2.1.2 Planning, Programming and Budgeting

1. District level planning

There is little or no coordinated and needs based planning for the education sector in any of the districts. Planning is done one year at a time and there is often a lack of continuity between one year's plan and the following year. The budget sent to the district government budget team is generally more of a 'wish list' based on the previous year's budget, rather than being based on a long term plan which has been developed from a needs analysis. There are no consultative procedures whereby schools can make proposals for funding from the APBD according to their needs.

The participatory planning procedures developed by the PERFORM project do not seem to have spread to the education sector with the exception of Pati where some consultative meetings have taken place. Dinas Pendidikan and the local branch of MORA make proposals to the local government budget committee based on only internal consultations. Likewise although some training in performance budgeting has been given at national level, its application in the education sector is reported to be weak.

2. Funding to schools

There is no allocation in any of the districts of a block grant to schools to support school based management. The only grants received by school are from provincial and central levels from a variety of GOI and donor funded projects.

Where grants have been given to school committees to manage, especially for rehabilitation of buildings, there is general agreement in all districts that the results are much more satisfactory than if the funds are managed at district level and tendered for by local contractors. In many cases local communities make their own matching contribution with the result that more repairs are able to take place for the same amount of money and the quality of the repairs is superior.

3. School Mapping and Data Collection

A priority policy of central government is to establish universal nine years compulsory basic education. In order to achieve this a considerable program of building of secondary schools and establishing informal schooling such as open SMP has been going on for several years, but it will be many years at the present rate of progress before anything near to universal attendance is achieved. School rationalisation (mergers, establishment of multi-grade schools) and building of new schools require reliable data on school and population numbers. By their own admission, several districts do not have up-to-date data on which to base their planning.

In several districts school mapping and data collection was undertaken in 1999-2000, before decentralisation and no updating of the data has taken place since. Central government reports that its annual census of schools in 2002 yielded only a 30% response rate, compared to 80% in 2000. Where routine data collection from schools takes place, it is, according to districts, in all cases used only for reporting and not for planning. Annual budgeting is generally based on the previous year's budget, rather than an analysis of needs based on data collected.

4. Monitoring

Representatives of various branches of local government including Bappeda, Dinas Pendidikan, the finance department and the supervisory board (Bawasda) make monitoring visits to schools, which are limited to physical activities (building and repairs). Pengawas make regular visits to schools, but often lack any monitoring guidelines or format. The data from the monitoring that takes place is generally used to fill in reports rather than as information to support planning. Various monitoring forms exist - on physical repairs, teacher and pupil data, financial reports - but these reports are rarely if ever questioned or analysed.

Conclusions and planned further action

The program will work with the PERFORM project to investigate ways in which participatory planning and performance budgeting at district level can be extended and improved in the education sector. The SBM training program will introduce participatory planning and transparent accounting involving schools and communities. The program will encourage increased budget allocations direct to schools to support this process.

In order to facilitate needs based planning the program will assist two sub-districts in each district to develop school mapping and data collection and to analyse and use the data to plan for improvements in the system. Plans made at district, sub-district and school levels will be expected to include targets determined by the stakeholders, whose achievement will be monitored by them and by the consultants.

2.2 Management Issues

2.2.1 Improving Access to and the Efficiency of the Provision of Basic Education

1. Teacher Deployment

Table 3 sets out basic data on the numbers of schools, teachers and students in each of the five program districts.