10 steps for solving the global learning crisis

Yesterday, at the Learning for All Symposium organised by the World Bank, global players came together to find some answers to two major questions: How can we solve the global learning crisis and how do we prepare young people for the 21^st century marketplace? The second of these two questions was tackled in the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report: Putting education to work. The first was addressed in the 2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report: Achieving quality for all.

This blog lays out the 10 strategies from that Report, which are based on the evidence of successful policies, programmes, strategies from a wide range of countries and educational environments. By implementing these reforms, countries can ensure that all children and young people, especially the disadvantaged, receive the good quality education they need to realize their potential and lead fulfilling lives.

1 Fill teacher gaps
On current trends, some countries will not even be able to meet their primary school teacher needs by 2030. The challenge is even greater for other levels of education. Thus, countries need to activate policies that begin to address the vast shortfall.

At this primary school in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, there are 174 learners in one class. Many children don’t turn up to school because the learning conditions are so poor.

Photo: Eva-Lotta Jansson

Bangladesh: Innovative solutions to improve education for the disadvantaged

Mosammat is the seventh participating teacher in our Teacher Tuesday campaign. Bangladesh is hit by flooding every monsoon season making access to school hard for those living in the affected areas. Mosammat describes what it is like teaching on a solar-powered floating school.

Mosammat Reba Khatun is 40 years old and lives in a small riverside village in Bangladesh. For the past ten years she has been teaching Bengali, Maths and English on Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha’s floating school on the Gumani river in the Pabna district in northwest Bangladesh. In total, the school teaches 90 students between six and nine years old. Almost two-thirds of the pupils are girls.

The floating school works in the remote river basin where access to education is hard, particularly during the monsoon season. From late June to October one third of the country goes underwater, making access to basic services very difficult. “It is the main reason for school drop outs in rural Bangladesh” Mosammat said. Were it not for innovative inventions such as this floating school, many of these children would find accessing education impossible.

The school collects children from their homes, teaches them on board and returns them at the end of the session. Mosammat describes the boat’s architect’s philosophy as ”if the children couldn’t come to school, then the school should come to them”.

“The teaching can be very challenging,” she continues, “as we are working with children from landless, extremely poor families vulnerable to natural disasters. Their parents mostly work as day laborers and have irregular family income. The children under age 5 are malnourished and infant mortality rate is high. Girls are not allowed to move around freely.  We meet with the parents monthly to encourage them to send their children to school regularly”. As a result, she tells us, “the rate of early marriage is reduced”.

Over the last decade, 17 million more children are learning in sub-Saharan Africa

Pauline Rose, Director, 2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report; Professor of International Education, University of Cambridge

New research revealed at the UK launch event of the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2013/4 shows that there has been a 45% increase in the number of children learning in sub-Saharan Africa since 2000.

Sub-Saharan Africa often hits the headlines for the wrong reasons – and this is just as much the case in education as in other areas. Failure of schooling to keep pace with population growth means that the region is now responsible for more than half of the 57 million children out of school. And the EFA Global Monitoring Report (EFA GMR) 2013/4 estimates that only two out of five children in the region reach grade 4 and learn the basics. As a result, almost 80 million of the 250 million not learning live in sub-Saharan Africa.

It is not all bad news, however, as the EFA Global Monitoring Report revealed at the UK launch event hosted by the Institute of Education in London today. The tremendous progress that has been made in getting more children into school in many African countries, in part due to the abolition of school fees, means that there are in fact considerably more children who are learning the basics than a decade ago: new evidence from the EFA Global Monitoring Report estimates that 17 million more children are now learning in sub-Saharan Africa. This represents an impressive 45% increase in the numbers learning.

 

250 million children not learning – but has there been any progress?

By Chris Berry, Education Head of Profession at the UK Department for International Development (DFID)

The 2013/4 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, to be launched in the United Kingdom on April 7, makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of global education progress. DFID and the UK government follow these reports closely.

One of the headlines in this year’s report is: “around 250 million children either fail to make it to grade 4 or do not reach the minimum level of learning”. This is shocking news.

Having already spent billions of dollars since 2000, not only has the global community failed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but it has also contributed to a situation where there are millions of children in school and not learning.

Where did this figure of 250 million come from?

The technical note by the EFA Global Monitoring Report team that underpins the figure uses an approach to anchoring proposed in a paper by Nadir Altinok. The note is based on a composite of children who do not complete grade 4 and results obtained in sample based learning achievement surveys such as SACMEQ and PIRLS.

Introducing the new director of EFA Global Monitoring Report: Dr Aaron Benavot

We’re pleased to announce that Dr. Aaron Benavot is the new director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report. Dr Benavot brings decades of experience in global education policy and comparative research to the Report team, including four years as a senior policy analyst for the Report. Most recently, he has been professor in the School of Education at the University at Albany-SUNY. He will take up his new position at UNESCO’s headquarters in May 2014.

