Encountering Exclusion : Primary Education Policy Watch

The current volume Encountering Exclusion reviews the National Education Policy (NEP), National Plan of Action (NPA) and Primary Education Development Programme (PEDP) and other policy instruments, plans and programmes in order to provide domestic discourse on fair share in, and equal access to, primary education, that the poor and marginalised children are able to enrol in and complete quality primary education. The volume offers a point of reference for citizens' engagement processes on policy design, implementation and outcome in order to identify homegrown policy alternatives and to build support for emerging policy options. Right to education has not only been promised through the Constitutional directives but also through numerous international Covenants in which Bangladesh is a signatory. Many of such promises carved out in different education policies and programmes, as the volume spells out, have fallen through, becoming rhetoric rather than reality in the education sector since policy changes and resultant programmes neither originate from, nor are designed with, stakeholder participation nor independent of the donors, limiting their acceptability and undermining their efficacy. The education system, as the volume elucidates, is elitist and systematically exclude many significant groups of people. So far all policy changes have predominantly focused horizontal expansion for increasing access, while the exclusion, according to the volume, is rooted not only due to disquiet of access but also on concerns of equity, relevance and social structure, thereby relentlessly jeopardising the credibility of public policies. The volume demonstrates that top-down elitist system of education, originally laid down according to policies