Education is indispensable in strengthening the bonds that hold communities and societies together.

The GMR is based at UNESCO headquarters in Paris and, while none of the Report team was directly affected by the weekend’s tragic events, a black mark has been left on us all. The impact is felt even more as the attacks follow so swiftly after other acts of ruthless violence affecting innocent people going about their daily lives in Beirut, and in Sharm El-Sheikh.

As a team we are more determined than ever to continue in our work in identifying barriers to progress in global education, and advocating for education’s place in helping to shape more peaceful and inclusive societies. We know that education helps people understand democracy, promotes the tolerance and trust that underpin it, and motivates people to become active inquisitive citizens. We are even more energised to ensure that education’s vital role is recognised, especially in regions and countries where lack of tolerance is associated with violence and conflict.

The GMR 2013/4 showed that education is a key mechanism for promoting greater understanding and mutual respect. In Latin America, the research showed that people with secondary education were less likely than those with primary education to express intolerance by 47% for people of different race, 39% for people of a different religion, 32% in the case of homosexuals and 45% towards those with HIV/AIDS.

In the Arab States, people with secondary education were also less likely than those with only primary education to express intolerance towards people of a different religion.

Gypsy children and Romanian children study together in a school near Bucharest. Credit: UNESCO/PETRUT CALINESCU

In Central and Eastern Europe, where intolerance towards immigrants is a cause for concern, those with secondary education were 16% less likely than those who had not completed secondary education to express such intolerance.

Education increases the likelihood that citizens will make their voices heard in other ways than violence, such as signing petitions, boycotting products or taking part in peaceful demonstrations. In Turkey, those with a secondary education are twice as likely as those with a primary education to participate in a peaceful demonstration.

Increasing access to school for all generally reduces feelings of injustice in society that have fuelled many conflicts. But it needs to increase equally for all population groups; otherwise, perceived unfairness can reinforce disillusionment and injustice as shown at length by the GMR 2011 Report. Skills need to match market needs or the ‘waithood’ between education and work can boil over into frustration as many believe was the case in the Arab Spring, and as was investigated in the GMR 2012. We must advocate for an education that does not reinforce violence, intolerance and that can help overcome language barriers. Attacks like those this past week should serve as a potent reminder of the depth of importance behind providing a quality education equally and for all.

Understanding context in Paraguay to promote gender equality

Yesterday we held a Paris launch for our new report: Gender and EFA 2000-2015: Achievements and challenges. It was well attended by Ministers of Education from Niger, Paraguay, Morocco and Sweden, by the US Ambassador to UNESCO and the Director General, Irina Bokova.

The speech by the Minister of Education and Culture in Paraguay, Ms Marta Fuente, took the spotlight away from a pure focus on girls as so often happens in education discussions, and drew the audience’s attention to the plight of boys. Below we explore the extent of the disadvantages that boys face in the country, and policies the Ministry is putting in place to close the gender gap.

Our Report tells us that Paraguay has achieved equal numbers of girls to boys – parity – in pre-primary education and in youth and adult literacy. There is also almost parity in enrolment in primary education, with 96 girls enrolled for every 100 boys. However, once in school, girls are more likely than boys to stay there longer: in 2011, 86% reached the last grade of primary school compared with 82% of boys. Girls also outperform boys in reading, while gender gaps are narrowing in mathematics.

Education 2030 Framework for Action: let’s get started

by Aaron Benavot and Manos Antoninis

The Education 2030 Framework for Action was adopted today in a high level meeting alongside the 38th UNESCO General Conference. What is this document and what does it mean for our work over the next fifteen years?

What is the Education 2030 Framework for Action?

This framework — painstakingly drafted over many months with input from governments, international agencies, civil society and experts — provides guidance for implementing the education commitments made in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at a national, regional and global level. In particular:

• it aims at mobilizing all countries and partners around Sustainable Education Goal 4 and its targets;
• it proposes ways of implementing, coordinating, financing and monitoring the new commitments; and
• it proposes indicative strategies which countries may wish to draw upon in developing their plans, taking into account different national realities, capacities and levels of development and respecting national policies and priorities.

