The consequences – and causes – of private school growth: a look at Nepal

This blog by Priyadarshani Joshi, Senior Analyst, Global Education Monitoring Report, is the first of a series of blogs in the run up to the 2021 GEM Report on non-state actors in education

Credit: Rene Edde

Few issues have garnered as much policy and research interest in the world as non-state education expansion. Nepal is my home country and country of research. It is where I chose to systematically analyse the consequences of private schooling for the education system’s equity and quality, which had not been explored so thoroughly in lower income countries before.

My research began with a series of exploratory interviews with public school principals and national education officials in Nepal. Most of the people I initially spoke to were government officials, who expressed mixed views on ‘private’ schooling – the main school choice available. Some officials spoke as parents and their right to choose; some discussed private schooling as providing better quality; while others argued that private schools were a bane for equity in society and talked of the need to promote government schooling.

With the help of external funding, approval from the government, and a data collection team, my research also included surveys of hundreds of public and private secondary schools around the country, data collection on private schooling characteristics from district offices, and interviews with a wide range of public sector stakeholders (national, district and local officials, and principals), private sector stakeholders (private school board members and principals), and parents.

Education Progress – the GEM Report’s new online interactive tool exploring progress made towards SDG 4

To mark International Education Day, the Global Education Monitoring Report has launched a new online interactive tool, Education Progress. Available in seven major languages, the site brings together data from various producers, notably the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, to explore the progress made towards SDG 4, the global education goal. It shows the progress being made by each country, as well as the bottlenecks and policy priorities from now until 2030 in five key themes, covered in brief below.

We invite you to explore the site, whose visualisations enable users to look at different countries, regions and education levels to uncover new ways of thinking about education progress around the world.

Access Globally, 88% of children complete primary school, 72% complete lower secondary school and 53% of youth complete upper secondary school

One of these issues includes the gravity of children who are over-age when they enroll. In Haiti and Liberia, for instance, almost one in ten of 20-year-olds are still in primary school, increasing the likelihood of further repeating grades, failing exams and eventually dropping out of school.

Using innovative and interactive data-visualisations, which can be changed by country, the site also shows the impact of population growth on out-of-school numbers. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the primary school-aged population has more than doubled between 1990 and 2017. As a result, even though the rate of out-of-school children has more than halved during this period, the number of children out-of-school has barely changed.

Join the consultation on the 2021 GEM Report on non-state actors in education

We are extending the online consultation and expressions of interest for the 2021 GEM Report on non-state actors in education. The concept note for the Report is now available in English/ Français / Español  and Русский. Chinese and Arabic will follow soon.

Your views at this stage of our report process are vital to be sure we have as broad an understanding of your requirements when researching this issue, that we are aware of existing research already available, and of experts on the issue who might be able to contribute to the Report as it develops.

Online consultation: 

We would like to invite readers to:

• Provide substantive feedback to the proposed lines of research in the concept note
• Recommend interesting examples from around the world that illustrate the different roles non-state actors play in in different education systems
• Recommend potential areas of new research drawing on already established or previously unexplored sources of quantitative and qualitative data.

Building the Foundations: Highlights from ASER 2019 Early Years report

By Hannah-May Wilson, Education Partnerships Group

Image: Sandeep Sharma / ASER Centre

For the last fifteen years, Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has provided an important and timely reminder that schooling does not equal learning. There is now wide acceptance that – despite spending at least five years in school, only half of all children in India can read a Grade 2 level text. The first ten years of ASER provided a fairly consistent picture of learning nationwide: learning levels were low; progress was slow; and ‘learning profiles’ (representing gains in learning per year of schooling) were relatively flat – meaning that years spent in school only equate to ‘time served’ and not ‘skills gained’. In 2016, ASER started an alternate-year cycle of assessment – conducting the ‘basic’ ASER every other year, using a different lens to examine new aspects of learning in the alternate years. ASER 2017 was the first alternate year. Known as ASER ‘Beyond Basics’, the survey focused on understanding more about the basic skills, enrollment status and aspirations of youth aged 14-18. On Tuesday, ASER launched the second alternate report in New Delhi, known as ASER ‘Early Years’.

Accreditation, certification and recognition of non-formal education in the Arab States

By Michael Cacich and Farida Aboudan, Educate A Child, a programme of the Education Above All Foundation

The recent Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report 2019: Migration, displacement and education: Building bridges, not walls estimates annual education spending at US$4.7 trillion worldwide. While education at all levels is inherently valuable to individuals and society at large, arguably it is especially useful when it is recognised and allows the individual to maximise future employment and learning opportunities wherever they are.

Photo by UNICEF USA – Lebanon

According to UNHCR, the world is now witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record, with 70.8 million people globally having been forced from home. Amongst them are nearly 25.9 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.

Internally Displaced Girls and Education in Yemen

By YoumnaFathi Al-Aswadi, author of a background paper for the Arab States 2019 GEM Report on migration, displacement and education

Photo by Clinton Doggett, USAID

The protracted conflict in Yemen since March 2015 has resulted in significant human suffering. More than 3.65 million people have been internally displaced, at least 1.71 million of whom are children.

Internally displaced children experience additional challenges besides the ones that every child in Yemen has encountered before and during this war. Unluckily, the most significant share of these challenges is for girls, especially as regards education.

