To: Paul Thornton, Veralum Associates

By Email

Andrew Griffin, PriceWaterhouseCoopers

1st May 2009

Dear Paul and Andrew,

Review of Building Support for Development (BSD)

We have had the opportunity to be interviewed by you for this review. We would now like to follow up with this written submission to reiterate our key points:

Overall

We are very supportive of DFID’s commitment to developing the understanding and engagement of people in the UK about development issues. Over the last decade, DFID’s funding and programmes have had a major impact on public understanding of development issues, especially through schools. We recommend that DFID continues with and builds upon the work it has done.
The present global financial crisis has once more highlighted the interdependence of people around the world. The global problems that the world faces around development and climate change will require a massive and sustained public outreach on global learning and participation in responsesto global issues on a scale not seen in any government programme for decades. It is also critical that at a time of domestic problems we do not let the UK public become inwardly focused (e.g. ‘British jobs for British workers’) but rather use the situation as an opportunity to help them understand the global issues and our interdependence with other countries.
We welcome that the forthcoming DFID White Paper will focus on interdependence. We strongly recommend that DFID reaffirms its commitment to building understanding and engagement in the UK about developmentand interdependence in the White Paper, and makes the link to the conclusions of the BSD review.
DEA supports DFID’s commitment to an educational approach to this agenda. Public support cannot be built by simplistic public relations and awareness raising campaigns. The public may believe these and support them when they see them but soon forget and will not feel strongly enough about them if they have not thoroughly thought the messages through and made connections to their own lives. For example, many people were involved in Make Poverty History but the evidence shows that their engagement was relatively shallow. The role of education is to ensure that people reflect critically on the issues and come to own their responses whilst maintaining an openness to review in the light of new circumstances.DFID needs a population that understands the complexity of development processes.
A key challenge for DFID is to structure its work in order to build ownership by the sectors it wishes to work with in formal and non formal education settings. This will require a mix of strategic as well as competitive funding, and also strategic relationship building.
DEA’s research in 2008 (in conjunction with Ipsos MORI) shows that global learning and development education broaden people’s horizons, with positive effects on a range of agendas such as sustainable development and community cohesion. Young people who had engaged in global learning were significantly more likely to understand that their actions had an impact on people in other countries, and also more likely to agree that it was good for people from different backgrounds to live together in the same country. Given the major issues we face in society around climate change and also with the rise of racism and support for far right ideas, it is important to recognise that DFID’s work has had impacts on a range of government agendas beyond its own. DFID needs to work more strategically with other government departments such as DECC and DCLG to ensure that their programmes support each other for maximum impact.
We understand that the budget for this area will rise from £24million in 2009-10 to £29million in 2010-11. We would urge for this budget to be significantly increased, as it is a relatively small proportion of the overseas aid budget which is presently over £9 billion.

Process

We welcome the fact that the review has engaged a wide range of stakeholders.
We recommend that the draft report be shared back with the stakeholders that have contributed to it, including DEA’s membership, before finalising it.
DEA would be happy to arrange an event to enable discussion on the draft report.

DAF and mini grants

DFID’s Development Awareness Fund (DAF) grants have been a very significant element of the funding for organisations supporting global learning since 1997. The total budget for 08/09 was £4.5m with £1.86m of this being for new projects in that financial year. There is excellent education work being done by small NGOs, including the UK’s network of 45 Development Education Centres (DECs), which would not be possible without this funding.
DAF is an important mechanism in funding work outside of the schools sector – for example in youth work, community education or with trade unions. It is useful to retain a competitive fund as this enables innovation, but it also needs to be balanced with more strategic funding.
DAF funding as a mechanism creates uncertainty and instability amongst DECs and other small bodies engaged in global learning work. It is something of a lottery as to whether organisations will receive funding or not. Many small organisations such as DECs have fragile funding and rely heavily on the DAF for funding. The UK is unique in having such a well developed civil society network around global learning and we need to support and nurture this expertise. DAF tends to fund new projects and there should be consideration for drawing on the best of existing projects for further funding, development and potentially rolling out on a wider basis, rather than purely a focus on innovation. There should also be more strategic funding mechanisms to support key partners in different sectors to take ownership of development awareness. The approach of the Strategic Grant Agreements might be revisited, and lessons learned about what worked and what did not.
The mini grants scheme is good in terms of fostering innovation, and is particularly good for smaller organisations that could not handle the larger funding that comes with a major grant.
The grant size of a mini grant has not risen since the beginning of the scheme. An inflationary increase should be applied to the maximum grant each year. This would take the present day grant to £13,000 per annum.
The management of the mini grants and major grants scheme regularly leaves grant recipients hanging on at the end of March / early April, waiting for ministerial sign off. DFID’s internal processes need to be improved around this process, as it creates uncertainty and bad feeling amongst grant applicants as they are unable to make decisions (sometimes about staff redundancies) until they hear about the grant decisions.
With DAF grants, more work needs to be done to ensure that learning from projects is captured in such a way that it can be used by DFID, current and future grant holders and other stakeholders. Project evaluations are done but there should be more mechanisms for sharing good practice.
More needs to be done to ensure new DAF recipients build on existing good practice rather than reinventing the wheel or indeed engaging in poor quality practice. There need to be more creative ways of disseminating lessons learnt and ensuring peer learning.

