The PAL Network Learning Journey: Beyond Assessment to Action!

 Hannah-May Wilson, Program Manager – PAL Network Secretariat

On the sparkling shores of the seaside town of Saly on the Petite Côte of Senegal, 50 ambitious education activists and innovators from 15 Global South countries convened last week to explore the next crucial stage of their learning journey at the 4^th Annual PAL Network meeting.

The People’s Action for Learning Network (PAL Network) is an internationally recognized south-south collaboration whose member countries work across three continents to assess the basic reading and numeracy competencies of over 1 million children annually, in their homes, through citizen-led assessments.

This is a journey that started in India more than ten years ago when a group of concerned citizens from India’s largest NGO, Pratham, decided to find out whether or not children were acquiring basic skills, regardless of their age or schooling status. This exercise came to be known as the The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), which has since spread organically to 8 other countries and continues to expand.

The 4^th Annual Meeting of PAL Network members welcomed representatives from six additional countries to join its member base of nine countries. Four countries were granted provisional member status for demonstrating significant progress and commitment towards piloting their own citizen-led assessments. In addition, Mozambique, Ghana and Cameroon formally joined the family this month, and Bangladesh will follow this week.

Pakistan: all girls and boys in school for 12 years – a critical pathway to progress

Baela Raza Jamil is the Trustee/Advisor for the Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA)

The demand for girls education has been rising in Pakistan but remains unmet due to poor access especially at post primary levels. The current net enrolment ratio for girls is 54% at primary level, declining to 21 % at middle and 13 % at secondary level according to the 2013-14 Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey. Governments in all provinces are exploring innovations to meet this growing unmet demand for expanding post primary education provision, especially for girls.

For girls and vulnerable groups who are still not learning in Pakistan, the announcement that the Government of Punjab will be establishing 50,000 basic education centres for approximately 2 million learners is good news indeed. However, Minister of State for Federal Education, Professional Training, Interior and Narcotics Control, Muhammad Baligh ur Rehman, clarified that, whilst a survey has been completed, the resources for the change are still a question mark.

What happens if an education system is outsourced?

The new Liberian Education Minister, George Werner, announced in January that the pre-primary and primary schools in the country will move over to be run by ‘public-private’ partnerships in a $65 million five year deal.

Why this change? In February 2013, the Liberian President, Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson, called the education system a “mess”. The legacy of the civil war means that there is an education quality vacuum in the country: there are almost 50 pupils per trained primary school teacher in the country. According to the 2013 Demographic and Health Survey, only 50% of young women and 68% of young men had completed primary school or, if not, were able to read a whole sentence. The situation was exacerbated during the recent Ebola public health crisis.

Big hopes for education, and yet more big targets at the World Humanitarian Summit

The UN Secretary-General’s Report, One Humanity: Shared Responsibility, was released yesterday for the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul this May. It contains calls for reform in humanitarian aid architecture that could change lives for millions if taken at their word.

The writing also dedicates two sections to education, giving it some of the prominence we might hope for, raising expectations in advance of the Summit. In particular, it underlines the following ‘Core Responsibilities’:

1. Commit to ensure safe, quality and inclusive access to primary and secondary education and vocational opportunities in and after crises, including for children and youth with disabilities.
2. Provide primary, secondary and vocational education and certification for those living in displacement, in line with national qualifications and standards.
3. Provide sufficient domestic and international funding to enable all children and adolescents to receive education and vocational training opportunities, including in crisis settings.

Books for Every Child: The Global Book Fund

Penelope Bender, Learning Team Lead, USAID’s Office of Education (@penelopebender, @USAIDEducation)

Despite the education sector’s longstanding call of “Education For All,”children in many countries are not learning to read and cannot read to learn. The right to education is not the right to a seat in a school.  The right to education is the right to learn.  Yet still, in 2016, in classroom after classroom, as the recent GEM paper showed, we see children struggling to share one copy of a tattered textbook in a language they don’t understand.  The “supplemental” reading materials that are essential for reading instruction and practice are completely missing.  Given these conditions, we should not be surprised that early grade reading assessments implemented in more than 70 countries since 2006 often show that the majority of children cannot read a single word after one, two or even three years of schooling (see www.eddataglobal.org).  This is a global crisis and a crisis for us as development professionals.

