Are we on track for a global education goal? Reflections on the global meeting on education post-2015

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report

This week I joined 100 education experts from around the world in Dakar, Senegal, to consider the outcomes of global consultations on post-2015 education goals, organized by UNESCO and UNICEF. The wide-ranging discussions reached consensus on the importance of stressing the right to education and, crucially, on the need for post-2015 education goals to focus strongly on access and education quality, with equity cutting across both.

Participants also supported placing greater emphasis on ensuring that no country is left behind due to insufficient finance after 2015, in line with the EFA Global Monitoring Report’s recent proposals.

At the same time, as Vincent Rigby of the Canadian International Development Agency stressed, it is vital to make the case for education’s importance as a gateway to other development goals; The global education community can’t take it for granted that others will consider education as high a priority as we know it is. Gordon Brown’s opening message put this powerfully, stating that if all mothers had at least secondary education, 1.8 million children’s lives could be saved each year.

I was encouraged by the enthusiasm and high ambitions that the education community expressed during the meeting, but I was also left with some concerns. Participants could have made more progress towards ensuring that new education goals are clearly and simply stated, measurable and have equity at their heart. The EFA Global Monitoring Report team, calling on its decade of tracking the EFA goals, has identified these as essential criteria for post-2015 education goals, as I outlined in an earlier blog post.

Participants agreed that the education community needed to identify an overarching education goal that would fit within the broader post-2015 development framework, to avoid the kind of mistake made with the second Millennium Development Goal (universal primary education),which was too reductionist. The document summarizing the outcomes of the Dakar meeting proposes as an overarching goal “equitable quality lifelong education and learning for all”. This proposal will be put forward to the Post-2015 High Level Panel, which will meet in Bali next week.

The wording appears to be a compromise aimed at resolving an emerging tension between two schools of thought in the education community. Should the focus be on the process of ensuring education quality, or on the outcome of learning? The former implies an all-encompassing goal, just as is being proposed for health in the form of a goal on universal health care. The latter is a plea for specificity, emphasized by Amina Mohammed, the UN Secretary General’s Special Adviser on Post-2015 Development Planning, in her opening remarks to the meeting. The proposed goal attempts to incorporate both – in the form of “quality lifelong education” as well as “learning for all”.

Post-2015: If we don’t tackle educational inequality, we’ll fail the fairness test

By Will Paxton, head of education policy and advocacy for Save the Children UK and chair of the Global Campaign for Education UK’s Policy Group, and Anthony Davis, policy adviser for Plan UK

As debates about the post-2015 development framework rumble on, there appears to be considerable agreement that in education a refocusing from access to learning will be needed. But where are we on educational inequality?  How strongly is this now embedded in the broader post-2015 development debate?

Many organizations, including the EFA Global Monitoring Report team, are highlighting inequality as a critical education challenge, but on the whole it is not being taken seriously enough and there is in sufficient recognition of just how vital it will be. This is a major problem.

Our new online hub for resources and other updates on education post-2015 gathers links to proposals from around the world.

It is also surprising because much of the overall development debate is focused on inequality in other areas. Income and wealth inequality are very much on the agenda. Even some unusual suspects like the IMF and OECD have highlighted why extreme inequalities in society potentially undermine social cohesion and put constraints on economic growth.

Yet for some reason there is relative silence about one of the major drivers of lower income inequality – the creation of more equal education systems. The experience of countries like South Korea in the 60s, 70s and early 80s and more recently Brazil is that spreading educational opportunity widely leads to lower levels of overall inequality.

No child should be forgotten post-2015 

This is one reason the Global Campaign for Education in the United Kingdom decided to focus our latest report on educational inequality.  Our core argument is that in the post-2015 framework, forging greater equality of educational opportunity must be front and centre.

We simply cannot afford to repeat the mistake of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which failed to focus on the most disadvantaged.  As the UN has said:  To the extent that accelerating progress towards some targets is easier when resources are concentrated among the better off, the era of the MDGs may have inadvertently seen some channelling of resources away from the poorest population groups or from those that are already at a disadvantage.

We cannot afford to make this mistake again.