Dr Benavot is stepping into the role of director at an important time. The EFA Global Monitoring Report team has completed 11 extensively researched reports on Education for All. On the back of this experience, it has a central role in assisting in the framing and specification of new global education goals and their indicators up until 2015 and beyond.

Dr Benavot will begin by leading the preparation of the 2015 EFA Global Monitoring Report, for which an open consultation is now in process. This next Report will assess how successful the EFA movement has been since its conception, and identify policies that have boosted progress towards the EFA goals. This assessment will provide evidence-based lessons for the framing of post-2015 education goals and strategies.

Previously, as senior policy analyst for the EFA Global Monitoring Report, Dr Benavot contributed to the development and drafting of four Reports: Literacy for Life (2006), Strong Foundations: Early Childhood Care and Education (2007), Education for All by 2015: Will We Make It? (2008) and Overcoming Inequality: Why Governance Matters (2009).

Dr Benavot has also published extensively on educational policy and practice, focusing on the evolution of basic education, post-2015 education policies, as well as the linkages between education, economic development and political democratization.

We hope you will join us in welcoming him to the post. Dr Benavot’s extensive comparative education scholarship and wealth of experience in international education policy-making will be hugely valuable for the EFA Global Monitoring Report in the lead up to 2015 and beyond.

Student-focused learning helps the Netherlands achieve

Cees, a teacher in Amsterdam, is the sixth participant in our 10-week #TeacherTuesday campaign. He describes some of the teaching and assessment methods that help children in the Netherlands achieve some of the world’s highest scores in international surveys. 

How much children learn varies hugely across the world. In the Netherlands all primary school age children learn the basics in reading and mathematics. In Niger, at the other 
end of the scale, just 8 out of 100 primary school age children are able to acquire basic reading skills.

Such glaring disparities between countries show that where children are born determines 
their opportunity to learn – and point to the need to make special efforts to bring education to the poorest and most marginalized.

Even among rich countries, performance varies considerably. The Netherlands is representative of most rich countries in having ensured basic learning skills in both reading and mathematics for almost all primary school age children.
 But in Spain, while most have achieved the basics in reading, 8% have not reached the minimum learning benchmark in mathematics by the end of grade 4.

In the Netherlands, in fact, 15-year-olds score higher than the OECD average in reading, mathematics and science literacy. So how does one country achieve such good results? Cees, who teaches in a secondary school in Amsterdam, says: “I find it difficult to answer why the Netherlands is doing so well, because what do grades mean? To which countries do you compare?

But there are several clues to the Netherlands’ high performance in his answers he gave to our questions about how he does his job. They reflect many of the strategies to provide the best teachers that we outline in latest EFA Global Monitoring Report, Teaching and Learning: Achieving quality for all, including getting enough teachers into school; training teachers to meet the needs of all children; including the disadvantaged; providing teachers trainees with mentors; and providing ongoing teacher training and professional development.

Poverty holds back learning in Kenya

Margaret, a teacher in Nairobi, is the fifth participant in our 10-week #TeacherTuesday campaign. She works in Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa, helping children find an escape route from poverty through their education. 

Margaret was born in a village in a poor area outside Kenya’s capital city. “I know what it means to be sleeping hungry,”  she said. Now, she wakes daily at 4am to make the two-hour journey to Kibera, most of whose residents lack access to basic services, including electricity and running water. She teaches until 6pm or 7pm, staying late to let children do their homework at school because they don’t have any electricity or space at home.

“There is a line between rich and poor,” Margaret says, explaining the challenges of her daily work. “A child whose parents are working means the child is fed, they are literate, and the parents are able to follow up on their child’s education and learning. Whereas the parents at the school where I teach believe the government should give everything for the child’s education and they don’t need to do anything extra.”

The majority of parents in the Kibera slum, she tells us, “did not go to school or if they did they did not have a very good education. They don’t see the value of education so they don’t follow up. Some children stay at home and are sick. They are used to the hard life”.

The latest EFA Global Monitoring Report, Teaching and Learning: Achieving quality for all shows that how much a child learns is strongly influenced by the inherited disadvantage that comes with poverty and extreme inequality.

Click to enlarge

In all 20 sub-Saharan African countries analysed in the Report, children from richer households are more likely not only to complete school, but also to achieve a minimum level of learning once there. In 15 of these countries, no more than one in five poor children reach the last grade and learn the basics.

How managing tax better could help fill the education finance gap

Better management of tax and prioritization of education in budgets could raise $153 billion for the sector in 2015, according to calculations in a new policy paper by the EFA Global Monitoring Report team.

