Measuring progress in education outcomes post-2015

The post-2015 global education agenda is beginning to take shape. The EFA Steering Committee Joint Proposal endorsed by the UNESCO Executive Board includes seven targets and the race is now on to ensure that the world can monitor progress towards them. How easy is this going to be?

The supply of monitoring data has increased tremendously since the list of EFA indicators was endorsed soon after the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, in 2000. But so has the demand for more refined measures of progress.

The first five targets of the EFA Steering Committee Joint Proposal shift the focus from whether education services are being delivered (e.g. enrolment) to the effects of education on children, young people and adults.

Are we ready to monitor such outcomes at a global level? The EFA Steering Committee has established a technical advisory group to tackle this question, of which the EFA GMR is a member. But how close are we to developing relevant indicators? What coordination efforts will it require from the international community? Over the coming weeks we are going to publish a series of five blog posts that examine these questions and others.

We must shelve our hopes for aid to education from Australia

The news that Australia’s aid budget will be cut by 10% over the next two years is worrisome for education financing. Ausaid is now closed and development has been merged into its foreign affairs and trade ministries. Combined, these two major shifts in aid policy do not bode well for flows to the sector.

These announcements are somewhat of a turnabout: Australia’s aid to development has been on an upwards slant for the past decade. It has consistently increased the percentage of its GNI dedicated to development aid since 2002, with 0.34% dedicated in 2013. The country never signed itself up to the 0.7% target of GNI to development aid in the past – such a target might have prevented the decision to make such drastic cuts today.

Australia’s aid doubled in ten years
Net disbursements of aid, 2002-2013

Hopes were high for aid from Australia among the education community before this recent announcement. Julia Gillard, Australia’s former prime minister, was previously education minister and demonstrated her loyalty to the sector in her aid budget during her term. The country’s aid to education increased by more than 100% from 2010 to 2012, and, although it allocated less to low-income countries in 2011 than it had the year before, that was reversed in 2012.

Seeking a common global aspiration for education

The Global Education for All Meeting, which took place this week in Muscat, Oman, was the last major international gathering to help shape a post-2015 agenda before next year’s World Education Conference in Incheon, Republic of Korea. The meeting aimed to reach a provisional agreement on the post-2015 global education agenda based on the goal and seven targets of the EFA Steering Committee Joint Proposal.

The Republic of Korea is an ideal choice for a showcase global education meeting, given its exemplary achievements over the past two generations. But the choice of Oman for such a meeting was equally apt. Back in 1970, just over a generation ago, the female adult literacy rate was an astonishingly low 12%. In 2010, it was 82%.

The hosts certainly understated their achievements, which show what can be done with strong will and with financial support that matches such ambition. Yet at the meeting, the reasons for Oman’s progress in education did not seem to have resonated with some of the participants, as was made obvious by some of the bones of contention.

One clear area where differing opinions are apparent is on how goals are to be financed. Poorer countries expressed their commitment to sign up to a target that will make their governments increase their spending on education. However, they pointed out that the target was not balanced: even if they increase spending, some of them will not be able to afford fast progress based on their own resources only. They asked for the target to include a commitment from richer countries to help fill the gap – but some richer countries would not accept such a clause in the final statement.

Post-Muscat: On track for equity, finance and measurability in the post-2015 education goals?

Pauline Rose, professor of international education at the University of Cambridge and former director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report, reflects on progress and potential stumbling blocks towards finalizing agreement on a post-2015 education framework.

It was a great pleasure to attend UNESCO’s Global Education Meeting in Muscat this week to present the 2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report. It was encouraging to receive feedback that the report is considered by many as an important reference point not only for progress towards the current goals but also for helping to inform the post-2015 global education framework.

There has been considerable progress in developing a post-2015 framework since the global meeting in Dakar in March last year. Until a few months ago, there were serious concerns about whether an education framework would be developed. It is now clear that there is a joint commitment for a new education framework to be integrated with a broader development framework.

We now have a robust draft, including an overarching goal with seven targets, which was widely supported and constructively debated at the Muscat meeting. While the targets were not changed at the meeting itself, the intention is to update them based on key points raised by participants at the meeting. The intention is to ensure that this framework is clearly linked with the broader development framework that is currently under preparation.

The EFA Global Monitoring Report has advocated for targets to be equitable, with sufficient finance, and measurable. How did the discussions in Muscat, and the document itself, fare on this basis?

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Member states, donors, and NGOs in Muscat universally criticized the targets for not including explicit language either on narrowing equity gaps or giving a specific focus to the marginalized. One outcome of the meeting is a commitment to edit the targets so they each include a particular reference to the issue. The sobering analysis in the 2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report that poor, rural girls only spend around three years in school in low-income countries, and that they are unlikely to achieve primary school completion for several decades, was an important source of evidence that helped to focus discussions on disadvantage in education.

We must say what we mean when writing post-2015 global education goals

Anyone working in communications will have a few tips to hand out for writing a compelling document. Writing must be clear and concise. With no space to waste, key messages should not be repetitive without good reason. They should be written in simple language and avoid ambiguity.

