2.1.2 Planning, Programming and Budgeting

1. District level planning

There is little or no coordinated and needs based planning for the education sector in any of the districts. Planning is done one year at a time and there is often a lack of continuity between one year's plan and the following year. The budget sent to the district government budget team is generally more of a 'wish list' based on the previous year's budget, rather than being based on a long term plan which has been developed from a needs analysis. There are no consultative procedures whereby schools can make proposals for funding from the APBD according to their needs.

The participatory planning procedures developed by the PERFORM project do not seem to have spread to the education sector with the exception of Pati where some consultative meetings have taken place. Dinas Pendidikan and the local branch of MORA make proposals to the local government budget committee based on only internal consultations. Likewise although some training in performance budgeting has been given at national level, its application in the education sector is reported to be weak.

2. Funding to schools

There is no allocation in any of the districts of a block grant to schools to support school based management. The only grants received by school are from provincial and central levels from a variety of GOI and donor funded projects.

Where grants have been given to school committees to manage, especially for rehabilitation of buildings, there is general agreement in all districts that the results are much more satisfactory than if the funds are managed at district level and tendered for by local contractors. In many cases local communities make their own matching contribution with the result that more repairs are able to take place for the same amount of money and the quality of the repairs is superior.

3. School Mapping and Data Collection

A priority policy of central government is to establish universal nine years compulsory basic education. In order to achieve this a considerable program of building of secondary schools and establishing informal schooling such as open SMP has been going on for several years, but it will be many years at the present rate of progress before anything near to universal attendance is achieved. School rationalisation (mergers, establishment of multi-grade schools) and building of new schools require reliable data on school and population numbers. By their own admission, several districts do not have up-to-date data on which to base their planning.

In several districts school mapping and data collection was undertaken in 1999-2000, before decentralisation and no updating of the data has taken place since. Central government reports that its annual census of schools in 2002 yielded only a 30% response rate, compared to 80% in 2000. Where routine data collection from schools takes place, it is, according to districts, in all cases used only for reporting and not for planning. Annual budgeting is generally based on the previous year's budget, rather than an analysis of needs based on data collected.

4. Monitoring

Representatives of various branches of local government including Bappeda, Dinas Pendidikan, the finance department and the supervisory board (Bawasda) make monitoring visits to schools, which are limited to physical activities (building and repairs). Pengawas make regular visits to schools, but often lack any monitoring guidelines or format. The data from the monitoring that takes place is generally used to fill in reports rather than as information to support planning. Various monitoring forms exist - on physical repairs, teacher and pupil data, financial reports - but these reports are rarely if ever questioned or analysed.

Conclusions and planned further action

The program will work with the PERFORM project to investigate ways in which participatory planning and performance budgeting at district level can be extended and improved in the education sector. The SBM training program will introduce participatory planning and transparent accounting involving schools and communities. The program will encourage increased budget allocations direct to schools to support this process.

In order to facilitate needs based planning the program will assist two sub-districts in each district to develop school mapping and data collection and to analyse and use the data to plan for improvements in the system. Plans made at district, sub-district and school levels will be expected to include targets determined by the stakeholders, whose achievement will be monitored by them and by the consultants.

2.2 Management Issues

2.2.1 Improving Access to and the Efficiency of the Provision of Basic Education

1. Teacher Deployment

Table 3 sets out basic data on the numbers of schools, teachers and students in each of the five program districts.

From the above figures, large differences in staffing ratios are apparent. The pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) for SD ranges from 24.1:1 in Batang to only 14.7:1 in Pacitan. That means that there is one teacher for every 14.7 pupils in Pacitan. Despite these staffing ratios, which can only be called generous, all districts complain of shortages of teachers. The low PTR in Pacitan's case is linked to the small average size of SD, which is only 123 pupils, and the rigid staffing formula which is applied. According to this formula districts aim to provide all primary schools with at least 9 teachers.

Pacitan has the second highest ratio of teacher per SD, (8.4 per school) despite having the smallest number numbers of pupils per school. This is reflected below in the financial analysis of each district (Table 2 in section 2.1.1 above), where the per capita cost of education per child is over twice as high in Pacitan (Rp. 1.04 million) compared with Batang (Rp.465,000).

¹ The formula, which is applied across the country but nowhere enshrined in law, entitles all schools to a principal, 6 class teachers (one for each grade), a sports teacher and at least one religion teacher (more, if several religions are represented in the school). This can lead to extremely generous staffing ratios in some schools.
² Most religion and sports teachers in primary schools who do not have responsibility for a class only have to teach for 12 period per week (less than 8 hours), while grade 4 - 6 teachers have to teach for over 40 period (over 30 hours). Secondary school teachers are expected to teach only 18 periods per week (13.5 hours per week - or 2.25 hours per day in a six day week! In addition significant numbers of teachers are reported as being absent from school.

Teacher distribution is a problem in all districts. The distortions caused by the staffing formula are compounded by the unwillingness of many teachers to teach in rural areas. In many cases they are women who are accompanying their husbands who work in the towns. As a result schools in towns are in some cases overstaffed, while schools in rural areas are left understaffed. Local governments are in many cases afraid to deal with the problems because of possible political consequences. The main problem with school mergers also concerns the redeployment of teachers. Very few teachers are willing to be transferred to other schools even within the same sub-district.

The PTR for Madrasah is even more generous in some districts than for SD and SMP, around or below 10:1 in both MTs and MI in Pati and in MTs in Pacitan. However, this may reflect numbers of part time teachers, especially for religious subjects, in these schools.

2. School Mergers

Falling roles in primary schools have meant that many schools have small numbers of pupils. Programs of school mergers and closures have been running in some districts for the past 5 - 6 years. All of the districts except Pacitan have already merged a number of primary schools, some with small numbers of pupils.

In Pacitan it was felt that no schools were suitable for merging as most small schools are in rural areas. The other districts have ongoing programs from year to year and. In all areas school data to support school mergers was found by our consultants to be incomplete or probably inaccurate. The numbers of schools merged or planned to be merged are set out in table 5.

3. Multi-grade Schools

In rural areas where schools are often far apart and mergers are not possible, there is need to establish multi-grade schools. Some multi-grade teaching is taking place in all of the districts except for Pati. This takes place in small rural schools by force of circumstances rather than because of local policy decisions. Headteachers with small numbers of teachers and pupils are forced to organise their classes to do multi-grade teaching. In all districts organising multi-grade teaching was felt to be technically difficult. Both school mergers and the establishment of multi-grade schools should enable buildings to be taken out of commission and excess teachers to be redeployed.

4. School Enrolment and Needs for Additional Provision

With the government aim of universal nine years compulsory basic education, it is clear from chart 3 and table 6 (next page) that in all of the districts most primary school pupils are already attending school. However, enrolment rates in junior secondary school range from a very low 44% in Problinggo to 84% in Batang . As a considerable portion of these pupils are certainly underage and overage it means that an estimated 35% - 65% of junior secondary school age population still are not attending school. Reasons for non-attendance are various, but include lack of provision of infrastructure in some areas and a perceived lack of relevance of secondary education and economic necessity.

³ Reservations need to be expressed over population data on which these calculations are based. The figure for Problinggo, in particular appears especially low.
⁴ Data from Banyuwangi indicates that 16% of junior secondary school pupils are under-age while 9% are overage.