Which way to the platform, please?

The Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) bi-annual meetings recently took place in Amman, Jordan. Two points stood out from the event: there is considerable excitement about the potential offered by the impending Crisis Platform for Education in Emergencies, now known as the Education Cannot Wait Fund. However, although the event was attended by the world’s best professionals in education in emergencies, they had very little understanding of how it will work, and how they can engage with it.

The Fund, or what it represents, is something that has been campaigned for vivaciously by many education advocators for some time. Any improvement to the tiny fraction of aid in emergencies going to education would be welcome. The persistently low amounts of humanitarian aid, and the frustrating lack of coordination between humanitarian and development assistance led to the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Education Gordon Brown leading the call for a new fund to be launched.

The time is soon upon us. The Fund will be launched at 3.45pm on the 23^rd of May at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul. It will no doubt be hailed as one of the major outcomes of the Summit, an initiative pushed hard by the UN Secretary General. This blog lays out a few ways the Fund can ensure it is viewed as a success and welcomed by the education community as it develops. 

We’ve been told: your advice for the GEM 2017 on accountability in education

The consultation for the 2017 GEM Report on Accountability in Education is soon to close. This blog contains some of the suggestions made by commentators for the GEM Report to consider as it embarks upon the research. Full comments can be read on the consultation webpage.

Too soon to critique learning assessments? Noah Sobe advised that the team look at the negative effects of accountability mechanisms on learning and classroom experiences as well as its benefits. Duishon Shamatov refers to research that suggests a “Third Way” after the past, and the present push for accountability that the GEM 2017 could explore.

Andreas Schleicher, however, thinks that an overemphasis on learning measurement may be ‘out of place’, especially with “the paint only drying on the indicator framework.” Silvia Montoya questions the same, but continues to support the Report’s potential for making a persuasive case for a proper balance in the use of assessment results for accountability. The Report ‘should make the point that perpetuating a system with poor performance is a violation of rights’.

Funding education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Can the momentum be maintained during the current economic slowdown?

This blog, by Birger Fredriksen, a leading expert on the development of education in developing countries at the Results for Development Institute, shows that concerted efforts are needed to stop the economic slowdown in sub-Saharan Africa from impacting on its education 2030 ambitions. It is released to coincide with the Global Action Week run by the Global Campaign for Education, under the theme ‘Fund the Future: Education Rights Now!”

The impact of good quality education on a country’s economic growth is now quite well understood. The inverse relationship – the impact of economic growth on education — is given less attention. This is especially so with respect to the importance of sustained high per capita income growth needed to generate both the education funding and the jobs needed to make rapid education growth financially and socially sustainable. This applies particularly to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), given the region’s continued high population growth, massive need for education catch-up, and very slow growth in modern sector job creation.

Aid to education has gone down

Timed to coincide with GCE’s Global Action Week, Fund the Future, we have estimated the latest aid figures for education showing that levels went down 4% between 2013 and 2014. The share of total aid being allocated to education also fell from 9.5% to 8.2%, indicating that the sector is falling further down the list of priorities for donors.

Do international rankings of universities help make them more accountable?

The GEM Report 2017 will be looking at how we can improve accountability in education. Hoping to engage people in the types of issues our Report will address, we are running a series of twitter polls to accompany our online consultation. The third in our twitter poll series asked whether people felt that international rankings of universities make high education more accountable. The answers sat more firmly on the fence than with our previous two polls:

Ever since they first appeared in the 1980s, university rankings continue to grow in number and popularity as basic reference points of tertiary education institution performance. In 2015, eleven global ranking systems produced updated lists.

The initial idea of establishing university rankings was twofold: first to help keep university programs relevant and second, to push universities to provide the best quality education, by creating a form of competition.   Students were then meant to use these rankings to explore the higher education options that exist beyond their own countries’ borders and to compare key aspects of schools’ research and teaching missions.  In design, therefore, they are set up to help students and governments hold universities to account; in reality, they are hotly contested. Why?

Last chance to join the call for the new Education Crisis Platform to be adequately and sustainably financed

By Kolleen Bouchane, Their World

Around the world, emergencies and protracted crises disrupted the education of 80 million children and adolescents in 2015. Despite this, education in emergency contexts received less than 2 percent of all humanitarian funding last year. At the Oslo Education Summit in July 2015, a joint Call to Action signed by more than 40 organisations set the work in motion to create an Education Crisis Platform and Breakthrough Fund to urgently address the need to make education a key part of humanitarian response.

The Education Crisis Platform and Breakthrough Fund will be launched during the first ever World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in May 2016. A high level of ambition on the part of donors at this launch will be critical to ensuring that we close the $9 billion annual funding gap and make sure that all children in emergencies do not lose out on their right to quality education.

Learning from former extremists

By Lynn Davies

I met these other people, Muslims, and for some reason they saw something in me that I couldn’t see. They basically believed in me and they said that, ‘You can do more with yourself’.

Interviewing former extremists (far right and Islamist) about their reasons for joining and leaving extremism uncovered a complex mix of drivers. Our research in ConnectJustice, called ‘Formers and Families’, was part of a larger EU funded study with the Netherlands and Denmark. It aimed to explore the role of families both in radicalisation and in exit.  Although the focus was the family, our exploration in UK found family background not to be a convincing ‘factor’ in motivation.  A number of the extremists in our sample reported coming from loving and caring homes.  As with many of the fighters going off to Syria, parents often did not know about their children’s journeys into violent extremism. There was no single, linear, recognizable pathway in and out.  The process of radicalisation was a mix of a whole range of factors and drivers.  Whether far right or Islamist, there is a sense of mission and purpose in life, wanting identity as a saviour – whether of the world or of the local community.

Do private schools need to be better regulated?

There are long-standing debates over whether offering the choice between private and public schools affects the equity and quality of education systems. With little regulation, private school expansion risks happening in an unplanned manner, with little government oversight and potentially exacerbating inequality. With too much, private providers could be deterred, and possible chances for expanding school access could be reduced.

We will be addressing this issue in the GEM 2017 as we take on the broad issue of Accountability in Education, and hope you might share your opinion with us via our online consultation as we gear up to begin our research. We raised the issue in our second twitter poll recently, with eight out of ten respondents saying private schools need to be better regulated.

Is tying student results to teacher performance pay the best way to hold teachers to account?

Teachers around the world have a commitment to meet a range of learners’ needs, from engaging them in meaningful and relevant learning experiences and supporting their cognitive and social development to being responsible for their care and physical safety. They are accountable not just to their students and their parents, but also to their peers and supervisors and to the community and society in which they reside. In addition, they are accountable for whether they adhere to professional standards laid out by professional associations and unions for the way that they carry out their duties in the school.

Is the best way to judge their performance by tying their pay to student test results?

There is no doubt that there is a need for increased accountability of teachers, under which they would have more support, collaboration and training, leading to higher expectations. In many countries, standardised learning assessments have become the basis for holding teachers, as well as school leaders, schools and/or entire systems accountable by assessing performance on specific metrics, published in regular reports. In some contexts, teachers and school leaders are rewarded or sanctioned based on student assessment results, as is the case in the USA, in Mexico with the ‘Carrera magisterial’, or Portugal for example. But is this the best way to hold them to account?

Consultation now open for the 2017 GEM Report: Accountability in Education

The second in the GEM Report series will investigate, analyse and propose concrete recommendations related to accountability in education. A full concept note describing how the GEM will go about addressing the issue is now available. We invite all to share their views on this note, including suggestions on relevant literature, data analysis and case studies via an online consultation now open until 11 April. 

With a new ambitious global education goal, tight budgets and a focus on ensuring the marginalized are not left behind, countries are under pressure to provide education more effectively, efficiently and equitably. These pressures exist because of the persistent underperformance of education systems in light of global challenges, and because of the growing evidence about the influence of good quality education on individual and collective well-being. In addition, education constitutes a – if not the – major budgetary expenditure in most countries; proper accounting of how these public funds are (mis)used has become a high priority.