8
The Development Plan
4.9
A key process both in the development of education policies
and in routine forward planning within those policies is the Development
Plan, which was introduced in 1976 to cover the entire range of services
provided by the government. The declared aim of the Development Plan is
to provide an information system for policy makers, to enable them to
evaluate competing claims for the government's resources of finance,
manpower and land and to match the government's policies more closely
with the resources likely to be available over a given period of time.
In order to do this the Plan is intended to provide Secretaries with
clear statements of Branch and Departmental policy objectives and the
degree to which these objectives are being achieved and will be achieved
over the planning period (i.e. over five financial years, beginning with
the current year). The Plan also provides an opportunity for contributors
to suggest alternative courses of action which might enable the objectives
to be achieved more effectively and which might, in time, lead to new
policies. However, the Development Plan is not intended to create policy
(though the regular and systematic re-examination of policy objectives
and assumptions within each programme area, which its annual revision
entails, is seen as a means by which the formulation of new policy can
be stipulated). The Development Plan and the Five-Year Forecast of Revenue
and Expenditure are regarded as complementary, the value of each depending
on the degree to which the narrative information in the former can be
seen to relate to and justify the financial information in the latter.
4.10
For the purposes of the Development Plan the entire range of
government activity is divided at present into sixteen services, with
each service sub-divided into programmes.
While it could be said that
in the broadest definition of 'education' elements of education policy
are included in several different services, for all practical purposes
such policy is confined to three services subdivided into eight programmes,
viz: