Approaches to Educational Planning in the 21st Century for National Development

Abstract

This paper looked at approaches to educational planning in the 21^st century for national development. It view educational planning as a process of preparing a set of decisions about educational enterprise in such a way that the goals and objectives of education will be sufficiently realized in the future with the available resources. The key areas of educational planning were discussed in the paper. The paper delved into rationale for educational planning, processes of educational planning, and approaches to educational planning. The paper galvanized into the main approaches relating educational planning which are social demand approach, manpower requirement approach, cost benefit approach and alternative approach (synthetic). There advantages, disadvantages and steps in applying the main approaches in educational planning were discussed. The paper concluded that that no particular approach to educational planning is the best for all. The following recommendation were made: Increase teachers effectiveness, proper data collection should be carried out according to the country’s sectors to ascertain the nearly accurate manpower demand of the different sectors in the country, most of the factor that impedes the implementation of good education programmes in funding. So adequate funding should be made available for educational sector and adequate statisticians should be trained in order to collect data organized, analyze and come up with where the education system needs to focus on.