Our proposed post-2015 education goals emphasize equity, measurability and finance

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report

As the global education community prepares to discuss education in the post-2015 development agenda at Dakar this week, the Education for All Global Monitoring Report team has drawn on its decade of experience to propose what those goals could look like. Our proposed goals, outlined here, are described more fully in a new paper for consultation that also includes guiding principles, specific targets and indicators.

Schoolgirl in Haiti
Copyright UNESCO / Abramson

The six Education for All goals have helped to drive remarkable progress since they were established in 2000. Some major education needs have not received the attention they deserve, however, and fresh priorities have emerged over the past 13 years. Many education observers and recent EFA Global Monitoring Reports have highlighted the limited progress in narrowing inequality gaps in education, despite this being a key feature of the EFA agenda.

As we outlined in an article on our World Education Blog, there are two likely reasons for this. One is that the Millennium Development Goals – which have dominated development planning – should have incorporated equity as a core principle, as the EFA goals did. Another is that the lack of measurable equity targets, and of data broken down to show inequalities within countries, has let down the poorest, girls, those with disabilities, and those in rural areas over the past decade.

The first problem needs to be tackled after 2015 by aligning the broader development architecture with the post-2015 education framework. The second problem underlines the importance of incorporating measurable equity targets in post-2015 goals, a step we recommend in this paper.

It is clear that new goals need to address unfinished business and to anticipate future challenges. While an EFA goal focused on the quality of education, this was missing from the MDG framework and so did not receive the attention it deserved. Measures for assessing equity in learning have also been lacking. The 2013/14 EFA Global Monitoring Report will look at this in more detail, identifying the key role that good teachers play in achieving equitable learning.

Education for All is affordable – by 2015 and beyond

If governments and donors make concerted efforts to meet the promises they made in 2000, basic education for all could be achieved by 2015, according to analysis in a new policy paper released by the Education for All Global Monitoring Report team.

$26 billion finance gap to achieve basic education

The report team estimates that poor countries need an extra $26 billion of external financing per year to achieve good quality basic education with measures to target the marginalized by 2015, up from $16 billion in 2010. I will be going to Dakar next week to attend the Global Meeting on Education after 2015, where proposals for new education goals post-2015 will be discussed, which I expect to include universal lower secondary education. The report team has calculated that such a move would extend the annual finance gap to $38 billion.

With fewer than 1,000 days left until the 2015 deadline of the Education for All goals, the global community needs to make a final push to bridge the financing gap, which is one of the biggest obstacles to education in the world’s poorest countries. It might seem impossible to close the gap of US$26 billion for basic education – by which we mean pre-primary education, primary education and adult literacy. But our analysis shows that by targeting government and donor resources at education, and basic education in particular, the gap can be filled.

Governments in low income countries could raise an additional US$7.5 billion just by spending the recommended 20% of the national budget on education, and allocating 50% of these resources towards basic education.

If donors were to increase the share of their aid that goes to education from 9% to 20% by 2015, and allocate half of this funding to basic education, this would raise a further US$4 billion to help fill the funding gap.

Currently around one-quarter of total direct aid to education never even leaves donor countries. This money is spent on scholarships and imputed student costs for students in developing countries to study in donor countries. Allocating a proportion of these funds to basic education in the poorest countries would contribute US$2.4 billion

BRIEFLY: WISE honours innovative projects and an education pioneer

The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), the Qatar Foundation’s global platform promoting innovation in education, is inviting applications and nominations for the 2013 WISE Awards and the WISE Prize for Education.

The WISE Awards spotlight the best educational practices: Innovative projects in education are invited to apply for the 2013 WISE Awards in order to promote their achievements around the world. Solar-powered floating schools in Bangladesh, Creative Partnerships in the UK, the Widows Alliance Network (WANE) in Ghana or the Self-Sufficient School in Paraguay are some of the 24 groundbreaking projects that have been honored by WISE over the last four years for their tangible impact on education and society. These projects demonstrate practical solutions to current educational challenges and serve as examples that can potentially be scaled up and replicated in other parts of the world.

