PERU-Strengthening the National System for Evaluation and Quality Assurance of Education The development Objective is to strengthen the capacity of the three recently-created  agencies of the Peruvian National System for Evaluation and Quality Assurance of Education (SINEACE in its Spanish acronym) to fulfill their mandate to monitor, evaluate, and promote measures that improve the quality of education in Peru, by helping them adopt good practices and lessons from the implementation of similar systems in the region and elsewhere on the basis of solid diagnostics of Peru's specific context. Improving skills and education levels is one of Peru's main challenges to sustain its recent strong economic growth.  The SINEACE is composed of three autonomous "sister" agencies that are to operate in coordination but independently from the Ministry of Education.   The Peruvian Institute for the Evaluation of Basic Education (IPEBA in its Spanish acronym) is charged with monitoring and evaluated basic and secondary education.   The National Council for the Evaluation and Accreditation of Higher Education (CONEACES in its Spanish acronym) has mandate to monitor, evaluate, develop standards for, and accredit non-university higher education; CONEAU, the National Council for the Evaluation and Accreditation of Universities, has the mandate to do the same for universities. Thus, the system has the potential to broadly influence the quality of provision of schooling in the education system as a whole and also in the training markets. All three agencies were established in 2006-07 and are in the process of constituting themselves.  Their mandates have been guaranteed by legislation, but they lack both the technical competencies and the experience to develop and implement their core programs of monitoring, evaluation, and accreditation (in the cases of CONEACES and CONEAU).  The Bank has been able to provide limited TA and some exposure to the relevant international experience, especially with respect to the monitoring and evaluation of teacher training colleges.  However, the agencies require a fuller, comprehensive plan that would provide tools for developing a country M&E action plan, build capacity, strengthen incentives for self-evaluation among educational institutions; and improve data analysis and production. Thus, the Government of Peru has requested for the Bank to provide support to strengthen the capacities of the SINEACE agencies so they can fulfill their mandates. The SINEACE faces particular challenges because it must not only improve its internal capacities, it must encourage the substantial participation of individual educational institutions throughout Peru in collaboration with the agencies for data provision, and, especially, authentic self-assessments as part of evaluation and accreditation processes. The IDF is envisioned to have two main components focus on capacity building. The first component will consist of a needs assessment of the existing institutional capacity and, most especially, the institutional development needs of each of the three agencies of the SINEACE (IPEBA, CONEACES, and CONEAU).  This will involve comparing the current capabilities and challenges of the sub-agencies with best practice examples from successful comparators from periods when these were in their "start up" stages.   Through gauging existing institutional strengths and weaknesses, the consultancy will arrive at a full needs assessment that diagnoses priority areas for institutional strengthening.    The experience profile of the consultants would combine in-depth expertise on institutional assessment with specific expertise on the evaluation of educational institutions and the implementation of successful accreditation processes.  The diagnosis would consider the differences and similarities between the sub-agencies and tailor the diagnosis to the individual circumstances of each.   The outputs of this activity would be a both a formal needs assessment for the SINEACE agencies, plus terms of reference for three technical assistance assignments for institutional strengthening of each of the agencies. The second component would then consist of providing technical assistance to the three agencies  in order to build capacity in policy development for evaluation and accreditation of educational institutions and for the SINEACE own institutional management. The technical assistance would be based on and respond to the terms reference produced in the first component.  The specifics tasks of the assistance will depend on the outcome of the needs assessment, but are likely to  consist of the following: (i)  support to the development of appropriate educational standards,  self-evaluation processes and procedures for educational institutions, and external review and accreditation procedures, including in all cases the drafting of the appropriate legal instruments for these;  (ii) provision of  training  to improve the management of the agencies in terms of practical/operational aspects; (iii) construction of pilot information systems  to build the national data collection system for the evaluation of educational institutions, (iv)  specific training in  linking data collection to analysis, M&E and dissemination, and use in consequential management decisions.  The expected outcomes of the technical assistance will be an action plan of setting up the recommended policy reforms and/or policy procedures, including its timeframe for implementation. Together, the activities will result in each sub-agency acquiring institutional strength in areas key to the fulfillment of its particular mandate and will lead to the production of  medium-term (3 years) action plans that will specify goals, milestones and needed resources and efforts to achieve these goals. To strengthen the capacity of the recently-created agencies (CONEAU and CONEACES) of the Peruvian National System for Evaluation and Quality Assurance of Education (SINEACE in its Spanish acronym) to fulfill their mandate to monitor, evaluate, and promote measures that improve the quality of education in Peru, by helping them adopt good practices and lessons from the implementation of similar systems in the region and elsewhere on the basis of solid diagnostics of Peru's specific context.