Contact: Claire Shewbridge Rien Rouw

Transcription

1 Contact: Claire Shewbridge Rien Rouw

2 2 Table of contents Background... 3 Aims... 4 Design... 4 Participants... 4 Preparation... 5 Carrying out the seminar... 5 Follow-up... 5 Costs... 5 The SEG Learning Seminars in brief SEG Learning Seminars apply OECD's insights on strategic education governance to specific policy challenges. Countries/systems can draw lessons for governance practice by contrasting and comparing their governance approaches and the challenges they face. The seminars will produce new knowledge or make tacit knowledge explicit, by deepening our insight in the design and implications of implementation strategies. Cornerstones of each Learning Seminar: A focus on reconstruction of real-life policy experiences with the help of stakeholders involved Each host country or system decides the theme in consultation with the OECD Each Seminar has an explicit phase of reflection and translation to different contexts The OECD prepares a background paper, in close collaboration with the host country, as a basis for each seminar The OECD prepares a short final report on the main findings Duration of days

3 3 Background The OECD work on Strategic Education Governance identifies six domains as the cornerstones of strategic governance: strategic thinking, accountability, capacity, stakeholder involvement, knowledge governance, whole-of-system perspective (see Box 1). Although these domains provide a framework for strategic governance of today s complex education systems, translating them into national, regional and local contexts and for particular policies is not always obvious and calls for differentiation and contextualisation. To facilitate this, the SEG Learning Seminars support countries to learn from each other on how to realise those elements in the everyday governance of specific policies, such as reducing school drop-out or improving the achievement of disadvantaged children. The SEG Learning Seminars will create a space where country representatives can learn from exchanging and studying real life cases. Box 1. Strategic Education Governance Organisational Framework The Strategic Education Governance (SEG) project supports countries/systems in identifying how to achieve system-wide objectives for education in complex contexts: Multiple actors are involved in decision-making at different governance levels. At the same time, the availability of education performance data engages parents and other stakeholders. Nonetheless, ministries of education remain responsible for ensuring high quality, efficient, equitable and innovative education. The study of complex systems requires a step back to examine how the various interconnections can form a coherent whole, in what way current structures facilitate or hinder this coherence, and how best to develop new forms of governance that take this complexity into account (Snyder, 2013 [1] ). This analytical lens, coupled with empirical work and efforts to develop aspirational indicators to analyse governance gaps, strengthens our ability to provide realistic and feasible suggestions for policy reform and strong examples from the field. Facilitating this, the work of the SEG project revolves around an Organisational Framework comprising six domains: Strategic thinking, to promote forward-looking policy making and to balance long-term strategic goals with short-term priorities. Accountability, to enable local discretion in policy making while limiting fragmentation, and to promote a culture of learning and improvement. Capacity, to ensure capacity for policy-making and implementation and to foster collaborative capacity building. Whole-of-system perspective, to mitigate tensions and to develop synergies across the system. Stakeholder involvement, to integrate knowledge and perspectives of diverse stakeholders as well as to foster ownership, trust and support. Knowledge governance, to engender a culture of using rich data and varied knowledge to improve policy making and realisation.

4 4 Aims Design The aim of the SEG Learning Seminars is to make the insights on strategic education actionable and to inspire systems to draw lessons for governance practice by contrasting and comparing their governance approaches and the challenges they face in governing their systems. This will provide critical feedback on their own systems, strengthen their self-reflection on the role of government in complex systems, and expand their repertoire to act effectively in various forms of governance. Both for participating countries and countries in general the seminars will produce new knowledge about implementation and realisation issues, or make tacit knowledge explicit, by deepening insight to the design and implications of implementation strategies. In particular, the seminars aim to: Participants gain a deeper understanding of the issues at stake and the range of governance options available across countries; learn about effective and/or innovative governance policy practice in other countries and context-specific obstacles and enablers, and develop consequently decisional capital of participants; identify governance options and possible trajectories (next practice) for future action; and generate knowledge of the actual how-to of implementation and realisation of policies. For the purpose of creating an engaging learning environment, methods focus on enactment and translation: A first phase focuses on the direct reconstruction of policy experiences, ideally with the help of stakeholders involved in the policy process. This is followed by an explicit phase of reflection and translation to different contexts. The cases are meant to illustrate and apply governance concepts. The approach is deliberately interactive, with participants actively engaging in discussion and explicit reflection. A learning seminar will generally take days. Ideally a group of around four countries will participate in a particular seminar. Each country can delegate two or three participants. Participants may come from different layers of the education system; it is up to the country to decide upon the delegation. One of the participating countries will host the seminar. This host country will not only provide facilities but also the main case to be discussed. Jointly decided by the SEG team and the host country, invitations are extended to comparable systems; however, there will be room to invite an outlier to insert radically different perspectives and sharpening the discussion. The main case will be presented by the most involved policy makers and external stakeholders from the host country. Optionally, one to two experts can be invited to strengthen reflection and translation. The SEG-team will provide theoretical and empirical insights from previous work on

5 5 Preparation governing complex education systems 1 and ongoing work on strategic governance. The seminar will be guided by an experienced facilitator. Seminars will be designed in close cooperation with the host country and taking into account considerations of the participating countries. For each seminar both a governance topic will be selected (for example participatory governance or accountability) as well as a particular policy initiative (for example introducing a new curriculum or attracting and retaining high quality teachers) as illustration of the governance issue. Cases might either be retrospective or prospective. For each seminar a background paper will be drafted jointly by the SEG-team and the host country. Part of the preparatory document will be a short country questionnaire to collect the learning needs of the participants. Carrying out the seminar Follow-up Costs Seminars will take days. The seminar starts with an introduction of the governance topic at hand. The next step is the reconstruction (for retrospective cases) or elaboration (for prospective cases) of the main policy case by the host country. The reconstruction (or elaboration, respectively) involves policy makers, stakeholders and potentially experts to get a comprehensive view on the case and to learn about the involvement and interests of various stakeholders. Ideally, the case presentation includes evaluation results or exploratory research, or draws from research on governance in general. A site visit could also be part of the reconstruction (elaboration) phase. This phase is followed by discussion, translation to other systems and reflection, among others based on a comparison between / systems, resulting in a list of challenges and opportunities. Short presentations of country experiences might be included. The last step entails the formulation of lessons and recommendations for governance interventions across countries. A short designing exercise might be part of this. The discussions and outcomes of the seminar will be included in a short final report (5-10 pages) prepared by the SEG-team in consultation with the host country. Publication of this report will be decided upon in consultation with the participating countries. Starting with the biennium , key lessons of all corresponding seminars will be included in a publicly available synthesis report at the end of a given biennium. Costs are to be discussed with respective host countries. 1 Work on governing complex education systems (GCES) was carried out between 2011 and The GCES project aimed to help countries develop and realize policies to meet modern education governance challenges (OECD, 2016 [2] ). Two volumes synthesize the conceptual and empirical work undertaken (Burns, Köster and Fuster, 2016 [3] ; Burns and Köster, 2016 [4] ) and provide the basis for ongoing work on strategic education governance.

6 6 References Burns, T., F. Köster and M. Fuster (2016), Education Governance in Action: Lessons from Case Studies, Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing, Paris, Burns, T. and F. Köster (2016), Governing Education in a Complex World, Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing, Paris, OECD (2016), Governing Complex Education Systems - Project Overview , OECD, Paris, Snyder, S. (2013), The Simple, the Complicated, and the Complex: Educational Reform Through the Lens of Complexity Theory, OECD Education Working Papers, No. 96, OECD Publishing, Paris, [3] [4] [2] [1]