These same tips must be applied to new global education goals and targets. If something is not clear, we must ask questions now, and not after 2015 when it will be too late. This is a lesson we have learnt from the vagueness of the language of the third Education for All goal on skills, which has been very difficult to track. Unclear language will let governments and donors off the hook and must be avoided at all costs.

The current wording of the overarching goal and seven targets proposed by the EFA Steering Committee contain a few crucial communications errors, which must be addressed before the wording is set in stone. Highlighted in the box below are words and phrases, which need to be clarified or defined in order to end up with a clear set of commonly understood goals and targets to drive us forward to 2030.

Let us take each of our communications tips in turn:

Repetition – Repetition can be used to emphasize a point, but it can also take up word space unnecessarily. Take a look at the goal currently sitting in the draft: “Ensure equitable and inclusive quality education and lifelong learning for all by 2030.” The words ‘equitable’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘for all’ are all included in the sentence in order to ensure that the most disadvantaged are not left behind. From an academic perspective, they capture slightly different meanings: ‘for all’ could imply addressing the average, ‘equitable’ can be measured in numerous different ways, and ‘inclusive’ tends to address one disadvantage in particular – disability. But from a non-academic perspective, they all seem to be emphasizing the same point.

The repetition in this sentence may be due to not finding a way of explaining what they mean in one word or phrase. What about: “Ensure quality education and lifelong learning for all by 2030.” If you want to emphasize equity, you could add ‘without exception’.

Other targets fall prey to the same mistake as the goal. In the third target, for instance, we want to equip youth and adults with ‘knowledge, skills and competencies’, the last two of which are hard to distinguish between. In the fifth target, we’re asked to know the difference between a ‘value’ and an ‘attitude’.

Bring back our Nigerian school girls

The recent abduction of girls from a school in Borno state in the north east of Nigeria has sent shockwaves not just through the country but around the world. Within the space of two years, two separate violent incidents involving schoolgirls in the two countries with the highest number of out of school girls, Pakistan and Nigeria, remind us of the enormous obstacles they face in accessing their right to education.

In Nigeria, despite great anticipation, the return to democracy in 1999 was not followed by an improvement in education outcomes. With more children out of school than any other country, Nigeria is now one of only a handful of countries that will still have more than 20% of its primary school aged children not enrolled in 2015, as the latest EFA Global Monitoring Report has projected. In Borno state, where the 276 girls were abducted three weeks ago, 44% of 10-year old girls had never been to school in 2011.

Contrary to expectations, the introduction of the universal basic education law in Nigeria and the transfer of responsibility for delivering education to state and local governments exacerbated already huge disparities instead of reducing them.

As shown in the visuals in our World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE), the gap in the percentage of adolescents completing lower secondary school between the North East and the South West zones of the country increased between 1999 and 2008.

 

Indonesia: Learning to meet the needs of disabled children

Siti is the 10th and final participating teacher in the #TeacherTuesday campaign. She works in a school supported by Save the Children in Indonesia, teaching a class with many children with disabilities. This week’s focus on disability and education echoes the theme of 2014 Global Action Week, organized by the Global Campaign for Education.

Siti works in a school of 672 students, of whom 44 have disabilities. She teaches 4^th, 5^th and 6^th grades.

“I didn’t want to be a teacher at the start, but one day in 2001 I met with street children who had disabilities – they had hearing barriers – which made me really eager to learn about disabilities so I took the master’s at university about special needs education,” Siti said. “I became a teacher in 2005 and have been teaching ever since”.

“Mostly I teach in one classroom, with all children together, but sometimes, when some children need to be taught separately, we break out into stimulation groups, which can be used for children with special conditions. Some need remedial lessons, for example. Some have tantrums.”

Teaching children with disabilities can be hard. “There’s an imbalance between the students and teachers in the school so the burden on the teachers is huge. The number of children with very challenging disabilities in the school is very high.”

Global Action Week: When disability is a barrier to education

“Equal Right Equal Opportunity: Education and Disability” is the theme of this year’s Global Action Week. The campaign aims to raise awareness of how a disability can seriously harm a child’s chances of going to school and learning.

As we outlined in the 2013/4 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, there are still 57 million children out of school and 250 million who are not learning the basics, whether they are in school or not. A principal reason for this is that efforts to improve education have failed to reach those who already face disadvantages.

Children living with disabilities make up a significant proportion of those who are prevented by disadvantage from getting to school and learning, along with girls, the poor, those who live in rural areas, and those from ethnic or linguistic minorities. That’s why education and disability is the focus this year of Global Action Week, organized by the Global Campaign for Education.

Global Action Week, one of the major focal points for the global education movement, highlights one area of the Education For All agenda each year to encourage targeted efforts to achieve change on the ground.

The 2010 EFA Global Monitoring Report, Reaching the marginalized, demonstrated clearly that disabilities affect children’s changes of going to school, and their ability to learn while there. The report found that in Malawi and the United Republic of Tanzania, for instance, having disabilities doubled the probability of children never having attended school. In Burkina Faso it increased the risk of children being out of school by two and a half times.

