The theme for the 2015 newsletter will be:
“Inclusive education management”
1. Why have we chosen this topic?
This year we would like the Enabling Education Review (EER) to share practical experiences of planning, budgeting and fundraising for, managing, monitoring and evaluating inclusive education initiatives.
EENET has the benefit of being both an information network and a consultancy service provider. Through this diverse work we are privileged to learn about many different inclusive education initiatives – we get to see what makes them work well, and the problems they face.
For instance, we have seen first-hand that organisations and governments often invest heavily in baseline studies, but these studies are not always high quality or used effectively to inform project/programme design. We see that budgeting and resourcing for inclusive education can be a challenge, particularly when seeking funding to scale-up and move beyond pilot projects or model schools. We carry out many evaluations. A common challenge is the limited qualitative and quantitative record keeping, making it very difficult to collate information for the final evaluation. We also notice that more money is spent on final evaluations than on mid-term reviews, yet a high quality mid-term review (and/or effective ongoing monitoring) can enable improvements to be recommended and implemented ‘before it’s too late’.
However, we also know that there are organisations and governments working hard to improve their approaches to inclusive education planning, budgeting, fundraising, monitoring and evaluation. We therefore want to provide an opportunity for those involved in such initiatives to document and share their experiences.
2. What could you write about?
Here are some ideas…
Planning
- Your experience of conducting a high quality, practical and relevant baseline study. In particular we would like to hear about efforts to conduct participatory baselines, involving stakeholders and beneficiaries in the research activities (and even as researchers), so that the baseline process becomes an integral part of the initiative (not just a formal or academic ‘outsider research’ process).
- Your experience with participatory planning – ensuring that your inclusive education initiative responds to the needs and ideas of stakeholders and beneficiaries; and/or ensuring that the initiative is planned as a genuine collaborative effort between NGO and government.
Financing and resourcing
- Your experience with convincing large/international donors to support inclusive education (particularly convincing them to provide longer-term support – because inclusive education is not a ‘quick fix’).
- Your experience with developing funding strategies that ensure shared financial responsibility between local/national government and NGOs, or which promote increased financial responsibility from the government for inclusive education.
- Your experience of successfully reallocating resources to support inclusive education (rather than seeking new/extra resources).
- Your experience with developing community-level financial, material or human resource support for inclusive education.
Monitoring and evaluation
- Your experience of developing approaches that enable implementers/managers, stakeholders and beneficiaries to regularly reflect on and document their experiences, throughout the life of the inclusive education initiative.
- Your experience or reflections on what makes a useful, high quality mid-term review or final evaluation.
- Your experience with developing relevant and useful indicators for measuring progress/impact.
- Your experience of developing joint monitoring and evaluation mechanisms, so that multiple partners (e.g. NGOs and government) contribute and learn collaboratively.
How do you submit an article?
Please email your article to ingridlewis@eenet.org.uk or send a hard copy to the address at the end of this document.
Length – either 550 words (for a single page article) or 1,100 words (for a double-page article). We may edit longer articles down to a single page, depending on the quantity and quality of articles received.
Style – please keep the article easy-to-read and non-academic. We encourage the use of sub-headings, bullet lists, etc. Have a look at previous editions of the publication if you are not sure what style to use.
Editing – we are very happy to help with editing the article, so don’t worry if you are not an experienced writer, we can work with you to improve the structure and content of your article, make it shorter/longer, etc.
Photos – it is great if you can add photos, drawings or diagrams to your article. Please send us high resolution images by email (these should be at least 1mb in size), or post us an original print/drawing. For every image you want to add to your article, you will probably need to remove about 75-100 words of text – but we can help with this editing. Please ensure that the people in any photos have given their permission for the photos to be published, or that parents/guardians have given permission for photos of children to be used.
Deadlines – the first deadline for draft submissions of articles is 30 June 2015.
But we welcome submissions as soon as possible so we can spread the editing workload. We will then review all articles and work with the authors to edit them. This process will happen July-August. We then aim to finalise articles and design the publication in September-October, so that it can be printed in November-December 2015.
Selection – please note that we might not publish all of the articles we receive. In addition to ensuring that we publish articles that are easy-to-read and of practical use to a range of education stakeholders, we will also ensure that the final selection includes:
- articles from a variety of countries/regions
- articles about a range of different issues
- articles by authors from different backgrounds (e.g. teachers, NGOs, parents, academics, government representatives, etc).
Articles that are not selected for publication in the newsletter may instead be published on EENET’s website.
Queries – if you have any questions, please email ingridlewis@eenet.org.uk.
Postal address – if you want to send an article in hard copy or as an audio recording (e.g. on CD), please send to:
EENET CIC
37 Market Street
Hollingworth
Cheshire, SK14 8LS
UK
