Reflections: The First Global Education Monitoring Report’s Advisory Board Meeting

By Baela Raza Jamil- Vice Chair GEM Report

For two full days I was honoured to Chair the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report’s First Advisory Board meeting (June 2-3 2016). Jeff Sachs our luminary Chairperson was unable to attend due to on-going strikes so I stood in, as the Vice-Chair. It was an extraordinary 2 days. It was the First Advisory Board meeting since the GEM Report was baptised, from its earlier incarnation as the EFA GMR (Global Monitoring Report). The decision to rename the Report and to focus on SDG 4 on Education was affirmed at the last year’s Advisory Board meeting. Since then, the role of the GEM Report has been boldly reinforced in the Incheon Declaration (May 2015), the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) at the UN General Assembly (September 2015) and in the Education 2030 Framework for Action endorsed by Ministries of Education during UNESCO’s General Conference (November 2015).

Now that the GEM Report has a clearly endorsed mandate, it needs to become more finely aligned to the architecture of the emergent SDG multi-layered governance system and its calendar. Many thought that this is an occasion for the GEM Report and its products to constitute a compelling formal knowledge reference until 2030, a report and set of publications that no one interested in global education can live without!

Should school principals be held accountable for the quality of education? An Ethiopian perspective.

The 2017 GEM Report will explore the successes and challenges to effective accountability in Education. While the online consultation is now officially closed, we welcome comments until the yearlong research period of the Report is over. This includes the following comments from an Ethiopian perspective, which explore whether school principals should be held accountable for the quality of education in their schools.

When we asked the question to you via twitter, we received the following fairly telling response:

Let’s see how the question is answered by three different points of view in Ethiopia: the Ministry of Education, a school principal and a student.

School in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

A/ Response from the Ministry of Education

By Fedlu Redi (School improvement program directorate, primary education program expert), Ministry of education, Ethiopia

Before we answer this question, it is important to see what activities are implemented by the Ethiopian government and other stakeholders to provide quality education at the school level and what are the responsibilities of school principals in supporting these efforts. Then we can easily identify where the blame should go.

In Ethiopia, currently there are more than 35,000 primary and 2,000 secondary government schools. Government schools account for about 96% of school enrollment and non-government schools account for the rest. Where schools do not exist, the first cycle of primary education is delivered through Alternative Basic Education Centers, which follows a curriculum different from that of primary schools.

Some donors are shifting aid to secondary education

The recent policy paper by the GEM Report containing the data on 2014 aid spending shows that, for several years, aid to education has been stuck not only at a level far below what is needed but even below levels reached a few years ago. Total aid to education in 2014 was 8% below its 2010 peak, while total aid to basic education is down 14%.

But it also shows some subtle shifts, with donors continuing to increase the share of their aid going to secondary education. The share of basic education (providing for pre-primary and primary education as well as basic skills) in total aid to education in 2014 was 3 percentage points below the peak it reached in 2010. By contrast, secondary education’s share increased from 12% in 2005 to 16% in 2010 and 21% in 2014.

Distribution of total aid to education by sector, 2003–2014

 

Source:  Global Education Monitoring Report team analysis based on OECD Creditor Reporting System (2016)

During this period, perhaps the most striking trend is the steadily rising disbursements of the United Kingdom and the World Bank, which increased their aid to secondary education by almost US$400 million per year between 2002/03 and 2013/14. They now give almost US$1 billion of aid to secondary education between them. In the case of the United Kingdom this is equivalent to an almost 10-fold increase during the period.

Reaching All Children with Education: Lebanon’s national education response strategy to the Syria crisis

By Lebanon’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education

In Lebanon, the five years since the beginning of the Syria Crisis have had a significant impact on its people and its institutions. With an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees now hosted in Lebanon, a country with a total pre-Crisis population of around 4 million citizens, Lebanon is now the highest refugee-per-capita country in the world.

It was welcome to read the recent policy paper produced by the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report and UNHCR on the education needs of refugees, what it said about how other countries are coping and its recommendations for improving the situation. In Lebanon, perhaps the most distressing part of the Crisis is that there are currently over one million vulnerable children in our country. Of these, there are 487,723 refugee children between the ages of 03-18 years. Only 41% of these children are enrolled in formal education (of which 75% are in public schools). As for non-Lebanese youth, limited mobility and lack of livelihood opportunities has contributed to families turning to negative coping mechanisms such as school drop-out, engaging in low wage labor and child marriage and the risk of radicalization.

Virtually Educated: The Case for and Conundrum of Online Higher Education for Refugees

by Martha K. Ferede, Consultant GEM Report, Lecturer in International and Comparative Higher Education, Sciences-Po

 

In addition to increased provision of primary and secondary schooling, refugees also need pathways into accredited tertiary education programs. As was highlighted in the recent GEM Report paper with UNHCR, only 1% of refugees have access to higher education. In recent years, several online initiatives have risen to meet the demand. This blog considers their potential and pitfalls.

 

Why it matters

Higher education, including TVET, improves the viability of the three durable solutions for refugees: repatriation back home, integration into host countries or resettlement into third countries. As outlined by INEE, among other benefits, tertiary education serves a protective function while also increasing refugees’ aptitude and capacity, opportunities to be assets to host countries, and to develop skill sets necessary to rebuild their countries.

Humanitarian aid: education’s double disadvantage

The GEM Report’s recent paper on trends of aid to education shows how education remains an under-prioritised and underfunded sector of humanitarian aid.

Humanitarian aid makes up only a small share of the external financing that countries receive for education. In 2014, compared with the US$13.1 billion of development aid that was disbursed for education, humanitarian aid to education was just a fraction at US$188 million.  

No more excuses. Provide education to all forcibly displaced people

By the GEM Report and the UNHCR Education Section

Days before the World Humanitarian Summit, we have jointly released a new policy paper, ‘No more excuses’, with new data showing that only 50% of refugee children are in primary school and 25% of refugee adolescents are in secondary school.

As people gather for one of the biggest ever summits on humanitarian needs, we are calling for all those forcibly displaced to have access to quality education within three months of displacement. Countries and their humanitarian and development partners must urgently ensure that those forcibly displaced are included in national education plans and programmes and to collect better data to monitor their education status and progress.

What data there are show that, behind the global average number of refugee children out of school, there are significant differences among countries. Primary enrolment rates average 80% in selected refugee sites in Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Yemen but only 40% in Pakistan and 50% in Ethiopia.

Access to secondary education is even more limited for refugees in many countries. In 2014, in Kenya, Pakistan and Bangladesh, less than 5% of adolescents aged 12 to 17 were enrolled in secondary education. Enrolment in early childhood education also remains very limited in some countries, reaching only 7% in Turkey in 2015.

Working across silos to deliver for women

by the GEM Report, UNESCO 

“There is no doubt that education is the single most transformative power in an individual’s life.”
Toyin Saraki, Founder and President of Wellbeing Foundation Africa

Credit: Women Deliver

Over the first two days of the 4^th Women Deliver conference, which is focused primarily on improving women and girls’ health, there has been strong recognition and continuous discussion of the vital roles education plays in empowering women and girls and ensuring gender equality. From the ministerial meeting to the plenary sessions, side events to coffee breaks, there is a buzz about education going around in Copenhagen’s spacious Bella Centre. Many of the stories are personal – women and young people speaking of how their own education brought them to this conference, to speak and learn alongside over 5,500 other delegates from around the world.

The Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, at Women Deliver for the first time, was proud to host a well-received side event that explored how the education and health sectors can better work together to achieve gender equality. Given that the focus of the 2016 GEM Report is on creating sustainable futures for all and that ithighlights the intersectoral relationships between education and other sectors, it was exciting to share some of our initial findings with a new audience.

Homophobic and Transphobic Violence in Education: A Global Problem

By: UNESCO Senior Project Officer Christophe Cornu

Schools and other educational settings are supposed to be safe places where children and young people can learn free from threats and violence. Yet data from 106 countries collected through the Global School-based Student Health Survey and the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children cross-national survey show that between 7 per cent and 74 per cent of students aged 13 to 15 have recently experienced bullying in and around school.

Especially worrisome, are the rates of violence directed at students who are, or are perceived to be, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI), and others whose gender expression does not fit into binary gender norms, such as boys perceived as effeminate and girls perceived as masculine.

While there is a lack of comprehensive and comparable data on violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity/expression in schools, all data reviewed for UNESCO’s global report on the phenomenon consistently showed high rates of violence towards LGBT* students.

Getting down to business: The Global Alliance to Monitor Learning

By Claudia Costin, Senior Director for Education at the World Bank, and Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics

We have just launched the ‘go to’ initiative on the monitoring of learning worldwide: The Global Alliance to Monitor Learning. What and how children, youth and adults learn is at the top of the global education agenda, with Sustainable Development Goal 4 demanding inclusive and equitable quality education and the promotion of lifelong learning for all by 2030. No fewer than five of its ten targets zoom in on learning outcomes, including  target 4.1, which covers children and adolescents, and target 4.6, which covers those aged 15 and above.

But right now, there is a chronic lack of the comparable data we need to measure even the most basic reading and numeracy skills across countries. As a result, we don’t have global information on these to monitor the basic building blocks of children’s learning, let alone their progress in later years.

The new Global Alliance to Monitor Learning aims to tackle this problem head on, supporting efforts by countries worldwide to effectively measure learning outcomes and – very importantly – to put that information to good use in their pursuit of the SDG targets. It will forge stronger links between assessment experts, decision-makers, donors and civil society organizations representing many groups including teachers – links that are essential if we are to generate globally valid and comparable data that contribute to improved learning environments. And when it comes to forging links, nothing works better than bringing real people together to discuss real challenges and share real solutions.