Following considerable success in implementeing EFA schemes to primary and junior secondary level throughout Africa, there is now an increasing demand for matching these with secondary exansion programmes.

A similar demand is also arising from outside the system; there is an increasing unmet demand for flexible, educated and technically qualified people to develop economies. Secondary systems in the past have been firmly academic. These have addressed the needs of only a small proportion of the learners and they have also addressed mainly the needs of the management levels of the economy. Such systems are not well-placed or sufficiently flexible to meet the new demands.

These pages outline, using successful examples from elswhere, mechanisms by which education systems can be exanded to address these two wider needs of the people and the ecomonies. In the process, ideas are suggested on how systems can be made more efficient by both reducing wastage (such as repetition and dropout) and by making schooling more relevant to the needs of teh pupils and the world they will join.

These pages provide a checklist of tasks for Ministries condsidering expanding their secondary education systems. Not all the tasks are essential but the reason for each one is is clearly defined.

The tasks are listed in order. Many depend on the successful completion of earlier ones