The 2020 GEM Report on inclusion and education launches soon. Take part!

The 2020 GEM Report on inclusion and education, All means all, will be launched on the 23^rd June. It calls on countries to concentrate on those being left behind and to move towards inclusion and education – a particularly poignant message for those now rebuilding their school systems after the arrival of Covid-19.

With a shift to an online launch, we have many different activities for people to join, hoping to reach all our different audiences around the world. Please join us and help share our messages in the run up to launch day.

Silvana Corso: Training teachers in inclusive education tools in Argentina and around world.

Silvana is one of many champions being highlighted by the GEM Report in the run up to the launch of its 2020 publication on inclusion and education: All means all, due out 23 June. In their own way, and in multiple countries around the world, these champions are fighting for learner diversity to be celebrated, rather than ignored.

Silvana was a teacher when her daughter Catalina came into the world with paraplegia, deafness and muteness. Determined not to reduce her daughter to her status as a patient, Silvana enrolled her in a regular school to give her the opportunity to interact with other children. The path was not easy, regular schools did not accept Catalina and referred her to special education schools for paraplegic children. Silvana managed to enrol Catalina in a regular school and she was not wrong. During the 9 years that Catalina was alive, she was able to share caresses and enjoy the company of her classmates.

Thanks to Catalina’s life, Silvana developed extensive knowledge of inclusive education. Determined not to waste it, Silvana earned a master’s degree and specialisation in inclusive education and today is the director of an inclusive school in the Villa Real neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, where she welcomes low-income children, teenage mothers, children with special abilities, and children who have been imprisoned, among others.

Non-state actors are influencing the teaching profession: What are the implications?

English / Español

By Amita Chudgar, Michigan State University

“When the schools reopen, I am going to hug my child’s teacher and thank her…” a friend said to me on the phone just three days into a Covid-19-imposed lockdown. Now several weeks into the Covid-19 crisis, it is no exaggeration that our world has changed in fundamental ways, including perhaps the way in which we view the work of teachers. Are teachers easily replaced by technology? Can anyone become a teacher? I imagine that at least a few amongst us may have changed their perspectives on these debates.

Image: GPE/Deepa Srikantaiah

Debates and discussions on teachers and teaching bring together considerations of economics and education like few other educational topics. Teachers are central to education provision, they are the frontline workers, directly entrusted with the responsibility to grow and nurture young minds. Teacher compensation on the other hand is central to educational budgets; in most education systems teacher payroll is the largest yearly expense.

Colin Northmore: Helping immigrant students in South Africa exercise their right to education

Colin is one of many champions being highlighted by the GEM Report in the run up to the launch of its 2020 publication on inclusion and education: All means all, due out 23 June. In their own way, and in multiple countries around the world, these champions are fighting for learner diversity to be celebrated, rather than ignored.

In 2008, Johannesburg experienced a heavy wave of discrimination and xenophobic attacks against the immigrant community. At that time, Colin Northmore, the then principal of Sacred Heart College, a school known to many for its fight against apartheid, was approached by the Marist Brothers and a Methodist bishop asking him to do something to alleviate the plight of immigrant children unable to access schooling. Sacred Heart College agreed to assist and the Sacred Heart College Board of Governors made a decision to extend its educational expertise to its neighbouring immigrant communities in the form of an afternoon bridging programme. This is when the Three2Six project was established. Despite being a constitutional right, the right to education in South Africa is not realized for many due to various barriers such as documentation. In addition, English is a pre-requisite for children to be able to enrol in school. Immigrant students often come from Francophone and Lusophone countries.

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on prosocial skills

By Gabriel Bădescu, Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania, and GEM Report fellow

All over the world, he Covid-19 pandemic has led to school closures. Poorer nations have tended to bring in stricter measures, relative to the severity of their outbreaks, than richer nations. This tendency is expected to continue, since countries with less-developed healthcare systems have to act more cautiously. This raises the questions of what kind of school outcomes are likely to be affected most, and how the most vulnerable students will fare in terms of these outcomes. Prosocial skills – which lead to ‘helping, sharing, donating, co-operating, and volunteering’ – are likely to be among the outcomes affected for many students, and disproportionately so for those with lower socio-economic status.

Prosocial skills are important in times of health crisis. Their importance has been documented in various contexts, including communities, firms, volunteer associations, political organizations and schools. Within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, several studies show that the speed and effectiveness of the process of crisis recovery are strongly influenced by the levels of trust and social capital, which are positively linked with prosocial behaviours. More prosocial people are more likely to follow physical distancing and hygiene recommendations, inform themselves about how they can help others, donate to fighting Covid-19, and buy a cloth face mask.

