Education and development the issues and the evidence - Education Research Paper
No. 06, 1993, 61 p.
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2.6 Organisational reforms,
assessment and alternative
delivery systems
2.6.1 Organisational issues
2.6.2 Achievement and automatic promotion
2.6.3 Assessment and examinations
2.6.4 Alternative delivery strategies
2.6.1 Organisational issues
Ways of organising and providing educational services vary widely. The key policy
question is which organisational and pedagogical reforms have the most potential to
improve internal efficiency without loss in quality. Three preliminary observations
provide a starting point.
First, the number of school days is not a constant between countries. For example, in
the 23 IEA science study countries (Postlethwaite and Wiley 1991) the number of
teaching days in the year for 10 year olds varied from 158 in Ghana to 220 in Korea a
variation of nearly 40%. When it is realised that the number of teaching hours a day
also varies independently - perhaps by as much as 2:1 - the range of instructional time
formally available to students may vary by a factor of two and probably by more (the
length of the teaching year in the 23 IEA countries varies between 672 hours (Hungary)
and 1134 hours (Nigeria) with a modal value around 950 hours. The teaching loads of
teachers are also unevenly distributed in some countries these may exceed 30 hours a
week in double shift schools with the majority of this time being spent in contact with
children, in others loads of three or four periods a day are common, amounting to about
10 to 15 hours teaching a week. Teacher class ratios span the range from less than one
to as much as 2.5:1 in more favoured institutions. The number of non-teaching staff on
school payrolls also varies from minimal allocations, to numbers that can be
comparable with the number of teachers. These facts suggest that there may be
opportunities to increase internal efficiency through changed working practices.