Turkey - Secondary Education Project

PROJECT INFORMATION DOCUMENT (PID) CONCEPT STAGE Report No.: AB882 Secondary Education Project Name Region EUROPE AND CENTRAL ASIA Sector Secondary education (100%) Project ID P066149 Borrower(s) REPUBLIC OF TURKEY Implementing Agency Environment Category [ ] A [] B [x ] C [ ] FI [ ] TBD (to be determined) Safeguard Classification [ ] S1 [ ] S2 [ ] S3 [ ] SF [ ] TBD (to be determined) Date PID Prepared April 26, 2004 Date of Appraisal June 7, 2004 Date of Board Approval October 18, 2004 1. Country and Sector Background The July 2001 CAS discussions identified the following priorities for the IBRD program: sound macroeconomics and governance, equitable human and social development, attractive business climate and knowledge, and strong environmental management and disaster prevention. The proposed Secondary Education Project directly supports the second priority, as well as the third, by enhancing development of human capital. It is listed as a FY04-06 project in both the base and high case lending scenarios. Economic Growth and Job Creation: Given its increasing working age population, Turkey has inadequate economic growth and job creation, and it has high income inequality. A reform of the education system is needed to help solve these problems. Average annual GDP growth was 4.5 percent between 1981-97. Although respectable, this growth rate was insufficient to generate jobs at rates commensurate with the growth of the working age population--especially jobs in high productivity sectors that are associated with higher wages. The implications of these points for education are that future workers need the skills and knowledge required for greater intrasectoral productivity growth, increased labor mobility from lower to higher productivity sectors, and a Turkish economy more competitive with the European Union, other OECD countries, and Turkey's global trading partners. Income inequality and poverty. Turkey has high income inequality, close to the levels for Russia or Peru. The poorest 20 percent command less than 5 percent of total income; the wealthiest 20 percent, 53 percent of total income. Differences in education account for as much as 22 percent of total income inequality between households, revealing the existence of entrenched inequities in access to education in Turkey. The average income of adults with higher education is almost six times that of illiterate adults. The Bank's Public Expenditure and Institutional Review (PEIR) reported that in 1994, the allocation of public finance on secondary education reinforces patterns in the distribution of income. These points underline the importance of targeting students from families that are poor, families where the adults have low levels of education, families in rural areas, and families in the poorer provinces. Turkish Educational System: The Ministry of National Education system is primarily public and consists1 of: (a) non-compulsory pre-school for 3-5 year olds with about 10,000 schools and enrollment of 258,706, (b) eight grades of compulsory primary for 6-14 with about 35,000 schools and a gross enrollment rate of over 95% and 10.5 million students; (c) three years of secondary education for ages 15-18 with a gross enrollment rate of about 67% and 2.6 million students, and includes over 2,500 general education schools 1 2000/1 Figures from Ministry of National Education, Ankara  with enrollment of about 1.7 million students and about 3,500 vocational schools with an enrollment of about 0.9 million students. The Higher Education Council administers the post secondary system, where the gross enrollment rate is about 29% of the cohort and includes about 1.6 million students. The post- secondary system includes: about 450 two year higher vocational schools with an enrollment of over 250,000; 704 schools with bachelors-level programs with an enrollment of about 800,000; a graduate program with an enrollment of about 100,000; and a large distance learning program with enrollment of over 0.5 million. This system is also primarily public (only about 3 percent of the institutions are private). Educational Attainment. Educational attainment of Turkey's population and labor force is by far the lowest of all the OECD countries. In 1998, virtually all children in other OECD countries had completed at least eight years of schooling, and in nearly two-thirds of these countries, over 70 percent or more of 25-29 year olds had completed upper secondary education. OECD analyses show that completing upper secondary education is a strong predictor of the acquisition of the information processing skills required to function in the new knowledge economy. Similarly large gaps appear at the tertiary level, with only seven percent of young people (aged 30-34) attaining this level, compared to an average of 24 percent for the OECD countries. On international assessments, Turkish students not only perform much worse than EU members, but lower than new EU members and accession candidates. Improving Access to Basic Education: Turkey has mobilized nationally to improve the basic educational qualifications of its population, with the support of the World Bank-financed Basic Education Project. The Basic Education Law (No. 4306) adopted by Turkey's Parliament in August 1997 extends the period of compulsory basic education from five years to eight years and raises new tax revenues to finance a vast expansion of education infrastructure to accommodate the expected increase in basic education enrollments. The compulsory extension of basic education began to take effect in September 1998 and the net enrollment ratio increased very sharply following passage of the Law, from 75.8 percent in 1996/97 to 91.1 percent in 1999/00. Turkey's success in raising enrollments at the basic education level will lead to a sharp increase in the number of students entering secondary education (grades 9 through 12). In 2001, the enrollment of boys vs. girls in basic education was somewhat similar, 697,930 vs. 618,264 respectively. Reforming Secondary Education: The Government's 8th five year plan indicates that the length of compulsory education will extend to 12 years. If the duration of secondary education is assumed to become four years in 2004-05, the Government will be under short-term pressure to increase secondary capacity by almost three million additional places by 2007-08, relative to the number of places in 2004- 05. In parallel, there is a need to encourage more gender balance, as in 2001, the enrollment of boys vs. girls in secondary education was 498,241 vs. 333,642 . Simultaneous with this expansion, the Government of Turkey wishes to align the structure and quality of its secondary programs with those of the European Union in preparation for greater integration with Europe and in response to an expected increase in the demand for higher level skills within Turkey and in Europe. In addition to improving the quality of general education (including ICT) and broadening vocational secondary programs to better reflect the needs of the knowledge economy, the secondary system needs to allow students the flexibility to move between programs and schools in accordance with their interests, aptitudes and progress. The current system has a variety of programs and schools, offering a wide range of tracks within general and vocational education and training (the latter has about 130 specialties). However, it is horizontally and vertically inflexible. Students have great difficulty in moving between tracks, and it is virtually impossible to move from vocational to general education. A student who begins in one track is destined to remain there regardless of his/her progress or interests, or the quality of the program. There is also a need to increase gender balance. It is anticipated that this gap will narrow as the enrollment percentage increases, and the proposed project will target resources to schools with lower  socio-economic status and will include provision of better education and career counseling to address social inclusion, information and equity issues. Students in vocational tracks have more restricted access to tertiary education programs because of the weighting of their scores as compared with general education graduates. In addition, vocational students have less time allocated to general education and therefore have difficulty achieving competitive scores on the university entrance examination. However, Law 4702 established vocational/technical education regions, the placement of upper-secondary vocational school graduates in related Higher Vocational Schools (MYOs) programs without the university entrance examination requirement, and provided for later transfer into university level programs The MYOs are administered by the Higher Education Council (YOK). The reform of secondary education is intended to address these challenges and give secondary education graduates a platform for lifelong learning and initial entry to the labor market. The proposed Bank Secondary Education Project does not support the overall expansion of secondary education. However, it does directly support the restructuring and updating of the existing system which is a crucial step before the Government invests large amounts of resources in expanding an outdated system. 2. Objectives The overall development objective of the project is to improve access to high quality and economically relevant secondary education on an equitable basis. There are two key outcome indicators: