Takeaways from the Cali International Forum on Inclusion and Equity in Education

Last week (11-13 September), the International Forum on Inclusion and Equity in Education was held in Cali, Colombia, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Salamanca Declaration with a packed agenda. This blog summarizes some of the energy and outcomes from the event.

“Making inclusive policies at the national level is not a very productive way to make a career in politics” said Stefania Giannini, Assistant-Director General for Education at UNESCO, but notably also former Minister of Education in Italy. And yet, the almost 40 countries represented at the Forum signed up to the ‘Cali commitment to equity and inclusion in education’, “which recognizes the necessity and urgency of providing equitable and inclusive quality education for all learners, from the early years through compulsory schooling, TVET, higher education, and lifelong learning”.

The statement also committed those present to “build on achievements […] including in the areas addressed by the 2020 Global Education Monitoring Report.” In shorthand:

• Legislative and policy frameworks that take a cross-sectoral approach
• Clarity of roles and responsibilities of decision makers at all levels and across all sectors
• Curricula that are broad and inclusive
• Learning environments that ensure high levels of motivation, engagement and learning outcomes for everyone
• Technologies based on principles of equity, diversity and inclusion
• Teachers with a solid understanding of the principles and practices of inclusion and their application
• Robust disaggregated data and evidence
• Adequate , equitable and effectively used funding at all levels

Making evaluations work for education equality and inclusion

By Karen Mundy, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

International organizations typically have well-developed evaluation units, generating large volumes of evidence about their policies, programs and practices. Yet, while synthesis of evidence on international education development has evolved considerably in recent years, synthesis of evidence from the independent evaluations undertaken by international organizations has not.

A new ‘evidence synthesis’ released this week from UNESCO’s IOS Evaluation Office and a group of international partners partly fills this gap. The study reviews 147 independent evaluations commissioned by 13 international organizations, all with a focus on measuring and assessing some aspect of education equality or gender equity. Using a rigorous search process, systematic coding and narrative analysis, the study gives a bird’s eye view of the types of interventions being evaluated by international organizations and synthesizes evaluation findings. It also proposes important recommendations to help improve evaluations commissioned by international organizations and ensure that these evaluations support country progress in achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.5.

Has the approach to inclusion changed over the years?

It is 25 years since the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education endorsed the approach of inclusive schools and argued that regular schools should accommodate all children, regardless of their physical, intellectual, social, emotional, linguistic or other conditions. 

The Statement is generally perceived to be a turning point although the past 25 years have also been marked by other important moments on the way to inclusion in education, not least the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2006 and General Comment 4 of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

To mark the anniversary, an International Forum on Inclusion and Equity in Education is being held in Cali, Colombia, this week from 11 to 13 September 2019 with the motto ‘Every learner matters’.

How much does it cost to achieve universal literacy?

As events for International Literacy Day continue, new cost estimates have been produced by UNESCO showing that US$14 billion will be needed if the 20 countries with the lowest literacy rates, which are members of the Global Alliance for Literacy (GAL), and the E-9 countries with the largest population in the developing world are to achieve universal functional literacy and numeracy skills by 2030.

The costs are presented in a new study authored by the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL), the UNESCO Division for Policies and Lifelong Learning Systems, and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), in collaboration with the GEM Report team. They were based on an extension of the costing model developed by the Report for the 2015 policy paper ‘Pricing the right to education: The cost of reaching new targets by 2030’. 

New photo competition on inclusion and education

The 2020 GEM Report due out in April 2020 will cover inclusion in education, addressing all those at risk of exclusion from education because of gender, sexual orientation, displacement, migration, ethnicity, language, remoteness, poverty, disability or other characteristics. Pictures speak louder than words when it comes to explaining the way inclusion in education works in practice. This is why the GEM Report is launching an international photo contest to seek out new and original images to complement its innovative findings and analysis. As with every year, the winning photographer will receive a $500 prize.

Our Report challenges policy makers how to build inclusive societies, whether that future is reflected in their education laws, policies and plans, and how these are to be implemented. It calls on all of us to look at whether we are practicing inclusion in the way we educate those around us. It is motivated by the call to ensure an inclusive and equitable quality education in the formulation of SDG 4, the global goal for education. It reminds us that, no matter what argument may be built to the contrary, we have a moral imperative to ensure everyone fulfils their right to an appropriate education of high quality.

About 15-40% of illiterate people come from households in which no member can read

This International Literacy Day we want to draw attention to those living in households where no member can read – those we call ‘isolated illiterate individuals’ – whose chances of finding work and enjoying a good quality of life can be worse than they are for others. Census data shows that around 15-40% of illiterate people are isolated. These are precisely the people we should be making even more of an effort to reach.