Schools work

From a school’s perspective, it is relatively random as to whether they will receive support around global learning. For example there is only one Development Education Centre in the whole of London and only one in the whole of the North East. Much depends upon whether an organisation wins a DAF bid as to whether they can support local schools. DFID’s work could be made more effective if it were able to do more to ensure an even geographical spread of support programmes across the UK.
One of DFID’s key programmes for schools work is ‘Enabling effective support for a global dimension in education’ (EES). DFID invests around £1.5million per year in this programme which aims “to build capacity within the UK’s education systems so they respond to the challenges of educating young people to understand and help shape the globalising and interdependent world in which they live.” Each government region has a different strategy in response to EES. The ‘enabling’ aspect of the strategy makes evaluation particularly difficult. From our engagement with those involved, despite differences in regional impact, we believe that this strategy has been excellent value for money.
Regions started EES programmes at different times and are currently scheduled to end at different times. We would recommend that this issue is revisited.
EES funding for some regions will be coming to an end in two years time. We recommend that programmes are granted further long term funding, in order to continue their work. This should be confirmed very soon, in order to prevent programmes from winding down.
EES management arrangements have not been very strong, with a lack of enough clarity and support from DFID. DFID hastaken some steps to address this but more could be done.
EES focuses upon enabling work, and this is important. This needs to be supplemented with additional funding for the actual delivery of support for schools. This could be done through building on the EES structure, especially if the management arrangements were improved.
EES has suffered from not having a strong enough national profile, and could do more to develop strategic links to national policy. DEA would welcome an opportunity to play a greater role in EES in both contributing to national educational policy and facilitating greater peer learning between regions.

Beyond the schools agenda

Less work has been done around building support for development outside of the schools sector, despite commitments in BSD.
There is a great deal of interest amongst different agencies around work with young people in non-formal settings (‘global youth work’). Global youth work can also bring quality global learning to young people not engaging with school; it can support and take forward the learning from international volunteering and exchanges; and can help give young people the confidence and skills to be involved in international decision-making forums on issues that affect them. One of the obstacles has been the low profile of youth work itself and policy makers limited understanding of it. DEA has commissioned a youth sector mapping which provide an insight into how global youth work could be supported in the UK. At present there is very little support for global youth work and no strategic coordination that could ensure the potential of this work is maximised. We recommend that this is addressed.
Less work has been done in other contexts such as adult, further and community education or higher education, and in working through civil society groups, workplaces, faith groups, and through culture and the arts. We recommend that DFID develops its work in these areas. This should be through developing its relationships in these areas with the key sector and strategic bodies, and through using funding to develop strategic projects. Lessons from EES should be used to ensure geographical coverage of support.
DEA has played an important role in developing policy and practice around schools work. We would welcome the opportunity to extend this role to areas such as those discussed above.

PPAs and Civil Society Challenge Fund

Although the PPAs fall under the civil society team, we recommend that the BSD team liaise with that team closely to ensure that they contribute to the strategic aims of BSD.
DFID funds a number of NGOs through PPA funding agreements, and we understand that these contain requirements to promote development understanding and education. It is unclear to us that on the whole these commitments are being delivered on. Indeed, many large development NGOs have been cutting their funding around education over the few years.
Education teams within NGOs that receive PPA agreements are hampered by the fact that they do not directly receive the PPA money, but nor are they eligible to apply for DAF grants.
We recommend that DFID holds to account NGOs with PPAs for funding that they receive to promote development awareness and education.
The Civil Society Challenge Fund states that all projects should have an element that focuses upon building support for development in the UK. Whilst this is laudable in theory, in practice there is a danger that this could lead to poor quality practice, as it may be seen as a tick box exercise by applicants whose primary expertise is overseas delivery. The capacity of organisations that win the Civil Society Challenge Fund grants should be built by fostering linkages with the expertise that already exists in the UK on development education and global learning.

Research

There is a lack of a research base for this area of work.
There is a lot of evaluation at the project level in order to prove the worth of projects to DFID. This does not, however, add up to research at the sectoral level about the effect of different initiatives and interventions.
All DFID’s programmes need to be structured in such a way that learning from them can inform wider research.
We recommend that DFID funds a number of PhD studentships around global learning.
We would recommend the creation of some specific funding tendered to higher education institutions for targeted research questions such as:

What constitutes good quality global learning, in each sector of education, and what are the pitfalls that need to be avoided?
What leads to educators’ engagement in creative educational responses to issues around development?
How does global learning impact on standards, teacher retention, community cohesion and other key issues in schools?
What impacts do different kinds of DFID funded interventions make? Which are the most effective?

Strategic relationships

Officials in DFID have focused primarily on the management of funding streams. This has reduced their capacity to engage in more strategic work. We would recommend that given the constraints on administration budgets, more of the administration of funding is outsourced, freeing up the officials to play a more strategic role.
In the schools work DFID should build strategic relationships with bodies such as DCSF, QCA, Ofsted, TDA, NCSL, local authorities, SSAT, trade unions and subject associations in England and equivalent bodies in the rest of the UK. DFID has made welcome steps in this regard with DCSF in the last six months, but there is much more to be done. This might be accompanied by strategic funding for specific pieces of work (e.g. NCSL to develop its courses to include global learning; development of training for Ofsted inspectors around global learning; a local authority network; funds for subject associations to explore the global dimension to their subject; support for the UK Teacher Education network on ESD/GC; funds for trade union CPD for their members etc).
DFID needs to identify the key sector bodies outside of the schools sector and develop relationships with them – e.g. Higher Education Academy in HE, NIACE in adult and community education.
It would also be valuable for DFID to work more closely with other government departments which have an interest in education for sustainable development (DEFRA and DECC), community cohesion (DCLG) and culture (DCMS).

We look forward to the outcome of the review process and to sharing it with our membership.

Yours sincerely,

Hetan Shah

Chief Executive