ABSTRACT
Senegal and Burkina Faso have been facing challenges to achieving universal primary education and better learning. They have promoted decentralization, one of the policy measures implemented being the establishment of school councils or school management committees. This chapter aims to examine the policy intent for school councils, along with the difference between policy intent and policy implementation. It adopts the analytical instruments that have been developed by the World Bank and its partners under the Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) program for School Autonomy and Accountability. For both countries, the data show that there are differences among schools in the existence and functionality of school councils. When school councils are more active in the implementation of procedural policies, the amount of contribution from the community to their school tends to be larger. This functionality of school councils is significantly associated with differences in learning achievement. The use of student assessment results at school also tends to be positively related to learning achievement. These findings suggest that strengthening policy implementation on participatory school councils, along with more substantial use of student assessment results at school, will be important for better learning results.