Who are isolated illiterates?

There are far more isolated illiterate women than men, and far more in rural areas than in urban. In richer countries, isolated illiterates are relatively older than others, whereas the converse is true in poorer countries.

This might be because most people who are illiterate in poorer countries live in multigenerational households and hence are more likely to live alongside younger, more educated family members. By contrast, illiterates in richer countries, such as Greece and Portugal, are less likely to live in such households and more likely to be isolated.

Do you know a champion in inclusion and education?

Help us by nominating those who you believe deserve recognition

The 2020 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report due out next April will cover inclusion in education, addressing all those at risk of exclusion from education because of gender, sexual orientation, displacement, migration, ethnicity, language, remoteness, poverty, disability or other characteristics.

Our Report will challenge the extent to which policy makers are building inclusive societies, and whether that is reflected in their education laws, policies and plans, and how they are being implemented. It calls on all of us to look at whether we are practicing inclusion in the way we educate those around us. It is motivated by the call to ensure an inclusive and equitable quality education in the formulation of SDG 4, the global goal for education. It reminds us that, no matter what argument may be built to the contrary, we have a moral imperative to ensure every child has a right to an appropriate education of high quality.

Tell us what you think about inclusion in education

September is an important month for inclusion and education – the theme of the 2020 Global Education Monitoring Report due for release next April. Later this month, the International Forum on Inclusion and Equity in Education is being held in Cali, Colombia to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of the Salamanca Statement. This statement included a Framework for Action whose guiding principle was that ordinary schools should accommodate all children, regardless of their physical, intellectual, social, emotional, linguistic or other conditions.

In order to feed into the discussions and debates about the way that thinking about inclusion in education has changed over the past 25 years since this Statement, we are launching a new survey (French, Spanish, Chinese) to gauge the sentiments and thoughts of parents, teachers and students on the subject. These quotes will bring to life some of the research in the 2020 GEM Report, showing that this is a subject that affects peoples’ lives, and deserves greater attention.

The Wrong Way to Educate Girls

By Manos Antoninis

Getting girls into classrooms remains hugely important in some of the world’s poorest countries, and it can be achieved with targeted measures, say, to make their daily commute safer. But balanced school enrollment numbers are only the beginning. There is also a need to address the underlying causes of unequal educational outcomes.

Credit: Credit: Save the Children / Hanna Adcock

Recent decades have brought significant progress toward a more just and equal world in areas such as poverty reduction, immunization, and life expectancy. But in some areas, change has been painfully slow. In one such area – gender equality in education – the problem is as straightforward as it is profound: we are focusing on the wrong metric.

Of course, there is good news. As the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring (GEM) 2019 Gender Report notes, the number of adult illiterate women in upper-middle-income countries fell by 42 million from 2000 to 2016. And progress on enrollment in most countries means that richer countries increasingly face the opposite challenge, as more boys than girls do not complete secondary education.

These disparities expose the limitations of the current approach, which focuses on gender parity – that is, ensuring that equal numbers of boys and girls attend school. Of course, getting girls into classrooms remains hugely important in some of the world’s poorest countries, and it can be achieved with targeted measures, say, to make their daily commute safer. Among the 20 countries with the largest such disparities, Guinea, Niger, and Somalia stand out for their commitment to closing the gap.

Ethiopia is making the fastest progress in primary completion in sub-Saharan Africa. How?

This week, we released new projections to 2030 for the global education goal, SDG 4, along with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). While not all projections can be drilled down to the country level, the completion rate projections can and shine a light on some countries that have been making faster progress relative to others. Ethiopia is one of these. What are the reasons for its success and how can others follow its example?

Ethiopia, like many countries in the region, has seen its education system expand quickly over recent years. It has gone from 10 million learners a decade ago to more than 25 million learners today. Despite this vast expansion, the completion rates at the primary school level projected to 2030 are the fastest in the region. It will have gone from only 3 in 10 children completing primary education in 2000 to 8 in 10 completing in 2030. Along with India, it will be topping the list of countries to have reduced their out of school numbers the most in relative terms.

Money is not always the answer to everything, but it has most definitely played a central role in this story. We learnt a lot about this from analyzing Ethiopia’s 2017 voluntary national review as part of our research for our new publication released this week: Beyond commitments: How countries are implementing SDG 4.

Ethiopia dedicates the second highest proportion of its entire budget to education of any country in the world – 27%. This is far more than the international suggested benchmark of 15-20% and the regional average of 16%. And a quarter of Ethiopia’s budget will not be insignificant given the economic boom we’ve seen in the country, which has witnessed the fastest growth of any in the region, growing by an average of 10% a year from 2006/7 to 2016/7, which is about double the average growth in the region.