Approaches to the Planning of Education

Approaches to the Planning of Education- A subtitle of the book- Educational Management: New Perspectives

Overview

Educational planning is an ongoing process which educational planners use to steer the direction of education in a country.  Planning itself is an activity that is future-oriented.  Many scholars and educational planners have come up with three main approaches or techniques which educational planners could use to plan the education of a country.  These approaches are the social demand, manpower requirements and cost-benefit analysis. The latter approach is also known as the economic rate of returns. While the social demand approach focuses on the provision of education for all those who request for such and are eligible to do so, the manpower requirements approach enables the planner to project future requirements of educated skilled labour that would be needed by a nation. The manpower requirements approach also has five forecasting methods which could be used to estimate the number of workers needed within the national economy of a country. The main thrust of the cost-benefit analysis approach is the fact that it views education as an investment which should yield benefit or returns in due course. The calculation of the benefit or returns takes into account the cost of the educational venture, the expected cost of the benefits (returns) as well as the expected returns on similar investments. All these approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. Since there is no perfect approach or technique, the synthetic approach- which is a combination of the strengths of two or three approaches- has been proposed by scholars as one that can be used to plan the educational system of a country. In the synthetic technique, different approaches could be used for different levels or different types of education depending on the particular problem the nation expects to tackle in the educational system.