Accelerated Education Working Group - Accelerated Education Principles Field Studies (Synthesis Report)

In 2016, the AEWG developed Accelerated Education: 10 Principles for Good Practice (Principles or AE Principles), and an accompanying Guide to the Accelerated Education Principles (also referred to as Guide) which specifies key definitions, essential information, recommended actions based on good practice, indications of challenges and other points to consider, examples and case studies, and suggested reading. Testing of these tools commenced in mid 2016. A checklist, based on the 10 AE principles and associated sub-principles was developed, piloted with seven programmes, and refined based on comments received. It was then disseminated more widely through the AEWG members globally to:

1. explore users understanding of/ agreement with the principles and the utility of a scoring rubric to assess performance of AEPs; and
2. provide a baseline assessment of how various AE programmes perform at present against the principles.

Further detail on the ways in which these data were analyzed, as well as limitations are included in this report, and are specified in a subsequent section. Concurrent to that, the Guide to the Accelerated Education Principles was sent out to a panel of eight global AE experts, six of whom responded and provided substantive feedback on the guide. This included an assessment on the overall usefulness of the guide and its intended audience(s), particular strengths of the guide itself, and recommendations for improvement. Some of their feedback is also included in this report.

The final stage of field testing was the design and conduct of field visits to various AE programmes. The intent was that the Guide should be field tested through a limited number of focussed case studies for a deeper analysis as to how the Guide can be used – in various contexts, with different target populations, and at various stages of the programme cycle – to strengthen AE programming. Additionally, the field studies aimed to capture deeper knowledge of how well each programme was aligned to the AE principles, and reasons for this. Finally, the case studies sought to understand whether there was a link between the application of the principles and key AE programme outcomes of:

1. increased access of out-of-school children and youth to the programmes;
2. the completion rate of pupils in the programmes; and
3. the proportion of pupils who receive officially recognized end of grade or primary exam certification.