After 12 finalists are shortlisted in June, a jury of international education experts will choose six winning projects. Prizewinners will be announced in September and showcased at the 2013 WISE Summit in Doha on October 29-31. If you are part of a unique educational project that is truly making a difference, apply today or share this post with a deserving candidate.

On International Women’s Day, let’s make sure education reaches the poorest young women

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report

What kind of policy reduces or banishes inequality? International Women’s Day on March 8 is not only a chance to celebrate greater equality for women and highlight inequalities that persist – it’s also an opportunity to focus on policies that can make a difference.

It is vital to put the spotlight on those who continue to be left behind. 116 million young women need a second chance to get the basic skills they need to find decent jobs, because they either haven’t been to school or weren’t able to learn. Many of these young women are living in poverty. Our new interactive visualization on our World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE) shows that, in 11 countries, 90% of the poorest women aged 15 to 24 have not even completed primary school. Ten of these countries are in Africa. Pakistan is the only non-African country where 9 out of 10 of the poorest young women haven’t completed primary school.

Some countries where this situation was worst, however, have made good progress over the past decade. They still have a long way to go, but some are moving faster than others by implementing carefully targeted policies. Let’s compare new data on the WIDE website from Ethiopia and Bangladesh.

What are we learning? PISA will cast a wider net post-2015

As part of its contribution to the post-2015 education framework, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) proposes to enhance its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to make it more relevant to developing countries. These ideas, outlined in a new OECD brochure, are set out here by Michael Davidson, Michael Ward and Alejandro Gomez Palma of the OECD.

Our  online hub for resources and other updates on education post-2015 gathers links to proposals from around the world.

Although large numbers of children have been able to enter school over the past two decades, the latest Education for All Global Monitoring Report finds that many young people— especially the disadvantaged — are still leaving school without the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in society and find decent jobs. This learning crisis has led to a general consensus that the post-2015 development goals should focus more strongly on the quality of learning and should be expanded to include education at the secondary level.

There is no doubt that learning, not schooling, should be the main goal of education policies, yet the challenge is how to measure learning. While it is straightforward to set targets for – and then measure – the number of children enrolling in and completing school each year, assessing the extent to which learners across all the countries of the world have acquired a specific set of competencies and knowledge is extremely difficult. Three fundamental questions need to be answered:

• How do we set universal learning goals that can be measured and tracked over time?
• How do we identify and collect the evidence needed to measure progress towards these goals?
• What targets can be defined to guide progress towards these goals?

What should every child learn? And how can we check on progress?

By Seamus Hegarty, chair of the Standards Working Group of the Learning Metrics Task Force and visiting professor at the University of Warwick

Many children around the world attend school but do not learn. According to estimates in the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report, at least 250 million primary school age children around the world are not able to read, write or count well enough to meet minimum learning standards, including children who have spent at least four years in school. Worse still, we may not know the full scale of the crisis, as this figure is likely to be an underestimate.

Our new online hub for resources and other updates on education post-2015 gathers links to proposals from around the world.

In the run-up to 2015 and beyond, the global education community must work together not only to improve learning but also to measure progress. That is why the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution have established the Learning Metrics Task Force. The main objective is to shift the focus of global education debates from access to access plus learning. Based on input from technical working groups and global consultations, the Task Force will make recommendations to help countries and international organizations measure and thereby help to improve learning outcomes for children and youth worldwide.

A meeting of the Task Force last week in Dubai focused strongly on school readiness, and literacy and numeracy at primary and lower secondary levels. It also reflected on the possible need for a neutral international body to animate and oversee developments in the field.

In the first phase of this project, a working group prepared a series of recommendations to identify the competencies, knowledge or areas of learning that all children and youth need to master to succeed in school and life. These recommendations were then the subject of a broad consultation involving more than 500 individuals in 57 countries. The main findings have just been presented in a new report, Toward Universal Learning: What Every Child Should Learn.

