys, as for girls. However, we will measure our success by the progress made by the girl in the most challenging of circumstances. If she is thriving in education, then we will know we are making progress.

Recommendation 4

To promote systemic change that benefits the most marginalised, FCDO should have a greater focus on dissemination and uptake of evidence of what works for these groups.

Response: accept

We agree that having an even greater focus on dissemination and uptake of evidence of what works will contribute to promoting systemic change that benefits the most marginalised. This will continue to be an integral part of our policy, programme, and international work.

We will work to achieve this ambition through our portfolio of education research investments, which focus on what works for the most marginalised children, particularly girls. Through the EdTech Hub, we will undertake new research, and share evidence with governments, innovators and implementers on how education technology solutions can improve learning at scale for all children including the most marginalised, in a cost-effective way. Our new Education Research in Conflict and Protracted Crisis (ERICC) programme will generate rigorous evidence on what works for delivering education to children affected by conflict and crisis and embed this knowledge in policy and practice by providing technical advice and support for in-country partners, alongside wider global and national dissemination efforts. As we enter the final three years of the Global Education Challenge (GEC), learning and evaluation are our top priorities, alongside delivering the results through the remaining projects. Reflecting this ambition, in February 2022, we agreed a comprehensive framework for collating, synthesising, and disseminating learning from the Girls’ Education Challenge. The framework will promote sustainability analysis and planning at project and portfolio levels, together with outreach activities with key stakeholders at national, country, and global levels.

We disagree with ICAI’s finding and problem statement that budget reductions have reduced the GEC’s ability to disseminate learning. The GEC incurred relatively modest budget cuts in 2020. In making these cuts we focused on enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of all three programme components (projects, fund manager and independent evaluator). We are confident that activities to share learning at both project and portfolio level are sufficiently resourced.

Recommendation 5

FCDO should enhance the convening and influencing role it often plays in partner countries to promote the impact of aid to education on learning.

Response: accept

FCDO has established a good reputation for convening and influencing through expert staff based in partner countries and plays a key role in improving the impact of, and coordination between, education ODA channelled through global funds such as the GPE and ECW. We are already building on this foundation, including by providing additional support to our country-based education advisers to enhance UK influence over funding from other sources, and to maximise efficiency, effectiveness, and ultimately impact on learning. We are running a series of learning sessions to ensure education advisers understand GPE’s new strategy and operating model (2020-2026) and are well-prepared to capitalise on the benefits it offers in terms of the prioritisation and implementation of GPE funds.

FCDO is committed to securing better coordination and coherence between GPE and ECW, both at HQ and country level and have already begun this work. We have convened donors to form a consolidated position on what is needed next from both GPE and ECW. We will continue to work closely with GPE and ECW to ensure there are clear operational guidance and processes in place for their joint work in emergencies and protracted crises.

As set out in the International Development Strategy, FCDO is committed to restoring funding for Women and Girls, which includes funding for girls’ education.