The Ministry of Education steers the education sector through a set of national policy instruments that translate the Constitution’s guarantee of the right to education into concrete programmes.
Key Policy Instruments
National Education Strategic Plan 2011–2030
The NESP is the sector’s guiding policy. It commits Timor-Leste to universal completion of basic education, the elimination of illiteracy and gender parity at all levels, through priority programmes covering early childhood, basic, secondary, higher and recurrent education.
National Inclusive Education Policy (2017)
Adopted in 2017, the policy promotes equitable access to quality education for all learners, including children with disabilities, and underpins the work of the National Directorate for Inclusive Education and School Social Action.
Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education
Building on a national policy debate that began with the 2012 pilot programme, the Ministry supports the use of children’s first languages in the early grades , today implemented through the EMULI programme , before transition to the official languages, Tetum and Portuguese.
GPE Partnership Compact 2024
Agreed with the Global Partnership for Education and national stakeholders in 2024, the Partnership Compact sets out an integrated reform agenda for inclusive, equitable, quality education, aligned with the NESP and Sustainable Development Goal 4.
EMIS Policy: Education Management Information System
The Ministry of Education runs a single national Education Management Information System (EMIS) as the official source of education data for planning, budgeting and reporting. Established in 2008, it is managed with the National Directorate for Planning, Budget and Statistics.
- Annual school census: every school reports enrolment, repetition and dropout, teachers and facilities through a standard school-level questionnaire.
- Unique school identifier: each school holds an EMIS code that links data from different sources.
- Central management: data is entered, cleaned and reported at national level, and the official dataset is updated once a year.
- Use of data: EMIS informs planning, budgeting and teacher deployment, and provided the evidence pack for the Ministry’s 2022 budget advocacy.
- Direction of reform: strengthening EMIS is a dedicated component of the World Bank-financed BEST project, and the Ministry is working with UNICEF towards tracking individual student data to identify children at risk of dropping out.
Statistics produced through EMIS are published under Education Statistics.
Policy Priorities
- Universal access to and completion of nine years of free, compulsory basic education
- Improved learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy from the earliest grades
- A qualified, motivated teaching workforce supported by continuous professional development
- Inclusion of children with disabilities and learners from remote and linguistically diverse communities
- Evidence-based planning through reliable education data and statistics
Policy development is coordinated with development partners and civil society through ACETL, Timor-Leste’s local education group.