Achieving whole-child development in Nepal: navigating through equity within diversity and resource limitation in education

Poudel, Prem and Choi, Tae-Hee (2022) Achieving whole-child development in Nepal: navigating through equity within diversity and resource limitation in education. In, Lee, Jaekyung and Wong, Kenneth K. (eds.) Centering Whole-Child Development in Global Education Reform: International Perspectives on Agendas for Educational Equity and Quality. American Educational Research Association: Annual Conference (13/04/23 - 16/04/23) American Educational Research Association, pp. 43-61. (doi:10.4324/9781003202714-5).

Abstract

Objectives: the main objective of this paper is to understand and report how the Government of Nepal conceptualised quality education and navigated through the contextual features to obtain the common global agenda of whole-child development (WCD), especially through the 5 implementation of two large-scale long-term educational reform plans, i.e., School Sector Reform Plan (SSRP) (2009-2016/17), and School Sector Development Plan (SSDP) (2016/17-
2022/23). With this aim, we analyzed the WCD agenda, which was promoted as part of realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our paper explored contextual constraints and enablement in implementing the WCD.

Theoretical Framework and Perspectives: we have drawn on Choi’s (2018) framework developed by synthesizing previous reform studies, including policy enactment research (e.g., Ball, et al., 2012) and administration research (e.g., Cheng, 2005). The framework suggests three interrelated components - the policy features, policy actors and contextual features - as contributing to the success or failure of the educational reforms. These interrelated elements facilitated our analysis and provided with a general picture of how the WCD agenda interacts with the macro agendas such as educational equity, equality and quality, and with parallel agendas
such as the SDGs.

Data & Methods: we analysed, first, the key policy documents to understand how educational reforms have (not) realized the WCD agenda. We analysed two additional sets of documents to gain a comprehensive picture of Nepal’s educational reform priorities, engagements, and initiatives and to learn how investigated policies are interpreted and translated at the lower levels. The first set concerns related parallel policy documents such as the SDG related ones, for which reports of international development partners and mass-media outputs (such as newspaper articles, online news) were reviewed. The second set includes policy implementation documents published by the provincial and local governments (e.g., circulars, executive plans, the national curriculum, census data), and donor organizations and recipients of the funds (e.g., evaluation reports). On all these documents, we conducted thematic content analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Miles, et al., 2018).

Findings and Implications: this study concludes that despite the GoN’s stated aim to seek all-round development of children/youths, including their social and emotional well-being, the 6 overarching frame of education policy as evident in the two macro plans shows that educational policy activities largely focused on meeting the impending threshold goal of providing equitable access to primary education for all. This meant that the whole-child development agenda received rather limited attention. Although Nepal has made significant progress in improving access to schooling, quality education and equity in recent years, challenges persist in truly transforming its education system to meet the 21st century aspirations, especially those envisioned in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This was largely due to the fact that there are limited financial and human resources, and the government had to prioritise the most urgent tasks. These findings show that Nepal requires detailed alignment plan if to advance the WCD agenda in the education systems including the large-scale interventions in curriculum as well as teachers’ professional development in understanding children’s well-being needs.

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Contributors

Author: Tae-Hee Choi

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