Overview

Macedonia recognized the need to reform its education system after emerging from civil conflict in 2001. The government enlisted the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s (IBRD) aid to help schools better cope with a range of challenges, from poor teacher development to weak enrollment policies. As a result, Macedonia has boosted secondary school enrollment, established training options for teachers, and now reports higher student achievement.

Full Brief—4 Pages
Improving the Education System in Macedonia—PDF, April 2010

Challenge

In 2001, Macedonia began pursuing a new education policy agenda through the Ministry of Education and Science. The aim was to decentralize education administration to municipalities, improve teachers’ professional development, expand access to education, and improve assessment and evaluation.

International assessments had found that Macedonia was hampered by a highly-centralized education system that lacked responsiveness to issues confronting schools at the local level – for example, organization of the teaching process, personnel management, appointment of school principals, and enrollment policy.

Approach

The 2003-2010 Education Modernization Project, financed with an IBRD loan, has helped Macedonia respond to the challenges of creating a quality, decentralized education system by:

• Establishing a school self-evaluation process; an evaluation performed by the State Education Inspectorate; and a nationally administrated assessment of student achievement, which provides data about the quality of the education system.
• Introducing medium- and long-term planning at both central administration and school levels.
• Providing School Improvement Grants – of up to $30,000 each – to all 427 primary and secondary schools to improve infrastructure, strengthen student security and hygiene, and provide teacher training and teaching aids.

Results

Between 2004 and 2008, secondary enrollment increased to 95 percent from 85 percent, and dropout rates decreased to 1.9 percent from 2.1 percent. A market for teachers’ training has been established, along with criteria for accreditation and monitoring of teacher training services.

The State Matura examination, the national assessment of student achievement, was given for the first time in 2008 in all four-year general and vocational schools.

From 2004 to 2007, 48.8 percent of school managers and teachers reported improvements in students’ achievements, 60.7 percent saw improvement in planning and assessment processes, and 28.5 percent confirmed that attendance and participation of students improved.

The project’s assessment and exam components have been replicated in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in Montenegro. The governments of Serbia, Azerbaijan, and Lithuania have expressed interest in applying Macedonia’s approach.

The Education Modernization Project provides an institutional basis for all other development projects in the education sector. It secures the needed synergy and enables a coherent approach to all current activities and their contribution to the fulfillment of the strategic priorities of the education sector in Macedonia.

— Nikola Todorov, Minister of Education, Macedonia

Toward the Future

The Ministry of Education is currently administering a second round of School Improvement Grants, with a focus on elementary and rural schools, as well as introducing electronic "school profiles" for all elementary and secondary schools, to house records on human resource management, infrastructure and equipment, and data on enrollment and dropout rates.

To complement Macedonia's work on national student assessments, IBRD is supporting a network of agencies for educational assessment and standards in Southeast Europe. A regional meeting will be held in March 2010, co-organized by the Bank and Macedonia's State Examination Center, to exchange experiences on use of results from student assessments in policy decisionmaking.