Syria? Education?

It’s not news that calls for funds for education in humanitarian situations are left unmet, but it doesn’t fail to shock when the actual figures are laid bare.

Syria, which no one can deny is in dire need of assistance, and where education has been flattened over the course of its recent conflict, had less than a quarter of its education requests for funding met last year, according to new GEM analysis. In total, of the funding that Syria received in its humanitarian appeal, only 4% went to education.

What does this mean for children and adolescents on the ground? The original requests that Syria made for finance in 2015 to help keep its education system buoyant through the crisis amounted to US$224 million for 4.5 million people. However, education only received 23% of the funding it requested, leaving around 3.5 million people with no education humanitarian assistance at all.

Donor conference must deliver on the promise of education for Syria

By Joseph Nhan-O’Reilly, Head of Education Policy & Advocacy at Save the Children UK. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Global Partnership for Education and Chair of the Board’s Strategy & Policy Committee. He is also a member of the Technical Strategy Group overseeing the design of the new common platform for education in emergencies.  

Funding, policy change and enhanced protection will be tests for this week’s London conference.

A bullet-hole scars the blackboard at the local school after armed groups occupied the school in Northern Syria.

In a few days, representatives from donor governments, regional nations hosting refugees and the UN will arrive in London to agree how to meet the urgent humanitarian needs of people affected by the war in Syria.

Five years since the start of the conflict and there are 13.5 million vulnerable and displaced people inside the country,4.2 million Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries and thousands more are on the move seeking asylum elsewhere.

A key measure of the event’s success will be whether the meeting helps to close the humanitarian funding gap: current funding to the 2015 UN appeals has not even reached last year’s levels and stands at $3.3 billion against an appeal of $8.4 billion. There is no doubt that the international community must do more.

The conference is set to address three pillars: protection, livelihoods and education.

Can Africa afford free education?

Today, BBC World Service is holding a debate in South Africa around the question ‘Can Africa afford free education?’, which we have been helping them answer.

Inequality in education: poverty as a major factor.

The new agenda calls for 12 years of free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education, yet, as of 2010, on average in the region, 20-24 year olds had only attained 6.6 years. A lot of the blame for this unfinished business falls on the persisting inequalities in education, not the least of which is related to poverty. The 2015 GMR underlined this fact, showing that in low and middle income countries, the poorest children are 4 times less likely to go to school than the richest, and are 5 times less likely to complete primary education. The poorest children are also almost 6 times as likely to be unable to read as the richest.

How we could triple the availability of textbooks

Our first new policy paper as the GEM Report is out today and shows how altering the textbook market to a more centralised finance model could take up to $3 off the price of each book. Combining this approach with finance models similar to those attached to the Gavi vaccine alliance could triple the number of textbooks available for children worldwide.

The fact is that many millions of children do not have access to textbooks. A survey of primary schools in eleven developing countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, India, Malaysia, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, and Uruguay shows that, on average, up to a fifth of grade 4 pupils do not have a textbook or have to share one.  In Cameroon, there was only 1 reading textbook for 12 students and only 1 mathematics textbook for 14 students in grade 2. In some countries, including Kenya, Malawi and Namibia, the rise in school enrolment is making textbook availability even scarcer.

This is a crucial issue for all of us as we embark upon the new UN Sustainable Development Agenda, within which good quality education for increased learning outcomes is put front and centre. Our research shows that this lack of textbooks is holding back learning. In 22 sub-Saharan African countries, providing one textbook to every student in a classroom increased literacy scores by 5-20%.

Join in: What’s the #EducationWeWant?

It’s a new year, and we have a new name – The Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM Report). To celebrate the change, we’re launching a new campaign using our logo as an interactive visual. We want to know which of the new education targets supporting the global education goal are most important to you. Join in online, and via twitter using #EducationWeWant and @GEMReport.

Countries grappling with the new 17 goals and their accompanying 169 targets in the Sustainable Development Agenda will need to decide which they’re going to prioritise in their national plans. We thought we’d ask you your thoughts as to which of the new education targets are most important.