National education programmes that are largely decentralized, whether geographically or functionally, place special coordination and control demands on the education team. This section discusses these demands and provides suggestions for dealing with them.
Coordination
Apart from the general requirement to manage different programme inputs according to a calendar or timetable that can be particularly tight, there are issues of power and authority.
In coalitions, consortia, or programmes involving civil society, there is no direct line of authority, unless it has been negotiated for the duration of the programme. In this circumstance, an education team has to be developed in which there is time given to managing the partner relationships and defining the terms of work, the delegation of tasks, and the relationship of these
tasks to one another.
Sometimes this requires a full-time staff of its own, and such a staff is typically drawn from amongst the partner organisations.
Steering committees, management committees, engine rooms, or project coordinators have to commit themselves to very close relationships and spending time in meetings. Other responsibilities of the representatives who sit in on these meetings may need to be reduced.
Control
Team leaders require good information and accurate reporting on the progress of the programme. When programmes are biased in favour of field staff or outside contractors, the team is likely to rely heavily on them for this information. There are potential problems in the areas of reporting and financial accountability.
Those who have to report may find it difficult to report accurately for the following reasons:
- Accurate reporting requires particular skills and a good knowledge of the outcomes planned. Neither of these may be available to those who are far from the centre.
- An educator or a contractor may under-report problems or poor performance; or may underestimate the number of people reached by a large event or a mass distribution of materials. This may be because of the reporter's own lack of information, or misperception of what has happened. There may also be some self-delusion. Each of these reduces the accuracy of the information filtering back to the programme centre.
In addition, there may be false reporting of events not actually conducted, or services not actually rendered. But it does not take such deceptiveness to skew the information and make it difficult to respond appropriately.
On the financial side, education programmes have to manage many different expenditure flows from the centre. In decentralised programmes, there are lower and lower levels of expenditure. Educators often have to pay for venues, catering, and even participant subsidies when accurate invoicing is difficult, and where the field educator is event secretary, bookkeeper, and trainer all at once.
These different expenditure flows need to be resolved during the planning stage and systems developed that enable good financial control without hindering the delivery of the programme.
Systems and Trust
In each of these dilemmas, the need for external sources of information and the necessary checks and balances of accounting and management have to be developed. Such systems have to be relatively slim, and judgements have to be made about the cost of such systems in relation to the overall budget of the programme.
Perhaps the best system is one that develops personal integrity based on pride in performance; commitment to the social aims of the programme; and defined, generally agreed, and inevitable censure where personal integrity fails. It is difficult to see how it is possible to put in place an administrative system capable of dealing with all the coordination and control demands of a national education programme without some level of trust.
When this trust does not exist, the costs of establishing it can be lower than implementing a bureaucratic control. When this cannot be done, bureaucratic controls, audit trails, double reporting procedures and inspectorates, spot checks, dip-stick audits, and external investigations will be the order of the day.
