Public Services: Education

What this is about:

On Monday September 24, 2018 we held a public consultation session on how to represent the theme of Education in the State of Open Government Report. (For more background and justification, please see here.) During the session we presented our preliminary ideas and approach to Education and asked for feedback on the best way to frame this topic, what is missing, and if there are other stakeholders we should talk to.

The purpose of this page is to provide a public space for written feedback for those of you who couldn’t attend the consultation or who would like to make your points in writing.  You can provide comments on the original framing, on the data being used for benchmarking and can suggest case studies to be featured.

What we heard from you:

• Corruption in education: is corruption the main problem to tackle in education? This also comes across as negative framing.  It seems that looking at ways education can be improved in a positive framing will be more effective. 
• Using technology as a way to fight corruption: in the education sector, there is not enough use of technology like we might see in other sectors. Technology can enable anti-corruption methods such as citizen participation/monitoring. 
• Moving from access to quality: the focus in the sector is shifting from access to education to quality and learning. One way to contribute to ensuring quality in education is through OGP values of transparency, civic participation and social accountability.
• Open educational resources increase quality: The quality of an educational product/resources is positively impacted by having public access
• Making a difference: One way to make open government relevant to citizens is by making a difference in people’s lives. We can achieve this by increasing the quality of education and having open educational resources.

How we plan in address/incorporate this feedback:

• One of the challenges of this report is making sure that we are framing public service delivery within OGP in a way that gives us some very clear achievable policy aims within countries.
• We are going to rework the framing to incorporate the feedback received. It is understood that focusing on corruption can be perceived as negative framing, so we will need to expand the focus to include a more positive perspective.
• We need to go back and review the types of education commitments that OGP participants are creating and analyze what is missing.
• We have heard that quality and equity in education are important concerns and we will to explore that angle in this thematic section.
• It is possible that framing corruption as one of the causes of low quality of education (but not the only cause) can be a way of modifying the framing of this theme.

Where to next?

• Next, we will update our approach and framing. (What’s currently in the “Thematic Strawmen” document listed above.)
• We welcome your feedback below (in the public comment box) or to our email at research@opengovpartnership.org. We are going to close comments on Wednesday 31 October. If you would like to talk to us again, please reach out (at the same email) to schedule a phone call.
• For some areas that we still need research, we are going to commission research by partners to help inform the final report.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the consultations during the live sessions and in writing!