Our new policy paper, ‘Increasing tax revenues to bridge the education financing gap’ shows that, if governments in low and middle income countries modestly increased their tax-raising efforts and devoted a fifth of their budget to education, they could fill over half of the annual funding gap for basic and lower secondary education.

Sustained economic growth in many of the world’s poorest countries has increased the resources that they can raise domestically to finance their education strategies. Many countries furthest from the Education for All goals, however, do not sufficiently tap their tax base and this economic growth, as a result, is not being fairly distributed. Currently only seven of 67 countries analysed for this policy paper generate 20% of GDP in taxes and allocate 20% of their budgets to education.

It is estimated that countries need to raise 20% of their GDP in taxes to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. At present, however, only seven out of the 67 countries analysed in our new paper reach the 20% threshold on both tax/GDP ratios and government spending on education. In addition, on current rates, only 4 of the 48 countries currently raising less than 20% of GDP in tax would reach the 20% threshold by 2015.

What questions should the 2015 EFA GMR answer?

The 2015 EFA Global Monitoring Report will provide a definitive assessment of overall progress toward the six EFA goals. The assessment will establish whether the goals were achieved and, if not, whether progress accelerated since 2000.  This blog sums up some of the suggestions made at a recent consultation event in Paris for questions that the next EFA GMR should help answer.

Earlier this month, a meeting was held in Paris on the subject matter of the 2015 EFA GMR, ‘What did we achieve?‘. The meeting took place on the side of the EFA Steering Committee Meeting at UNESCO’s Headquarters. It brought together key representatives from the education community to look at the extended outline for the next Report.

The meeting complemented the online consultation which is still ongoing, and where we encourage all and anyone to share any additional comments they may have for us as we work on the Report.

During the meeting, suggestions and questions mainly focused on the EFA process and the mechanisms that helped bring about progress towards the EFA goals:

–       Overall approach: The GMR should focus on a summative evaluation of EFA especially with respect to the commitments and pledges made in the Dakar Framework for Action. By analysing education developments in this context, the Report will provide vital lessons for working on new global education goals after 2015.

–       Role of certain actors:

• To what extent has civil society influenced education policy and practice since 2000?
• What was the influence of international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF? What was their influence through the poverty reduction strategy initiative?

–       Governance: The GMR should analyse what the broader role of management and governance reforms have been in advancing EFA. This should include an assessment of the coordination between sub-sectors, accountability initiatives, and evolution in the use of data for planning and policy making.

–       Inter-sectoral links: Education impacts all of development, and cannot be seen as stand-alone from other sectors. As such, the existing links – or lack of links – between sectors should be assessed for their impact on education progress.

–       National perceptions: In assessing the role of EFA, the Report should also cover how EFA goals were perceived by those implementing policy in-country.

–       Data: Is there a need for better data post-2015? Could governments use already available data (such as household surveys) better than they currently do?

–       Emphasis on early childhood education: The next GMR should take a deeper look at the first EFA Goal and ensure that it covers adequately the youngest children.

This consultation is not yet over, and we are still keen to hear more of your thoughts and suggestions. Please comment on the suggestions we have already had on our online consultation, and/or give new guidance for areas of research the EFA GMR team could usefully analyse.

Syrian refugees make the best of temporary schools

Mohammed, a teacher from Syria who lives in Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, is the fourth participant in our 10-week #TeacherTuesday campaign. His daily struggle to help Syrian refugee children underlines the need to support teachers in difficult situations – and to make education a more central part of humanitarian efforts in conflict zones.

Mohammed arrived eight months ago in Zaatari, which has become the world’s second-largest refugee complex as more and more Syrians flee the civil war. “I was teaching in my school until it was completely destroyed, then I moved to another school. Once all schools in the area had been completely destroyed, then I left and came to Zaatari.”

Four months ago he got a job teaching. “Save the Children had a recruitment for schools and I applied for the job. They hired me because of my experience and because I have a university degree and have been teaching for 12 years.”

“My school is primary and secondary combined. Girls in the morning, boys in the afternoon. There are 800 students in primary and 400 students in secondary school.

“There are 25 to 40 in each class at my school, school 2. In school 1, there are from 80 to 120 in classes because it’s in one of the most densely populated areas of the camp. Zaatari is a massive, massive place. It takes a couple of hours to walk across the camp.”

“Our main problems are the shortage of text books, we need boards and markers,” Mohammed says, adding, “The school doesn’t look like a school. I want a yard where children can play. We want our school to look like other schools.”

Despite the difficulties, Mohammed says the majority of children in the camp are in school. “There are 50,000 children in the camp in total. Half of them are school-aged children and 20,000 are currently registered with a school. Some have missed up to three school years. It’s important they are enrolled into school.”