Disabilities also make it less likely that a child will complete school. The 2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report found that in 14 out of 15 low and middle income countries, people of working age with disabilities were about one-third less likely to have completed primary school.

South Africa: Preparing students to compete in the job market

Shape is the ninth teacher to participate in our Teacher Tuesday campaign. She works in a secondary school in Pretoria. Her 21 years as a teacher have given her many insights into the challenges and rewards of the job. As well as teaching the curriculum, she is passionate about giving her students the best chance possible of earning a good living, leading a full life and believing in themselves.

“I became a teacher because of my love and passion of children,” Shape says. “In South Africa you have to have a passion to be a teacher. Here it is not an easy job. In South Africa in most cases teachers are not seen as a people who can be rich, because the salary is not good. You never have money as a teacher! So we need to see it as a calling.”

Shape won an award for being the best teacher in her province in 2012, because of her dedication. She often works overtime to help her students succeed, and to ensure no-one falls behind. “I give extra lessons after others go home. I remain with year 12 to teach them again, to make sure that those who did not understand, later do understand everything. Some of them are still struggling, especially in terms of writing and pronunciation. My extra lessons help them catch up.”

Shape is especially determined to make sure her students are as ready as possible for the world they will meet when they leave school. In South Africa, more than in most countries, that means being able to compete for jobs: unemployment among those aged 15 to 24 is currently 49%, according to the latest figures.

“After grade 12, we need to prepare them to go to universities or colleges,” Shape says, “so I need to ensure they’re ready to face the outside world. Last year 127 applied for further studies, only 19 or so failed. Forty-five went to university; one was regarded as the best learner in the province.  He got 100% in his studies and 100% in his accounting. Forty-nine went to college.”

As we showed in the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, Youth and skills: Putting education to work, schools must recognize that a fundamental purpose of education is to prepare young people for work. Especially at secondary education level, courses must provide skills that relate to gaps in the labour market.

One way to help young people learn practical problem-solving skills and practise crucial workplace skills is to link schooling with work-based programmes through internships and apprenticeships.

“We invite companies that are the same as the career the learners have chosen, to come to our school and talk to them,” Shape said. “They come to school and after we identify the children who can go to them and do some work to be familiar with the outside world. They go to work for a day as managers or whatever. When they come back they are able to tell us of the challenges, then the companies come again to give them more knowledge.”

The evidence in the EFA GMR 2012 showed that skills training can help young people break free of their disadvantages and poverty for good.

“We teach them business skills, we have business projects” Shape told us. “They learn how to write a business plan. We buy some products/stock and they sell them to other learners and teachers and take money. They need to learn how much money to take from people and how much to then save. People from banks come to assist them to open bank accounts so that they can save money.”

Finding and keeping work require a broad range of skills that can be transferred and adapted to different work needs and environments, such as problem-solving skills, communication skills, creativity, leadership, entrepreneurial skills and confidence. Such skills are nurtured to some extent outside the school environment. They can, however, be further developed through education and training.

After more than two decades as a teacher, and with a past record of having an 100% pass rate in the classroom, Shape knows that it is important to foster the self-confidence that is needed in the world of work: “The first week of grade 12 I have a motivational talk with them: this is your final year, this is what you must do, this is what you must expect, this is what you must know. Some of you will get jobs, some of you will go to university but if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world. It’s not about where you’re from. Ask yourself what is it you want to be, how am I going to change my family? You are the one who must reach out and change things.”

“Assure the learners they are important and they can make it. Then they start to feel very well. I want them to do better and I say ‘I know you can, I know you can.’ They start to believe in themselves.”

Australia: Rich countries are also failing to ensure that the marginalized can learn

Russell is the eighth teacher to participate in our Teacher Tuesday campaign. He works in a school in Inverell, a New South Wales country town in Australia. Of the 680 students in his school, 125 are Aboriginal. Four of the 30 teachers in the school are Aboriginal as well, including Russell, who is Gamilori.

“The challenges Aboriginal people face are still there today and we need to recognize these,” he told us.  These challenges result in the children often being on the back foot in school. “My first school was 98% Aboriginal and I had to speak Aboriginal English to give instructions to children because they didn’t quite understand. They hear the spoken language but they’re three steps behind before they start. They’re playing catch up from day one. I’d say you’d be lucky if 50% of your Aboriginal children had been to preschool.”

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Although learning gaps between indigenous and non-indigenous children in Australia are clearly visible in student assessments, they have not received sufficient policy attention, and so have persisted for a decade and a half. The latest EFA Global Monitoring Report shows that, in Australia, around two-thirds of indigenous students achieved the minimum benchmark in mathematics in grade 8 between 1994/95 and 2011, compared with 90% of their non-indigenous peers.

Poverty can also hold back learning. The latest EFA Global Monitoring Report shows that 96% of the richest in Australia will achieve the minimum standards, compared with only 80% of the poorest. “Poverty draws a line in the sand,” Russell said. “You’re on one side or the other. That’s why I don’t set homework on a computer as I know some still don’t have computers at home, and that’s disadvantaging them. I don’t mind how it comes back as long as it comes back!”