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The previous Government committed the Department for International Development (the Department) to rising expenditure on education, reaching at least £1 billion per annum by 2010-11, within the context of an overall rising aid budget. The coalition Government has since committed to increasing the Department's total aid spending from £7.8 billion in 2010-11 to £11.5 billion in 2014-15. This represents a real terms increase of roughly one third over this spending review period. The Department is currently reviewing how it allocates resources across its whole portfolio.
The Department's aim has been to improve and expand state primary education, focusing mainly on sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. It works largely by influencing and financing developing country governments to pursue global Millennium Development Goals. We universally support the aims of the Department's education programme. However we have significant concerns about its ability to assess the value for money of its spending.
The majority of the countries the Department supports have made good progress in enrolling a higher proportion of children in primary schools, up from typically 50% or lower in the mid-1990s to 70-90% now. The rate of increase in enrolment has been particularly strong for girls. Fourteen of the 22 countries the Department supports are on track to meet Millennium Development Goals for primary enrolment by 2015.
We are concerned, however, that the Department cannot adequately attribute impacts to its spending and its influence. Even for its largest programmes, such as in India, it typically contributes a low proportion of countries' education spend. In some countries, such as Kenya, private schools not supported by the Department account for over half of enrolment growth.
We recognise that choices of where to allocate aid must take into account a range of factors. But we were surprised that value for money has not been a primary focus for the Department either in allocating its resources or assessing the performance of its education programmes. The Department's rationale for investing in education is that it brings wider benefits which support reduction of poverty, but it has placed too much emphasis on measuring simply the numbers entering education. The Department has paid less attention to how many children attend and complete primary education, and the literacy and numeracy they achieve; key areas where limited progress has been made.
The Department is currently trying to change its approach by building value for money criteria into its spending choices. This includes a range of mechanisms to ensure money is well spent, such as the establishment of the Independent Commission on Aid Impact. We welcome Liz Ditchburn's appointment as the Director of Value For Money and the prominence the Department is now giving to this role. It assured us that it is placing an increasing emphasis on quality and attainment in deciding which programmes to support, and on measuring important indicators of education delivery against the costs. Until this is achieved, we can have little confidence that UK taxpayers' money is securing the fullest benefits for poor people overseas.
A series of frauds have occurred in the main education programme supported by the Department in Kenya. We are extremely concerned both that the Department may have misjudged the risks when it invested and that it did not prevent or detect fraud. The Department acknowledged that it needed to learn lessons.
The Department has set itself the challenge of managing an increasing aid budget whilst trying to achieve the lowest management overhead of any major aid donor. But in our view it is already showing signs of serious stretch in its capacity. It needs enough capacity in the form of education advisers on the ground to obtain good data on cost and performance and to use this information to manage its programmes effectively.
We took evidence from the Department for International Development on the basis of the C&AG's report on the Department's bilateral support to primary education[1].
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