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Egypt has the largest overall education system in the Middle East and North Africa and it has grown rapidly since the early 1990s. In recent years the Government of Egypt has accorded even greater priority in improving the education system. According to the Human Development Index (HDI), Egypt is ranked 123 in the HDI, and 7 in the lowest 10 HDI countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa, in 2009. With the help of the World Bank and other multilateral organizations Egypt aims to increase access in early childhood to care and education and the inclusion of ICT at all levels of education, especially at the tertiary level. The government is responsible for offering free education at all levels. The current overall expenditure on education is about 12.6 percent as of 2007. Investment in education as a percentage of GDP rose to 4.8 in 2005 but then fell to 3.7 in 2007. The Ministry of education is also tackling with a number of issues: trying to move from a highly centralized system to offering more autonomy to individual institutions, thereby increasing accountability. The personnel management in the education also needs to be overhauled and teachers should be hired on merit with salaries attached to the performance. ==Education system== The public education system in Egypt consists of three levels: the basic education stage for 4–14 years old: kindergarten for two years followed by primary school for six years and preparatory school for three years. Then, the secondary school stage is for three years, for ages 15 to 17, followed by the tertiary level. Education is made compulsory for 9 academic years between the ages of 6 and 14. Moreover, all levels of education are free within any government run schools. According to the World Bank, there are great differences in educational attainment of the rich and the poor, also known as the “wealth gap.” Although the median years of school completed by the rich and the poor is only one or two years but the wealth gap reaches as high as nine or ten years. In the case of Egypt, the wealth gap was a modest 3 years in the mid1990s. Overall, the composite education Index in the MENA Flagship Report: The Road Not Traveled showed promising results of Egypt’s relative educational achievements. Of the 14 MENA countries analyzed, Egypt achieved the universal primary education and has also reduced the gender gap at all levels of instruction, but there is still a need to improve the quality of education. Egypt launched its National Strategic Plan for Pre-University Education Reform (2007/08 – 2011/12). The Strategic Plan (which has the subtitle ‘Towards an educational paradigm shift’) mirrors Egypt’s commitment to a comprehensive, sustainable, and collective approach towards ensuring an education of quality for all and developing a knowledge society. Its key elements are: access and participation; teachers; pedagogy; curriculum and learning assessment; textbooks and learning materials; management and governance; and a quality improvement strategy. Promotional examinations are held at all levels except in grades 3, 6 and 9 at the basic education level and the grades 11 and 12 in the secondary stage, which apply standardized regional or national exams. The Ministry of Education is responsible for making decisions about the education system with the support of three Centers: the National Center of Curricula Development, the National Center for Education Research, and the National Center for Examinations and Educational Evaluation. Each center has its own focus in formulating education policies with other state level committees. On the other hand, the Ministry of Higher Education supervises the higher education system. There is also a formal teacher’s qualification track in place for basic and secondary education levels. The teachers are required to complete four years of pre-service courses at university to enter the teaching profession. Specifically with respect to teacher’s professional development to raise mathematics, science and technology teaching standards, the Professional Academy for Teachers offer several programs. Local teachers also take part in the international professional training programs. Starting in 2007, the Ministries of Education, Finance, and Local Development (and others) started informal discussions to experiment with the decentralization of education. Working groups were established to make more formal proposals. Proposals included ideas for starting with recurrent expenditures, using a simple and transparent formula for carrying out fiscal transfers, and making sure that transfers would reach the school itself. During 2008 design was carried out, three pilot governorates (Faiyum, Ismailia, and Luxor) were chosen, and monitoring and capacity building processes and manuals were agreed upon. The formula is quite simple, and includes enrolment, poverty, and stage of education as drivers. During 2009 funding was decentralized all the way to the school level, and schools began to receive funding. As of late 2009, the pilot showed few if any problems, and the expected results were materializing quite well, in terms of stimulating community participation, allowing schools to spend more efficiently and assess their own priorities, and increasing the seriousness of school-based planning by creating a means to finance such plans, among other expected results. An informal assessment of the pilot revealed that the funding formula money precipitated an increase in community donations. The survey results show that the ratio of the median values of community donations of the pilot year to the previous year was 2.20. Parallel to these efforts in the education sector, other sectors (for example, certain aspects of housing and municipal services) in Egypt are planning to decentralize decision-making and spending, now nationwide (without a pilot stage in limited governorates), in a phased approach. Education plans to be one of the lead sectors in this process. In addition to administrative and financial decentralization, there is an increasing emphasis on involving elected local popular councils (which exist at governorate and district level) in the horizontal oversight of expenditure and planning across the decentralizing sectors, and as they come on stream in the decentralization process. Within the education sector, as of late 2009 plans are being made to decentralize certain lines of funding and planning for capital equipment and infrastructure, in all governorates, all the way to school level in the case of smaller units of capital equipment, or levels higher than the school for items such as new infrastructure. The education sector does expect to continue to use the original 3 pilot governorates as a special observatory to assess and understand how well the process is proceeding. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Education in Egypt」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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