Education Research Programme Consortia (RPCs)
The Human Development Team of the Central Research Department (CRD) has just
commissioned a number of new programmes of research. Three consortia of
researchers, including northern and southern partners, have just been awarded
contracts in the following areas:
HD10: Consortium for Research on Educational Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE)
 CREATE seeks to generate knowledge and insight to improve access to basic education and reduce
poverty. It will achieve this through a programme of research, capacity
building, and communication and dissemination with partners in Bangladesh,
Ghana, India, South Africa, and the U.K. Its activities will be designed to
support progress towards Education for All, feed directly into practice, inform
reviews of progress towards the MDGs, and influence national and international
policy.
Access to basic education lies at the heart of development. Lack of education
is both a part of the definition of poverty and a means for its diminution.
Sustained access is critical to long term improvements in productivity, the
reduction of inter-generational cycles of poverty, demographic transition,
preventive health care, the empowerment of women, and reductions in inequality.
Exclusion from basic education is a process culminating in an event with
multiple causalities. CREATE will work across four ‘zones of vulnerability’.
These are defined by populations which (i) have no access to education (ii)
enrol but drop out before completion (iii) attend but are silently excluded and
learn little in school, and (iv) complete primary but fail to enter secondary
schooling.
The key question CREATE addresses is how to increase meaningful educational
access for those between the ages of 5 to 15 years. The numbers are large. Even
where primary gross enrolment rates exceed 100%, national data indicates that
attendance may be below 70%, completion rates may fall below 50%, and fewer than
20% may attend lower secondary.
CREATE will chart current patterns of access and exclusion, explore how
supply and demand side constrain access, identify strategies to include those
currently excluded from basic education, generate methods to improve
progression, completion and transition rates, and analyse the political, social
and economic conditions, institutional mechanisms and investment strategies
which will facilitate EFA up to, and beyond, 2015.
Members of the consortium are as follows:
- Applicant Institution: The Centre for International Education, School of
Education, Sussex Institute, University of Sussex (UK)
- Bangladesh: Institute of Education and Development, BRAC University, Dhaka (Dr Manzoor Ahmed)
- Ghana: The University of Education at Winneba (Professor Jerome Djangmah)
- India: The National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration,
Delhi (Dr R.Govinda)
- South Africa: The Education Policy Consortium (EPC) (Enver Motala)
- United Kingdom: The Institute of Development Studies at Sussex (Dr Ramya
Subrahmanian)
- United Kingdom: The Institute of Education, University of London (Professor
Angela Little)
Other partners may be granted associate status including those in Malawi,
Kenya, Tanzania and Sri Lanka.
Director: Keith Lewin, University of Sussex
HD9: Implementing Quality Education in Low Income Countries
The RPC will generate new knowledge to assist governments in low
income countries, DfID and the international development community to implement
initiatives that will improve the quality of education in ways that will benefit
the poorest people in the world and will promote gender equity. Special
attention will be given to remote, overcrowded and otherwise difficult delivery
contexts and to meeting the educational needs of the most disadvantaged groups.
Policy makers, practitioners and NGOs will be engaged in determining priorities
and in designing and implementing practical solutions. Research will link state
of the art school effectiveness techniques with in-depth, cross-national studies
of curriculum change, teaching and learning, assessment, ICTs in education,
languages and literacy and leadership and management. A key priority will be the
dissemination of outputs targeted at policy makers, NGOs and the international
development community using a virtual Quality Education Network alongside
existing networks, workshops and more traditional printed media. The RPC will
develop the capacity of partner institutions in Africa to become regional
centres of excellence in research, teaching and policy advocacy in the field of
quality education and of governments in these regions to implement quality
improvement initiatives. The work of the RPC will cover the consortium partner
countries of Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa and Tanzania although several other
countries in South Asia and Latin America will be included in specific projects.
Members of the consortium are as follows:
- Applicant Institution: Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol,
UK
- United Kingdom: Department of Education, University of Bath
- Ghana: Institute for Educational Planning and Administration, University of
the Cape Cost
- Tanzania: Faculty of Education, University of Dar es Salaam
- Rwanda: Kigali Institute of Education
- South Africa: Education Policy Unit, University of the Witwatersrand
Director: Dr Leon Tikly, University of Bristol
HD8: Improving the Outcomes of Education for Pro-Poor Development: Breaking the Cycle of Deprivation
Poverty often leads to inferior educational outcomes. Those outcomes in turn play a major role in
determining the future extent and incidence of poverty. The core objectives of
this programme of research are to study the mechanisms that drive this cycle of
deprivation and to identify the policies needed to ensure that educational
outcomes properly benefit the disadvantaged. It is clear that a simple expansion
of education systems does not always benefit the poor, particularly where the
quality of education is very low. During this five-year research programme, more
children than ever before - particularly those from poor households - will be
moving through schooling and training to become working youths and adults. Their
fortunes will be affected not only by their educational experiences, but also by
the broader context of welfare and opportunity that they confront. The multi-sectoral
objectives of the Millennium Development Goals acknowledge this interdependence.
Yet its nature and strength is not always well understood, and judgements about
priorities for policy change, or about their sequencing, are not always firmly
based. Our research will help clarify these matters, focussing upon the
circumstances of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa - the two regions of the
world where the challenge of achieving the MDG objective of halving world
poverty by 2015 is greatest and where the policy benefits are most urgently
required.'
Members of the consortium are as follows:
- Applicant Institution: Centre for Commonwealth Education, University of
Cambridge, UK;
- Ghana: Associates for Change, Accra
- United Kingdom: Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) University of Oxford
- India: Collaborative Research and Dissemination (CORD), New Delhi
- Kenya: Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi
- Pakistan: Mahbub Ul Haq Human Development Centre,
Islamabad
- United Kingdom: School of Social and Political Studies, University of
Edinburgh
Director: Christopher Colclough, University of Cambridge
Last updated: 25 August 2005
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