Assessing UK aid’s results in education

Education systems in developing countries have expanded schooling at a rapid rate in recent decades, but there is now an urgent need to drive up quality and learning to resolve what has been described as a “learning crisis”. There are also huge inequalities in access to and achievements in learning, including for girls (for example, an estimated three-quarters of primary school age children who may never start school are girls), children with disabilities and those affected by conflict and crises, made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Tackling these problems is integral to meeting Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 – Quality Education.

The purpose of this review is to assess the results of work by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the former Department for International Development (DFID, now part of FCDO) on education, particularly for girls. In 2020, DFID estimated that, between 2015 and 2020, it supported at least 15.6 million children to gain a decent education. This review will test and explore the integrity of these estimated results through: assessing the accuracy and significance of the results reported, testing whether DFID/FCDO education programming has achieved its stated objectives, including boosting the quality of education, improving learning outcomes and directing resources to children at risk of being left behind, and assessing whether DFID/FCDO is achieving sustainable impact through its aid to education.

The review will cover DFID/FCDO’s global education portfolio since 2015, and will assess the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent cuts to the UK aid budget on its impact. It will focus on primary and lower secondary education, as these were key areas of DFID’s 2018 education policy. It will cover bilateral, centrally managed, multilateral (core contributions and ‘multi-bi’ programmes) and humanitarian spending. We will consider girls’ education in particular as we answer the review questions. This review will reflect largely on work carried out by the former DFID but it will make recommendations for the new FCDO to take forward.

DFID’s 2018 education policy stated that “education is a human right which unlocks individual potential and benefits all of society, powering sustainable development”. Global progress in education is too slow to achieve the SDG education targets by 2030. Even before the pandemic, in 2017, around 90% of children in low-income countries and 75% of children in lower-middle-income countries could not read or complete basic maths by the end of primary school. In 2018, 59 million children of primary school age and 62 million of lower secondary school age were not in school. There were also major inequalities in access to and achievements in learning, with disparities between rich and poor students beginning early, widening over time and being compounded by other sources of disadvantage, such as gender, disability and location. These inequalities have been exacerbated by the pandemic. The UN has described it as a “generational catastrophe” and found that two in three students are still affected by full or partial school closures one year into the crisis.

The UK government has made successive commitments to global education, especially to girls’ education. In particular, the Conservative Party’s 2015 manifesto set a target that, by 2020, the government would help at least 11 million children in the poorest countries gain a decent education and promote girls’ education.

This review is built around the evaluation criteria of effectiveness, equity and impact. It will address the following questions and sub-questions. Review questions and sub-questions have been developed for each of the above criteria (see Table 1).

Table 1: Our review questions

The review methodology includes the following five components, to allow for data triangulation to robustly answer the review questions.

Figure 1: Overview of the methodology

In sampling activities funded by different modalities of aid, we have aimed to achieve a balance that broadly reflects the contributions of these different channels to DFID/FCDO’s results claims.

We have selected the centrally managed and ‘multi-bi’ programmes that contributed the most to the global results and which had the greatest basic education spend to date:

• Girls’ Education Challenge – £569 million spent over two phases since 2015.
• Support for the Global Partnership for Education – £374 million spent over two phases since 2015.
• Support for Education Cannot Wait – £92.7 million spent over two phases since 2015.

The multilateral fund that made by far the largest contribution to DFID/FCDO’s imputed education results through the UK’s core contributions was IDA. We have therefore selected it for assessment. We will ensure that we learn from, and do not duplicate, the work of ICAI’s ongoing review on the UK’s spending through IDA.

Criteria for the countries and bilateral programmes included in our sample are: contribution to results, relevant spend, range of programming and range of country contexts. As a result, we selected Bangladesh, Tanzania, South Sudan, Syria, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. We plan to conduct virtual visits and in-person citizens’ voice work in Bangladesh and Tanzania.

Table 2: Selected countries – UK aid to education received through different channels since 2015

The review sets out to examine DFID/FCDO’s work on basic education and the results of this spending and activity. This is ambitious due to the scale and diversity of relevant basic education programming, which takes place through different channels. This review is therefore at a strategic level, giving a broad understanding of the spending priorities attached to this area of work and the contribution of different funding channels. The methodology has a number of limitations.

First, given the large and complex portfolio, the review will only be able to examine selected countries and programmes. This will limit the extent to which it will be able to report findings which can be generalised. Our assessment will be based on a sample of countries that provides good overall coverage of the expenditure of basic education programmes, including good coverage of those that contribute to DFID/FCDO’s reported results. Six country assessments, including two visits, will look at performance across multiple funding streams. In addition, the strategic review will consider the whole of the portfolio in scope.

Second, COVID-19 has disrupted education programmes since March 2020, posing a risk to the sustainability of the results reported. We will, therefore, explore available qualitative evidence concerning the response to COVID-19 and the extent to which results reported between 2015 and 2020 have been affected, including implications for sustainability.

Finally, there are some methodological constraints to assessing the extent to which DFID/FCDO programmes are based on evidence of ‘what works’ and the needs of targeted communities. Although the literature on the effectiveness of aid for education is extensive, there remain areas where evidence is weaker, for example on ‘what works’ in crisis settings. Evidence can also be context-specific. The review will therefore take into account available evidence from the literature and draw on qualitative evidence from stakeholders, including citizens, in selected case study countries. Areas where evidence is missing or inconclusive will be noted.

There are a range of risks that need to be addressed in undertaking this review. The table below identifies these risks as well as the mitigating actions that we will take in order to ensure they do not undermine the research.

Table 4: Risks and mitigation

The table below sets out the timing of the key phases and deliverables for this review.