New statement on framing and measuring inequalities in education

By Aaron Benavot, Director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report, and Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

As reported in a previous series on this blog site, a two day workshop with 40 attendees was organized by the EFA GMR and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) last December on ‘Framing and measuring inequalities in post 2015 education targets’. Today, participants are publishing a short consensus outcome statement summarizing key points made during the workshop, which aims to contribute to on-going discussions on measuring and monitoring inequalities in education in the coming decade and beyond.

The statement presents the following key findings:

• Education systems are neither inherently equal, nor designed to create an egalitarian society. Even as education expands, enabling all children and youth to exercise their right to education, better resourced groups will continue to enjoy an advantage. Indeed, patterns of education inequality persist from one generation to the next. Circumstances of birth and the household are still the major determinants of inequalities in school performance and attainment. Nevertheless, while education systems cannot serve as the ultimate solution to inequalities, they should not augment them. Education systems should be designed to lay the foundations towards greater equity.

• In a rights-based agenda, there is value in measuring whether everyone achieves minimum thresholds of education attainment regardless of their endowments.

A People’s Global Network on Learning is Born

By Baela Raza Jamil, Founding Member PAL Network and Director of Programs Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi and the Institute for Professional Learning, as well as Coordinator of the South Asian Forum for Education Development. 

While Kenya and Nairobi were at a standstill preparing for the US President Barack Obama’s Airforce I to land on July 24 for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit,  in another beautiful scenic setting, a global network on learning was born! The network will help hold countries accountable for ensuring their children are not just in school, but also learning. Committed to transparently conducting citizen-led household based assessments on learning, the network will increasingly enable communities to hold their leaders to account; it will support the call for lifelong learning for all – central to the new SDG on education.

The PAL Network Steering Committee

The People’s Action for Learning (PAL), Network was formally established last week by nine passionate country groups who came together at Lake Naivasha Kongoni, Kenya last week. The PAL Network  is a unique brand, aspiring to become a universal movement where learning is at the centre of all education endeavours. Led by ordinary citizens, it is committed to household based assessments for each child.

Inside the figures: How the finance gap for Education-2030 was calculated

You may have seen the recent GMR estimates that there is an annual $39 billion finance gap for achieving new education targets by 2030. They have appeared in the working paper about financing by the Sustainable Development Solution Network, the report by the Overseas Development Institute on a global social compact, the background paper by Brookings for the Oslo Summit, and the recent Malala Fund report on twelve years of education. They were widely discussed in the side-event at Addis during the Financing for Development Conference.

The EFA Global Monitoring Report would like its estimates to be used more extensively in the coming months and years as existing mechanisms are strengthened or new mechanisms are being established. The more we can publicise the extent of the finance gap, and the thorough methodology behind its calculation, the more traditional and new donors may take note of it. For that reason, we are making the tools available to enable those interested in education financing to check for themselves how different assumptions made by our team affect the cost implications. With the support of a short guide, users can go through the model and consult the data sources.

Comments and suggestions on how the model can be improved will be welcome on this blog.

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Addis – Can we break out of Groundhog Day?

I hesitated about putting pen to paper on this blog. It seems so obvious that we won’t achieve the vision of sustainable development unless we see tangible commitments emerging from the Third Financing for Development taking place in Addis Ababa this week. Why labour the point?  I thought.

And yet for some this point is not obvious. Many political leaders and decision makers are not convinced. And that’s what has driven this blog, and must drive all our efforts until we see real change for education.

An inconvenient truth is that money matters to finance sustainable development, not least in the area of education. Huge amounts – vast even – are needed to make real progress on the ambitious education goal. The EFA GMR has calculated the cost of ensuring all children and youth access a basic cycle of quality education (from one year of pre-school up to upper secondary education). After accounting for domestic resources and current international aid there remains an annual finance gap of $39 billion. This is, without doubt, a scary sounding price-tag.

What role for Citizen Led Learning Assessments? – Moving beyond Measurement

By Colin Bangay, Senior Education Adviser for the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) in India. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official position or policies.

The contribution of citizen led learning assessments (CLLA) in which community organisations conduct simple reading and/or math evaluations has rightly been celebrated. A new Results for Development Report (R4D) provides insight into their strengths, limitations and most importantly makes practical pointers on how they can be improved.

Credit: Rene Edde / EFA Report UNESCO

The report has a lot to praise. CLLAs have mobilised civil society. They provide large scale reporting on skill proficiencies among children and adolescents both in and out of school. They have set the bar high in their adept communication of findings — presenting results in ways that are glaringly easy to understand – and as a consequence have impact.

But herein lies the weakness: how often can you report dire results in learning before the shock value of the reports no longer shocks? The R4D report finds that to date none of the CLLAs have succeeded in raising learning levels. This is largely because assumptions  about how CLLAs should work haven’t held. Principal amongst these is that reporting on woeful learning levels will automatically galvanise action.

The Impossible, by Malala Yousafzai

The EFA GMR recently updated it’s costing analysis for the price of education targets from 2015-2030. The updated costing paper shows that there is an annual finance gap of $39 billion to provide pre-primary through to upper secondary education. This new paper has helped feed into an online campaign, and a report with the Malala Fund on “Making 12 years of education a reality for girls global“. This blog is written by Malala Yousafzai and first appeared yesterday on The Telegraph. 

