Actions to Strengthen Performance for Inclusive and Responsive Education Program

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The Project Development Objectives is modified to maintain its relevancy in responding to school disruptions due to various crises, including floodings, beyond the COVID-19 pandemic; expand access and quality of education; and bring focus to sector management through better coordination. ASPIRE AF will continue to prioritize the lagging districts. The PDO is edited to read: To support the government to: (i) respond to school disruptions caused by various crises; (ii) expand access and improve education quality; and (iii) enhance sector resilience and management through better coordination, with focus on lagging districts.The proposed AF builds on the accomplishments of ASPIRE, seeking to (i) expand the Program's scope by scaling up interventions that have demonstrated positive impact, and (ii) establish a performance-based transfer mechanism between the federal and provincial governments. The AF introduces new DLRs and indicators to further address FLN gaps by scaling the provincial policies’ implementation in lagging districts, establishing certification pathways for primary-level distance education, ensuring that students whose education is disrupted by crises have equitable access to credentialed learning, and providing a sustainable mechanism to improve teaching quality and support student learning outcomes through the newly approved provincial Foundational Learning Policies. The AF will continue to strengthen the federal-provincial coordination by incentivizing provinces to integrate provincial education data systems and standardize provincial assessments for smoother, more accurate, and comparable national data. The National EMIS will be integrated with all provincial databases, which in turn, will be integrated with all relevant databases at the provincial level as per the data standardization framework, providing a comprehensive overview of the education system. Additional reforms suggested under the AF include designing and establishing a performance-based federal-to-provincial grant mechanism, developing and implementing provincial well-being and nutrition policies for schools, implementing foundational learning programs consistent with the foundational learning policies developed and notified by each respective province, establishing Pakistan Institute of Education (PIE) as an autonomous agency to enhance impartiality in education data and research, and furthering national and provincial assessment frameworks. Collectively, these measures will build on ASPIRE's successes to ensure sustained progress toward improving education access, quality, and resilience in Pakistan. A new Results Area on performance-based transfers through the OOSC Challenge Fund (OOSC CF) is created. The OOSC CF is introduced on a pilot basis in order to test the proof of concept of performance-based transfers to improve education in lagging districts. Under the AF, the annual budget allocation will transition from input-based transfers against the provincial AWP to performance-based transfers against reducing the number of OOSC and improving education outcomes in lagging districts. The new mechanism will promote a results-driven financing culture, incentivizing provinces to prioritize interventions that are conducive to reducing the number of OOSC and improving learning outcomes. By the end of AF, based on the impact of the OOSC CF, the Government can determine whether the incentive structure yielded the desired outcomes. The aim of the OOSC CF concept is that, if proven impactful, the provincial governments will adopt performance-based transfers in relation to the districts. The AF will support the provinces with the implementation of performance-based grants for lagging districts. The preparations for this step started under the original Program: MoFEPT completed the review of fiscal flows and policies in the provinces, and has invested in data collection and standardization. Under the AF, provinces will be required to allocate a percentage of their development budget to performance grants for lagging districts (an indicator tracked in the Results Framework). For this, districts will be encouraged to diagnose their systems and assess their binding constraints to access and quality education, and identify the most effective interventions to enroll and retain OOSC CF and decrease learning poverty.ASPIRE AF will include an IPF component of US$3 million. This component will fund the Program Coordination Unit (PCU), its monitoring systems, and the third-party verification of achievement of results. The component will also fund technical assistance for activities such as FLN policy implementation, wellbeing policies/plan development and implementation, horizontal integration of education data across provinces, aligning provincial learning assessment frameworks, implementation of the NAT, support to the provincial SEDs in establishing the OOSC CF, assist districts to diagnose their binding constraints to access and quality education and identify most effective interventions, monitoring, research, communication and dissemination activities.