particularly acute for children from minority and vulnerable sectors that, in the past, have at worst been purposely excluded or, less insensitively, just neglected. To apply a more inclusive policy, the Serbian Ministry of Education and Science (MoES) is undertaking a range of activities to establish ways for ensuring additional support for disabled children, children with learning difficulties, and children from families from challenging socio-economic backgrounds.
To ensure real results are being made the MoES needs to develop and implement a system for regular monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of inclusive practices. To assist the MoES the WBIF is providing a grant to design a quality assurance system to monitor and evaluate their inclusive education policy that can be used to support the daily work of education professionals at the school and municipal level. The M&E system will also assist with further inclusion-related policies and their implementation. In particular, the technical assistance will assist the MoEs with:
- Performing a needs assessment of the current situation related to the work of Inter-Sectoral Commissions at the municipal level;
- Designing the inclusion related tools for the relevant institutional actors, such as the MoES and its regional school administrations (pedagogical advisors), the Inter-Sectoral Committees at the municipal level, the Institute of Quality Education and Evaluation, education professionals and other education stakeholders, including the schools;
- Developing standards and procedures for inclusion related M&E in regular external and school self-evaluation, which will also involve other relevant institutional actors;
- Developing the training packages for capacity building of the relevant institutional actors in the education sector at all levels;
- Piloting the training packages for relevant institutional actors in the education sector; as well as
- Cross country learning and knowledge sharing on M&E of inclusive education.
The project introduces a system-wide intervention where all of the pre-university students are the direct beneficiaries with particular benefits from those children who, under old practices, would have missed out of a good education. The project, classed as a WBIF 'sector development project', is designed to be an exemplar that can be copied and replicated in other countries in the region.
The outlined proposal is founded on the provisions of the 2009 Law on the Foundations of the Education System and will be made part of the quality framework for external evaluation of schools. The WBIF technical assistance and capacity building should provide the MoES with the knowledge and means to ensure effective project implementation and its longer-term sustainability.
