Promoting good governance and transparency in educational management and financing

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UNESCO/Andrés Pascoe
A student in Tarapacá, Chile, does coursework

Educational planning and management that embodies and promotes good governance, transparency, and accountability can protect education systems from corruption and malpractice, helping to ensure efficient and equitable educational financing and that educational plans are well implemented. 

Keep reading to learn more about:     IIEP's approach     Examples of our work

Accountability and transparency throughout all stages of educational planning and service delivery can help address and prevent corruption in the education sector. Corruption in the education sector can appear throughout an education system – from financing, staff recruitment, and promotions, to the supply of school materials, and admissions. The effects of corruption are wide-ranging, and it can overall reduce access to quality education, especially for vulnerable learners.

Our approach

For more than two decades, IIEP has leveraged its training, technical cooperation, and research functions to support countries in the fight against corruption and to foster a culture of good governance and ethics across whole systems. Building on its extensive work in open government and open school data, IIEP is now turning its attention to digital tools to promote transparency and foster greater citizen participation in education. IIEP is also supporting UNESCO Member States by strengthening the link between education sector planning and the budget cycle to improve service delivery for millions of learners worldwide and to help reduce gender disparities.

IIEP’s integrated capacity development offer to foster transparency and accountability in education includes: 

  • Training courses on transparency and accountability, reaching more than 2,600 educational officials since 2003, as well as study visits for delegations and a new online course on tools to improve transparency for civil society actors. 
  • Research and development on using digital tools to fight corruption, programme budgeting reforms, citizen engagement in policy and planning, and resource sharing through the ETICO portal. Additional research explored has included formula funding and transparency, teacher codes of conduct, open school data, open government, plus more. 
  • Technical support to countries including corruption risk assessments, tracking surveys, the conceptualization of codes of conduct, and aligning strategic planning with performance-based budgeting to ensure more efficient and equitable spending in education, including with a gender lens. 

Educational planning that echoes the principles of open government and leverages the power of open school data can help protect quality learning for all.

Explore more

  
Open school data Open government Education financing

 

 

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Neeraz Chaturvedi/Shutterstock.com

Spotlight: Using digital tools to promote transparency and accountability 

There is a lot of talk about how big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and automation could overhaul educational management and promote transparency and accountability in the education sector. Current literature on the use of new technologies, however, remains largely predictive rather than evaluative, and it stops short of sharing the actual impact of such tools on service delivery. 

As part of  IIEP's 11th Medium-Term Strategy, IIEP is exploring new opportunities to use digitalization to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 for equitable and inclusive quality education by 2030. 

The research will map out the diverse range of ICT tools that can be used to improve transparency and accountability in education and analyze the use of new technologies and their impact on information, exams and diplomas, and audits. It will also explore the attitudes of administrators as well as teachers, parents and students on new digital tools and will assess the impact and the challenges associated their use. 

Part of this project will be organized within the context of the Global Partnership for Education’s Education Out Loud (EOL) programme

 

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ETICO portal

All the resources produced and collected by IIEP are brought together on the thematic platform dedicated to ethics and corruption in education, ETICO. Conceived as a dynamic database, it offers information, tools, and resources in three languages – English, French, and Spanish – intended for anyone interested in issues of transparency and accountability in the education sector.