Summary of the most important study contents
Need for educational expertise in developing countries
The need for educational expertise has grown significantly over the last decades. This applies notably to the African continent, where educational systems – not least due to the UN initiative ‘Education for All’ – are expanding rapidly.
This trend is going to continue. At the same time it must be recognised that people in charge of school management have often received not enough training to cope with the challenges of educational and ethical orientations towards an increasing quality management in a global society.
Implementing compulsory schooling, training and in-service training for more than four million teachers will be needed in Africa and other developing regions during the next decade.
Challenges
Public teacher training and in-service training systems are not yet prepared for this challenge. In addition, during the training, it will be necessary to focus on topics which until now have hardly been taken into account: sustainability and the question of how to shape globalisation, the strengthening of the including function of education within societies or rather the minimisation of its excluding effects, and the challenges arising from educational planning and didactics in view of migration, multilingualism and the pluralisation of cultures. Attending to these challenges in the training of decision makers in the educational sector – both from developing countries and from agencies in donor states – is a pivotal challenge the Master’s programme tries to respond to.
Furthermore, the Master’s programme deals with another phenomenon closely related to this development: in many countries and for different reasons, governments do not sufficiently meet their educational responsibility. Therefore, programmes in public education often do not reach the whole population.
At the same time, in many countries where educational responsibility is recognised by the civil society (e.g. schools run by minorities or denominations), its subsidary support is often insufficient. In Rwanda, for example, 60% of all schools are not state schools and schooling expenditures are not completely covered by the state.
In this context, a new culture of school sponsorship is developing, which is referred to as the ‘low-fee private school sector’. These private schools are founded through the initiative of parents, parishes or other providers in areas where the state, due to many different reasons, cannot offer any or adequate education. Until today, it has oft