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Under the Primary Education Development Programme (PEDP-III), the School-Level Improvement Plan—now known as the School Learning Improvement Plan (SLIP)—aims to raise primary enrollment and completion rates as well as learning outcomes by promoting decentralisation, boosting local involvement in school administration, and strengthening relationships between schools and the community.
In 2007, the SLIP initiative launched in 13 upazilas (sub-districts) as a pilot programme after the successful outcomes from six sub-districts in 2006 to trial the core procedures. Under PEDP-II, around 40 Upazila Education Offices (UEO) were established between 2008 and 2009 to support the expansion of SLIP in the remaining sub-districts of Bangladesh. Scaling-up began in 2009, providing sub-districts with technical and financial support to raise the general standard of primary education. As of 2013, SLIP is operational in the GPS of 280 of the 469 sub-districts in the country.
PEDP-II proposed decentralisation as the most prominent implementation approach for improving quality and equity in primary education. The objective was to promote the active participation of stakeholders at the grass-roots level in the development, execution, and monitoring of educational activities for children. SLIP promotes a bottom-up planning process, as does the process of preparing an Upazila Primary Education Plan (UPEP) in each upazila (sub-district). Primarily, it focused on establishing a system for preparing Annual Operational Plans (AOP) based on the consolidation of UPEPs, reflecting the needs identified through SLIP and situation analyses in each sub-district. PEDP III aims to take the SLIP initiative further and promote the decentralisation of a more extensive set of education functions.
The recommendations regarding building on SLIP achievements are to provide dedicated spaces and teachers for Pre-Primary Education (PPE) in each school, to ensure an effective coordination and collaboration approach in PPE nationally and locally, to provide support for RNGPS and Ebtedayee madrasas (private religious schools) in extending high-quality PPE services, and to implement an expanded SLIP pilot to broaden school-level authority with accountability.
The writer is an upazila nirbahi officer in gafargaon (UNO), Mymensingh.
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