Sabine Kreutzer: putting the child at the centre in school models in Germany

English / Español

Sabine is one of many champions being highlighted by the GEM Report in the run up to the launch of its 2020 publication on inclusion and education: All means all, due out 23 June. In their own way, and in multiple countries around the world, these champions are fighting for learner diversity to be celebrated, rather than ignored.

Sabine, the principal of Marie Kahle secondary school in Bonn, Germany, understood quickly in her career that child-focused education was key for learning. Eleven years ago, when her school was founded, she decided that children were the most important asset of her school and, ever since, her school has implemented initiatives to keep that idea at the core of its operations.

Bonn is a diverse community, home to many immigrants from African and Middle Eastern counties. Sabine is proud to welcome 960 students at her school including many children whose native tongue is not German and children with special needs.

Suraj Yengde: Trying to leave his caste behind him to pursue his education

Suraj Yengde was born in Maharashtra in India into the Dalit caste. His parents enrolled him into a Christian school where caste still mattered, but less than it does in the public system. India has a system of affirmative action in admissions to universities for Dalits and other lower castes, which he benefited from and was accepted to the University of Mumbai. He now has a LL.M. degree from the UK and a PhD from South Africa. At 30, he is now a fellow and postdoc at Harvard Kennedy School, one of only three caste members to be studying there as far as he is aware.

“As a Dalit, the only option you have, except doing your traditional occupation, is education. If you don’t pursue education, you go back to your caste-centered traditional job such as cleaning bathrooms and toilets, doing manual labour.”

Reflecting on education in his hometown, he explains that after the 12th grade, options are very much limited if you come from a lower caste. Most children end up in the same socio-economic situation as their parents even if they do not want to. They are unlikely to make it to college and extremely unlikely to study abroad like Yengde did. According to census data, only 2.4 percent of Dalits in India have a university degree.

The world post-Covid-19 might be the world pre-Incheon – or even pre-Dakar

English / Español

By Sheldon Shaeffer, Chair, Board of Directors, Asia=Pacific Regional Network on Early Childhood (ARNEC)

Post-Covid-19, the world will not be the same for a very long time. Life may be so different that there might not even be a post-Covid-19 world in the sense of ever returning to any form of normalcy. We should spend more time assessing exactly what effect this pandemic is going to have on the feasibility of achieving SDG 4. It is time that we moved past discussions about the logistics of school opening to the policies needed to address the pandemic’s long-term damage. At least four major implications for education come to mind.

Image: Stars Foundation

First, achievements in virtually all sectors of development will be reversed and even lost.  Maternal, child, and infant mortality; immunisation rates; food security; poverty; and school enrolment and completion rates will be affected.  Parents may no longer be able to afford to educate their children, and child labour may increase.  They may also decide to prolong home schooling in face of successive waves of Covid-19 or other pandemics, while students may decide themselves not to return to school after their extended break.

Alejandro Calleja: A father fighting for his son’s right to an inclusive education in Spain

English / Español 

Alejandro is one of many champions being highlighted by the GEM Report in the run up to the launch of its 2020 publication on inclusion and education: All means all, due out 23 June. In their own way, and in multiple countries around the world, these champions are fighting for learner diversity to be celebrated, rather than ignored.

Alejandro Calleja has gone through all the levels of the judicial system in his fight to ensure the right to an inclusive education of his son Ruben, who was born with Down syndrome. For 8 years, Ruben attended regular school and, during this time, he was able to socialise and interact with his peers until a teacher demanded that he be removed from regular school and enrolled in a special school. The Calleja family believed the school’s decision was a violation of Ruben’s rights and began their fight to see them respected.

“Ruben has Down syndrome, but he also has rights and dignity. Inclusive education is not a favour, it is a right. Someone has to fight for it. We are fighting, for Rubén and for all children.”

Distance Learning Denied

Over 500 million of the world’s children and youth not accessing distance learning alternatives

By Stefania Giannini, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education

Most countries around the world have mandated school closures as part of public health measures to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since February 2020, school closures in 190 countries have caused widespread disruption of the education of 1.27 billion children and youth or some 95% of primary and secondary students worldwide. This situation is dramatically exacerbating inequalities in access to educational opportunity in multiple ways. Data shows that despite government efforts worldwide to provide alternative remote learning, at least 500 million children and youth are currently excluded from public educational provision.

While governments in four out of five countries with school closures have proposed national distance learning alternatives in efforts to ensure continuity of curriculum-based study and learning, other countries have not. Indeed, school closures in many other contexts have been implemented with no apparent national distance learning alternative to offset the interruption of learning. In these situations, the closures of physical schools amount to a temporary suspension of publicly provisioned education for some 45 million students.

Figure 1: Government-initiated distance learning solutions and intended reach

Source: UNESCO May 2020

Note: The diagram includes distance learning solutions initiated and endorsed by Ministries of Education and does not account for initiatives by private or other providers. It does not reference distance learning solutions reliant on print materials and which do not require information communication technologies.