Benchmarks: the forgotten commitment for accelerating progress towards SDG 4

Time for a new year resolution

By Silvia Montoya, Director, UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), and Manos Antoninis, Director, Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report

The Education 2030 Framework for Action called on countries to establish “appropriate intermediate benchmarks (e.g. for 2020 and 2025)” on the way to achieving SDG 4, seeing them as “indispensable for addressing the accountability deficit associated with longer-term targets” (§28).

Setting benchmarks as intermediate points cannot be done at the global level because countries have set off from very different starting points. However, as a quick search through the Planipolis repository of education plans of UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning can show, most countries are yet to formally set such national benchmarks even though we have reached 2020.

It is high time countries and the international community set the benchmarks to which they committed. The most promising way forward is to set benchmarks as minimum levels to be achieved by each country at the regional level (Figure 1). Our analysis and projections for the 2019 High Level Political Forum showed, for instance, that at current rates only 60% of young people will be completing secondary school by 2030. We need renewed emphasis to achieve SDG 4 and a benchmarking process will help build momentum.

The Framework for Action was explicit that benchmarks had to be set through an inclusive process. Such a process is already underway with the SDG – Education 2030 Steering Committee and the Technical Cooperation Group on the Indicators for SDG 4.

Figure 1. Hypothetical example of historic and target indicator trend with different regional minimum benchmarks in 2025 and 2030

Setting benchmarks is political…

The promise of non-profit schools for all children in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries

By Natasha Ridge and Susan Kippels, who prepared a background paper for the Arab States 2019 GEM Report on migration displacement and education

In our recent background paper for the Arab States 2019 GEM Report, we explored how there are a significant number of migrant workers with school-aged children living in the GCC region. In fact, in some of the GCC countries, there are even more migrant students than there are national students. For example, in the UAE, 15-year-old students from migrant backgrounds comprise nearly three quarters of all students.  In the other GCC countries, migrant children of the same age make up between 64% and 17% of all students.

Percentage of students aged 15 in the GCC that are migrants or from migrant backgrounds, 2015

Note: GEM Report team analysis was based on the 2006 and 2015 PISA and 2015 TIMSS and refers to 15-year-olds, including natives of mixed heritage. Source: Calculated from GEM Report StatLink: http://bit.ly/fig3_4

The only schooling option for the majority of migrant children living in the GCC region is private school. This is in part due to language barriers, but also dictated by quotas, fees, and/or other policies related to public school enrollment for non-nationals. The one exception is Bahrain, where any child can enroll in a public school, and, as a result, approximately 50% of the public education system in Bahrain is comprised of non-national students. This is a greater proportion than in any of the other GCC countries.

Our joint pledge to increase financing and coordination and improve education for refugees

Jointly authored by Yasmine Sherif, Director Education Cannot Wait, Alice Albright, CEO of the Global Partnership for Education and Keiko Miwa, Regional Director for Human Development of the World Bank

The first Global Refugee Forum, which kicks off in Geneva today, comes at the end of a tumultuous decade in which the number of refugees has risen to more than 26 million people worldwide.

Having fled their homes in search of protection, the vast majority of refugees – some 85 percent – live in the world’s poorest countries. As a result, many struggle to access essential services in their new homes.

Access to education is a case in point. More than half the world’s refugees are children, and some 3.7 million of them have not only lost their homes but their opportunity to go to school.

As a result of discrimination, exclusion and a lack of funding, refugee children are five times less likely to attend school than other children in the countries to which their families have fled. Only 61 percent attend primary school, 22 percent have access to secondary school and just 1 percent benefit from higher education. Refugee girls are out of school at higher rates than boys.

Internally displaced people and education in Syria

By Jen Steele, an education in emergencies specialist, and author of a background paper on IDPs and education in Syria for the Arab States 2019 GEM Report

Internally displaced children (IDP) not only need better funding for education programmes, but also better integrated education programmes that address the unique factors that limit their access to quality education. In Syria (and likely in other conflict-affected contexts), factors outside of education and its administration (such as the opportunity costs of education) are as important as factors internal to it (such as teaching and learning materials). Paying more attention to the more nuanced needs of IDP children (such as their wellbeing) and their families (such as household income constraints) could help the education in emergencies community better prevent future lost generations.

Before her tragic murder by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008, Jackie Kirk was a vocal advocate for more thoughtful investment in education for internally displaced persons (IDPs). The Arab States 2019 GEM Report quotes her saying that “… in many ways the situation for IDP children may be more complex than that for refugee children, and access to education even more difficult.”

Although often less spoken about, IDPs outnumber refugees, at 41 million at the end of 2018 compared to 26 million refugees. Providing them with an education is also more challenging, mainly due to complex notions of state sovereignty, neutrality, and impartiality in humanitarian response.

But the tide has turned on Syria’s conflict, if we are to believe recent analysis by senior commentators, including Economist, Howard Shatz, in his recent blog, “The Syrian Civil War Is Coming to an End.” From analysing battlegrounds, discussions now centre more around the costs and political economy of reconstruction. Nevertheless, approximately 6.1 million, or 29%, of Syria’s population remain internally displaced. Fifty-two percent are children.  As of June 2018, more IDPs live in areas controlled by the government of Syria (GoS) than in areas of opposition control. As such, donor coordination with the GoS on education sector programming is increasingly critical (and increasingly complex).