The Education 2030 Framework for Action – Towards Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education and Lifelong Learning for All succeeds the Dakar Framework for Action – Education for All: Meeting our Collective Commitments, which guided international efforts between 2000 and 2015. While the text may not always manage to inspire, it deftly accommodates the interests of a multiplicity of constituencies involved in repeated layers of consultation. Indeed, it is an extremely valuable snapshot of international consensus on issues of education and development.

A Data Revolution for Education 2030

By Jordan Naidoo, Director of Education at UNESCO, and Sylvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS).

The fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) is a global dream about quality education for all children, youth and adults. But this ambitious vision will remain just that – a dream – without a concrete plan and real commitment. We need a data-driven mechanism to ensure that every effort and dollar are targeted to transform the promise of quality education for all into reality.

This week Member States are adopting the Education 2030 Framework for Action in Paris alongside the UNESCO General Conference. To map the way forward, the framework includes a list of 43 thematic indicators, or, ways of measuring progress towards the education SDG. These are proposed by the extended Technical Advisory Group, which was established by UNESCO to develop recommendations for education indicators and to inform and support the work of the Education for All Steering Committee.

We are in a far better place than we were fifteen years ago when countries adopted the Education for All Goals and Millennium Development Goals and then began the process of defining the monitoring indicators. The new Framework for Action is clearly linked to an existing proposal of indicators. This proposal has been the subject of considerable debate and global consultation among Member States, international organizations, academics and civil society over the past 18 months. While this is work in progress, we already have a solid base of information and a strategy to establish the mechanisms needed for effective monitoring.

Education cannot wait, and yet it always does

For many years now there have been calls for greater attention to education in crisis situations from a multitude of advocacy organisations and influential spokespeople. Despite this noise, although there have been some indications of progress, there have been no major improvements for children’s education chances in emergencies. It was exciting to hear at the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) annual meetings that have been taking place this week in Geneva, therefore, that 2016 might be a break-through year for the sector. Might this finally be the year that statements get turned into commitments?

A Syrian refugee looks out of a window at Zahi Alsameen school serving as a refugee camp for students and women in Jaramana district, southeast of Damascus, Syria, 2014 (Xinhua/Pan Chaoyue)

The global momentum built up this year at the Oslo Education Summit, World Education Forum and the UN General Assembly has created a real urgency to finally position education up on the list of priorities in emergencies. This has resulted in a large amount of activity on the issue planned for 2016:

• The World Humanitarian Summit offers a great opportunity to have education’s voice heard with a different audience, and to position education centrally in any outcome document produced. Hidden within the synthesis report of the Summit’s global consultation is a target saying that “No one should miss a month of schooling due to conflict or disaster”. This is a target many in the sector would have formulated differently, no doubt, but it is a target nonetheless, and an ambitious one at that. This should be seen as good news for our sector, which has been singled out by having a target assigned to it in the text.
• The new Sustainable Development Document, Transforming our World, names refugees among those vulnerable populations needing to be addressed. The Education 2030: Framework for Action due to be adopted in early November underscores the need to address education in emergency situations. Both policy priorities give rallying calls for us all to use in our work.
• There is a vast amount of continuing media attention on Syria, and the resulting refugee crisis, within which education is more frequently mentioned than in many emergencies that have hit the press in the past. The convergence between the complexities of this crisis and the scope of the new SDG 4 could open up a conversation where the voices of advocates might finally be heard.
• There are also three important publications or pieces of research that will help build the arguments for education in crisis, notably the International Commission on Financing of Global Education Opportunity, the work being done by the Overseas Development Institute on the platform for education in crises, and the GEM Report 2016. It will be important for these publications to make the argument for investing in education early – either when conflicts are on the horizon, or immediately after a crisis, rather than waiting for the costly repercussions that arise from leaving it until the development stage.