Malala shows why she chose #booksnotbullets

Tomorrow, I return to Oslo where last year I received the Nobel Peace Prize with child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi. When I heard I would receive this great honour, I felt this was a call to action. I went to Oslo and challenged world leaders to act, to make sure that no child is denied the right to get an education.

Now I return to ensure that we keep that promise at the Oslo Education Summit. Many people tell me that I am special. However, it leads me to ask myself: am I unique because I’m a girl who was stopped from getting an education? Because that is also true for over 60 million other girls around the world.

I know there are other brave and talented girls I’ve met who have gone through the same circumstances. Is it because the enemies of education attacked me? Unfortunately thousands of girls and boys are unsafe at school every day and many have been attacked, the most tragic one was the massive killing of more than one hundred and thirty school children in Peshawar, Pakistan. The reality is I am one of these  girls who has been denied an education.  But there is something significant which makes my story special: You.

Out-of-school numbers on the rise as aid to education falls short of 2010 levels

By Aaron Benavot, Director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report, and Silvia Montoya, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

A new paper jointly released by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and the Education for All Global Monitoring Report (EFA GMR), shows that the number of children and adolescents out of school is on the rise, reaching 124 million in 2013. While international aid to education increased slightly in 2013, it is still below 2010 levels and grossly insufficient to meet new education targets to achieve universal primary and secondary education.

New UIS data show that one in eleven children is out of school, totaling 59 million children in 2013, a growth of 2.4 million since 2010. Of these, 30 million live in sub-Saharan Africa while 10 million are in South and West Asia.

Oslo: Investing in teachers is investing in learning

 

The Oslo Summit on Education for Development, which starts on Monday, is part of the global relay race to bring education back to the top of the development agenda by the end of 2015. It is taking the baton from the World Education Forum in May, which outlined an ambitious global education agenda for the next fifteen years. Its conclusions will pass the baton to the third International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa – hopefully with clear messages on how to scale up international cooperation in education financing.

There are four key areas being addressed at the Oslo Summit on Education – education financing, girls’ education, education in emergencies and quality of education.   The EFA Global Monitoring Report was asked to provide the official background paper on quality of education. The paper shows that well –prepared and supported teachers and effective teaching are the key elements to achieving relevant learning outcomes.

Poor funding, insufficient targeting of resources to those most in need, and the unequal distribution of education inputs fuel what is sometimes called a learning crisis – the realization that millions of children do not acquire foundation skills even after spending several years in school. Ensuring that qualified, professionally trained, motivated, and well supported teachers are available for all learners is essential for addressing this challenge in poor and rich countries alike. Investing in teachers can transform education and will be crucial for the effective delivery of a post-2015 education agenda that focuses on equity and learning.

“The quality of an education system can exceed neither the quality of its teachers nor the quality of its teaching”

Building on the evidence of the EFA GMR 2013/4, Achieving quality for all, the paper has four key recommendations for governments looking to improve the quality of learning.

$2.3 billion needed to send all children and adolescents to school in war zones

This blog details the contents of a new paper by the Education for All Global Monitoring Report on the barriers that conflict poses to getting all children and adolescents into school, and a new suggested target for financing education in humanitarian crises.

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Our new paper, released today, one week before the Oslo Summit on Education for Development, shows that 34 million children and adolescents are out of school in war zones.  The paper shows that $2.3 billion is required to place them in school – ten times the amount that education is receiving from humanitarian aid right now.

One of the core reasons conflict is taking such a heavy toll on education is lack of financing. In 2014, education received only two per cent of humanitarian aid.

The paper determines that even the suggested target of at least 4%, championed since 2011, is grossly insufficient. Had this target been met in 2013, it would have left 15.5 million children and youth without any humanitarian assistance in education. In 2013, 4% of humanitarian aid would have left over 4 million children and youth in Afghanistan, nearly 1.6 million children and youth in Syria, and almost 3 million in Sudan without humanitarian support.

Reaching the target of 0.7% of GNI to aid and prioritizing education would fill half of education’s finance gap

On June 25 and 26, the European Council, consisting of Heads of State of European Union members met to discuss issues relating to migration, security and defence. However, as the European Union is coming out of the financial crisis and with the new ambitious development agenda taking shape, another issue that needs attention is the pledge 15 EU countries made 10 years ago to dedicate a share of their national income through aid to some of the poorest countries in the world.

High income countries in the European Union and elsewhere committed themselves to spend 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) on Official Development Assistance at a UN General Assembly in 1970. This pledge was reaffirmed in 2005 when EU member states committed to reach their target by 2015. It was again reaffirmed in the Incheon Declaration agreed at the World Education Forum in May 2015 that urged “developed countries that have not yet done so to make additional concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 per cent of GNP for ODA to developing countries”

Despite the deadline for the target being upon us, many aid-giving countries are still far from achieving it: Three countries which could be said to have been hardest hit by the economic crisis have not moved closer, or have even moved further away from the target since it was set. Italy, for instance, is only expected to give 0.16% of its national income to development assistance in 2015 – the same as it dedicated in 2004. Portugal and Spain are expected only to dedicate 0.17% in 2015.