Seven domains of learning

To develop a framework that would be relevant for the next 15 years, the Task Force recognized that it would have to take a step back from what is measurable today and consider first what kind of learning is important for the 21st century. In addition, the global consultations highlighted the need to go beyond a narrow focus on literacy and numeracy. Accordingly, the Task Force proposes a broad definition of learning that encompasses seven domains: physical well-being; social and emotional; culture and the arts; literacy and communication; learning approaches and cognition; numeracy and mathematics; science and technology.

Education and Kenya’s election: let’s hear how to help the excluded

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report

Education has emerged as a leading theme in the campaign for Kenya’s hotly contested presidential election on March 4. The quality of education, the lack of teachers and making sure children progress to secondary school all came up in the first presidential debate on February 11.

While these important issues deserve to be addressed, there is one that goes deeper, because it keeps so many children out of school: the stark inequalities faced by large groups in Kenyan society, including pastoralists, urban slum dwellers and refugees. When the presidential candidates meet on February 25 for their second debate, they have a chance to tackle this injustice.

Kenya has made some great strides in education over the past dozen years. When the government officially abolished primary school fees, many more children were able to attend. The net enrolment ratio surged from 62% in 1999 to 83% in 2009, as we found in the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report.

Kenya is now looking beyond primary school to universal secondary education. But primary school is still a distant dream for many children – especially girls and young women, as we highlighted on this blog a year ago. Kenya has 1 million children out of school, making it one of the 10 countries in the world with the highest numbers out of school, as we show in our fact sheet on education in Kenya. If you are from a rich household in Nairobi, your chances of getting into school are extremely high, whether you are male or female. But if you are poor and live in the pastoralist North-Eastern region, it’s a very different story, and even more so if you are female.

Equity in education post-2015: how do we get there?

By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report

A good education has been voted the top priority in the UN’s online survey on what people want in a post-2015 world. But what does a “good education” mean? And how can we set goals that will give everyone a chance to obtain it? The Education for All Global Monitoring Report’s experience in assessing progress towards the Education for All goals since 2000 offers crucial lessons for the complex process of setting new goals, targets and indicators.

It helps that the post-2015 education goals and targets proposed so far have a lot in common. There is general agreement on the need for an overarching goal that is part of the broader global framework that will replace the Millennium Development Goals, and that is clearly linked with a fuller post-2015 education framework. The majority of proposals suggest 2030 as a new deadline. While the education MDG is about reaching universal primary education, the new proposals stretch that ambition to lower secondary. There is broad consensus that a good education is not only of “good quality” but is also equitable – that is, available to all, regardless of their wealth, gender, ethnicity and other characteristics. Having co-convened the online post-2015 consultation related to equity, it’s encouraging to see the popularity of this theme.

Our new online hub for resources and other updates on education post-2015 gathers links to proposals from around the world.

Of the four proposals that spell out an overarching education goal, however, none have made equity explicit.  Most prefer to make it implicit: “all children (and youth)…” is the phrase used by the Basic Education Coalition, Global Campaign for Education (US Chapter) and Save the Children. “Quality education for all” is proposed by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).

Looking beyond the overarching goal to targets and indicators, GCE-US and the Basic Education Coalition call for data to be disaggregated (broken down to show the influence of factors such as poverty, gender and ethnicity). The Commonwealth Secretariat lists the disparities it recommends be eliminated for learning outcomes (household wealth, gender, special needs, location, age and social group), and suggests equity “should be captured in subordinate goals as appropriate”. The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) presents a specific equity target – “Disadvantaged girls and boys, including those with disabilities and from religious and ethnic minorities have equal access to effective learning in school” – and also calls for data to be disaggregated to allow monitoring.

As you can see from the box on the left, all the EFA goals did include the language of equity (highlighted in blue), with the exception of goal 6 (education quality). So why, two years from the deadline, has that ambition still not been achieved? We must at least consider whether the language of equity is enough on its own to bring results.

Our World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE) shows how stark inequalities in education access remain. Data from 2010 show that in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, almost all the richest boys and girls in the capital city, Kinshasa, go to school. By contrast, in Katanga – a conflict-affected region – only 55% of poor females have the chance of an education. Global education’s unfinished business, in other words, concerns even this most basic of goals – getting every child into school.