Strengthening Secondary Education in Morocco

Program Overview

MCC’s $460.5 million Morocco Employability and Land Compact (2017-2023) funded the $225 million Education and Training for Employability Project, including the $113 million Secondary Education Activity to improve secondary schools and equip youth with labor market-relevant skills. The activity was based on the theory that school- and system-level improvements that strengthen teaching, school management, assessment, infrastructure, and school life would help students build basic, digital, and soft skills and improve retention, completion, employability, and income.

Key Findings

Evaluation Questions

This final impact and performance evaluation was designed to answer the following questions:

1. 1
   What were the impacts of the Integrated School Improvement Model on school management, infrastructure, learning resources, and the school environment?
2. 2
   What were the impacts on teaching practices, professional development, accountability, and classroom engagement?
3. 3
   What were the impacts on student learning, soft skills, enrollment, attendance, completion, and transitions?
4. 4
   How did the student assessment, MASSAR, and O&M sub-activities contribute to stronger school and system performance?
5. 5
   To what extent were the Secondary Education Activity reforms sustained three years after the compact ended?

Detailed Findings

School Outcomes

The activity, known as Attahadi in Arabic, strengthened school planning, coordination, and resource prioritization. Treatment schools at both lower and secondary levels were more likely to have ISIPs (significant only for lower secondary schools) and to allocate budgets to them. Lower Secondary treatment schools were also more likely to have action plans, while Upper Secondary treatment schools had more frequent management board meetings. The intervention also improved infrastructure and learning resources. Treatment schools had better water, sanitation, and hygiene facilities, greater ICT access, more instructional materials, and improved learning spaces such as computer rooms, science labs, and libraries. Still, classroom conditions changed only modestly, many ICT resources were not consistently functional or used in instruction, and about 70 percent of both groups reported urgent maintenance needs.

Teacher Outcomes

The intervention expanded teacher exposure to training and increased use of some instructional tools. Treatment teachers were 20 to 30 percentage points more likely to report participating in training than control teachers. Treatment teachers also used more ICT. However, training did not lead to broad changes in classroom practice. There were no meaningful improvements in learner-centered pedagogical strategies. Teachers valued the training but described changes as incremental and constrained by large classes, heavy workloads, weak student skills, and limited coaching.

Student Outcomes

Attahadi did not significantly improve most student learning, soft skills, enrollment, completion, or attendance outcomes.Impacts on French literacy were negative but not statistically significant, and impacts on exams and soft skills were generally close to zero. Limited instructional change and weak French skills likely contributed to the limited learning effects. The clearest positive student-level finding was for upper-secondary transition outcomes: treatment students were 5.9 percentage points more likely to be employed or enrolled in school or university.

Other Reforms

MASSAR

Attahadi did not significantly improve most student learning, soft skills, enrollment, completion, or attendance outcomes.Impacts on French literacy were negative but not statistically significant, and impacts on exams and soft skills were generally close to zero. Limited instructional change and weak French skills likely contributed to the limited learning effects. The clearest positive student-level finding was for upper-secondary transition outcomes: treatment students were 5.9 percentage points more likely to be employed or enrolled in school or university.

Student Assessments

Student assessment reforms strengthened system-level monitoring and diagnostic capacity through national assessments, item banks, remediation guides, and staff capacity building. However, classroom use of assessment data remained uneven, especially for remediation and individualized instruction.

O&M

O&M introduced preventive maintenance practices in one pilot region and was valued by schools and system actors. However, it was only partially implemented, was not scaled nationally, and remained constrained by financing, procurement, and technical capacity.

Sustainability

Three years after compact closeout, the Activity was partially sustained in Morocco’s education system. ISIPs, MASSAR, assessments, infrastructure, and monitoring processes continued to operate and were reflected in national policy and administrative systems. However, sustainability was weaker in day-to-day school and classroom practice: ISIPs were not always translated into funded activities, assessment data were not consistently used for instruction or remediation, and infrastructure, extracurricular activities, teacher training, and O&M depended on maintenance systems, follow-up support, flexible resources, and local leadership. The main sustainability risk is that reforms continue unevenly and remain concentrated in administration rather than practices that directly improve teaching and learning.

MCC Learning

• 
  Close coordination with the government users of a new IT system is critical to its future use and utility.
• 
  Close review of education budgets during the program design phase could help contextualize program design and potentially identify efficiencies that can fund reform priorities.
• 
  Addressing the accountability system for teachers is critical as forced adherence to rigid curricular timing can impair teachers’ ability to adopt learner-centered pedagogy.
• 
  Incentivizing adoption of new techniques learned in professional development is a potential pathway to improve adoption of new teaching practices.

Evaluation Methods

The evaluation used a mixed-methods impact and performance evaluation design. The impact evaluation used a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to estimate the causal effects of the Attahadi model by comparing outcomes in treatment and control schools. The performance evaluation used administrative, qualitative, and observation data to assess the implementation and continued use of the Attahadi, MASSAR, student assessment, and O&M sub-activities.

The Attahadi model was implemented in treatment schools between 2018 and 2023. The student survey cohort entered lower secondary or upper secondary school in the 2022–2023 school year, allowing the evaluation to measure outcomes after maximum exposure to the full model. Since some elements of the Attahadi model were rolled out across the education system after the compact, the evaluation’s ability to measure the impact of MCC’s investment was reduced.

Quantitative data included student, teacher, and director surveys (including measures of student soft skills); student French literacy and math assessments (endline round only); classroom observations (interim and endline rounds); school infrastructure checklists; school records; and MASSAR administrative data. Qualitative data were collected during the interim and endline rounds through interviews and focus groups with school, regional, national, and beneficiary stakeholders. The endline analysis integrates these data sources to estimate impacts, assess implementation and performance, and examine the durability of reforms after the compact ended.

2026-002-3172