Gender equality – it can’t yet be counted but it most certainly counts

By Aaron Benavot, Director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report, and Nicole Bella, Senior Statistician and Policy Analyst at the EFA Global Monitoring Report.

This week, we launched the 2015 EFA GMR Gender Summary in time for International Day of the Girl Child. As we noted in a previous blog this week, it showed that despite significant progress made, fewer than half of countries have achieved gender parity in both primary and secondary education. What it couldn’t show in such an easy headline is where we are, or are not, in achieving gender equality in education – the other half of the EFA gender goal. This blog explains why, and what’s being done about it.

There is a limited understanding of the meaning of gender equality, and a dearth of data to measure it. A few weeks ago, a workshop on this issue, organized by UN Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) together with the MacArthur Foundation, was held at the London International Development Centre (LIDC).

Don’t be gender blind. Take a moment to understand gender gaps in education.

It may surprise many that, in global terms, girls make up just 52% of out of primary school age children. At the secondary level there are actually fewer girls out of school than boys. When averaging out the gender parity index across all countries, you will find that gender parity has actually been achieved globally in both primary and secondary education.

Given the loud cries for girls to be prioritized in education policies these facts don’t add up. Why?

For a start, many countries with large populations – in particular, India, Brazil and China – have achieved gender parity in primary education and constitute a large slice of the global pie. Global figures cover up the entrenched disparities faced by girls in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and in parts of South and West Asia and the Arab States, where populations are relatively smaller. At the secondary level, many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have disparities at the expense of boys, not girls. This, together with more conventional disadvantages faced by girls in other regions, creates a seemingly balanced global portrait.

Girls continue to draw the short straw.

Today we are celebrating International Day of the Girl Child and are launching the Gender Summary from the GMR 2015. It shows, yet again, the extent to which girls face the greatest challenges in accessing basic education. The theme of the Day is the ‘Power of the Adolescent Girl’. It is an occasion to remember that education is the linchpin for forging communities of empowered and enabled women. Our Report serves to remind us of the work still to be done to ensure that every girl gets a chance to reap education’s rewards.

Many may have forgotten that gender parity in education was actually due to be achieved in 2005. Ten years later, and the goal is far from being met. Results show that by 2015 fewer than half of countries will have achieved gender parity in both primary and secondary education. No country in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to achieve parity at both levels by 2015.

Although gender parity has not been met, our Report, co-produced with UNGEI, shows that progress towards it has been one of the biggest education success stories since 2000. There are 52 million fewer girls out of school now as compared to then. The number of countries that have achieved gender parity in both primary and secondary education has increased from 36 to 62. Governments among this group should be congratulated for their efforts.

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Educating migrants will be the first SDG challenge for rich countries

Syrian refugee children in a Lebanese school 
Picture: Russell Watkins/DFID

It is impossible to turn a blind eye to the arrival of so many hundreds of thousands of migrants* into Europe recently. According to Save the Children, this includes the highest number of child migrants seen since the end of World War II. Their arrival is testament to the challenges that some of these families have faced in their own countries for too long; it also presents a new conundrum to their host countries, which must now provide for their clear and ongoing needs.

The promise we have made

The outcome document from the UN General Assembly on the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) last week stated that “All people, irrespective of sex, age, race, ethnicity, and persons with disabilities, migrants, indigenous peoples, children and youth, especially those in vulnerable situations, should have access to life-long learning opportunities that help them acquire the knowledge and skills needed to exploit opportunities and to participate fully in society.”

This is no small task.

Indeed, the task is one that even better performing rich countries have not managed to live up to in the past. Immigrant students already in many of these countries face a higher risk of underachievement and low attainment in education.

In France, Germany and Sweden for instance, in 2012, over 80% of 15-year-old students achieved the minimum benchmark in reading on average in the PISA survey. But immigrants perform far worse: in France, the proportion of immigrants making it above the minimum benchmark is lower than the average in Mexico, while Germany’s immigrants are on a par with students in Thailand. Immigrants in Sweden face particular problems, with only just over half passing the minimum benchmark – equivalent to the average for students in Uruguay.