How can we promote fairness in access to education beyond 2015?

The World Inequality Database on Education

As the UN Secretary General launches his Education First initiative and as the new World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE) goes live, Will Paxton from Save the Children – drawing on new research from Rwanda – asks what the implications of a focus on equity might be for how schools are funded.  Should more developing nations include “fairness premiums” in their funding systems?

Will Paxton recently started as Head of Education Policy and Advocacy at Save the Children, UK. He worked for IPAR-Rwanda last year and remains a Research Associate at the Institute.

Debates about what will replace the current education Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) and Education for All (EFA) framework in 2015 are gathering pace.  There is widespread agreement that focusing on quality and learning outcomes should come out of the shadows and into the limelight.  While the devil will be in the detail, few can credibly argue against a decisive shift to considering what schools are teaching their pupils.

But what of a second key goal – equity, or equality of opportunity?  Here too there is a growing momentum. Earlier this week the UN Secretary General launched a five year Education First initiative which has concerns about inequality at its heart, arguing that unless “we act swiftly, educational disparities will become an event greater source of division – both within and between countries”.  On the same day the EFA Global Monitoring Report team launched a new on-line tool which will allow users to get under the skin of the headline school access figures.  The World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE) allows anyone to assess the patterns of different educational inequalities in over fifty countries.

This week also saw the publication, by a Rwanda based independent research institute called the Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (IPAR), of some important research on school funding.  The findings are stark and have direct implications for debates about equality of opportunity.  They also reinforce the recommendation in the 2009 EFA Global Monitoring Report to scale up financing with a commitment to equity.

IPAR surveyed schools in two contrasting Rwandan districts, one relatively better off urban area – in Kigali – and one poorer rural area.  It totalled up the funding that schools in these two areas were receiving from all different sources. This included government, but also – crucially – private contributions from parents.  Including these private contributions is important because while nine years of basic education is free in Rwanda, as previous EFA Global Monitoring Reports have shown, happens in many other countries, parents still boost school budgets by making their own contributions.

IPAR found that Kigali parents topped-up school budgets far more generously than their poorer counterparts – their average contribution was ten times higher.  This meant that the total funding head teachers had for each pupil in their school (excluding teachers’ salaries, which are paid direct by the government) was approximately three times greater in the urban area.  The chart below shows the recent trends in both total per-pupil funding and also the parental contributions in the urban and rural area assessed.

Put Education First – share our flyer

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon launched his Education First initiative today. To support the rationale for choosing access and learning as two of the three key aspects of the new Initiative, we have collected some key statistics below. These include a few new figures from the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report, to be released on October 16.

You can help putting Education First by downloading the flyer here, and sharing it with your followers on Twitter and Facebook.

Also remember to have a look at the World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE), launched today which shows the extent to which girls, the poorest and remote miss out on an education.

The World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE) – a new visualization tool to measure marginalization

To coincide with the launch of the UN Secretary-General’s Education First initiative, the Education for All Global Monitoring Report Team will launch a new interactive website tomorrow – the World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE). In an exclusive preview for this blog, the Report’s director Pauline Rose explains what WIDE shows and why it is important.

I am delighted that the UN Secretary-General is putting Education First by launching his new initiative for education. Three years before the Education for All deadline, it is a much needed push to get more children into school and ensure they learn – especially for the poor and marginalized.

In order to design policies to reach the marginalized, it is vital to know who they are and where they live. But measuring marginalization is not an easy task. National averages of indicators such as average years in school often hide the problems of those at the margins. The 2010 EFA Global Monitoring Report, Reaching the marginalized, took a big step forward in providing new analysis that allowed us to look beyond the averages, showing how disadvantages, such as poverty, gender or rural residence, often overlap leaving large groups of children and young people with less than four years of schooling – which the Report identified as living in education poverty; and some even with less than two years of schooling – living in extreme education poverty. It gave world leaders, policymakers and the media unprecedented insight into disparities in access to education within countries.

On the occasion of the UN Secretary-General’s initiative, the EFA Global Monitoring Report will publish the data presented on a new interactive website called the World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE) – available at http://www.education-inequalities.org. The website, which provides updated analysis for over 50 countries, allows you to zoom in on selected countries and indicators, compare disparities across countries, and identify which groups are most disadvantaged within these countries.

WIDE paints an overall picture showing that much remains to be done to make access to education more equitable. For example, there are over 20 countries where at least one in five children have never even been to school. In as many as 24 countries, more than a quarter of young people have completed fewer than four years of education – and so are living in education poverty. As the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report will discuss, these young people will lack many of the skills needed to get a good job. The report will be launched on October 16.

WIDE provides vivid visualizations that enable you to look beyond the averages. You can, for example, compare in detail how countries’ performance has changed over time. Looking at Cambodia, you will find that while the average years of education increased by more than two years for 17-22 year olds over a decade, the gap between the richest and poorest in the country has remained constant throughout the period.

Cambodia, 2000-2010, 17-22 year olds. Average years in school.

WIDE also lets you contrast countries with similar averages, but different levels of inequality. While Burundi and Sierra Leone have the same percentage of 17-22 year olds with less than four years of education, the gap between the rich and poor is almost twice as large in the latter. In Sierra Leone 72% of the poorest children had spent fewer than four years in school, compared with only 15% of the richest children. In Burundi, 60% of the poorest had spent fewer than four years in school compared to 25% of the richest.

Burundi, 2005, and Sierra Leone, 2008, 17-22 year olds. Fewer than four years in school

Education empowers people and promotes democracy

The importance of good governance to overcome inequalities in education was the focus of the 2009 EFA Global Monitoring Report. As part of our 10^th anniversary countdown to the launch of the 2012 report on October 16, we are looking back at some of the report’s findings.

Graça Machel recently said that one word can summarize why education makes a difference and “that word is ‘empowerment’.” The 2009 EFA Global Monitoring Report, Overcoming inequality: Why governance matters argued for better governance of education policies. But the report also found that education promotes good governance by giving citizens the skills and confidence they need to become active members of their societies and hold their governments to account.

As the economist Amartya Sen pointed out in his book, Development as Freedom, education is crucial to give people capabilities such as literacy, confidence and attitudes that they need to participate in society. For example, providing education to poor and marginalized children and young people often means they are more likely to participate in meetings of local political bodies managing resources such as education, health and water. Research from sub-Saharan Africa, cited in the report, found that even primary schooling promotes citizen endorsement of democracy and rejection of non-democratic alternatives. In the 18 countries of the study, people of voting age with a primary education were 1.5 times more likely to support democracy than people with no education, rising to three times more likely for someone with secondary education.

These effects are neither universal nor straightforward. There are many examples of societies with a well-educated citizenry that might not be very democratic, as well as of democratic societies with low levels of education. But education can help people participate in democracy in a variety of ways, including providing them with literacy and other skills to enable them to take part in political discussions and access political information through the media.

As the 2009 EFA Global Monitoring Report  showed, a country which is managing to deliver quality skills training to its children and adolescents within its own borders will also find that those skills make a difference on an international level. If we are to solve global challenges such as climate change, we need people who understand enough science to recognize the problem and push their governments to act. The 2006 PISA assessment of scientific literacy of 15-year-olds, for example, found a strong link between how well students scored in the tests and their environmental awareness and their sense of responsibility for sustainable development. An educated and empowered population is therefore more likely to push its government to promote the necessary change on the international level.

Education for All is about empowerment, but the effects of good quality education reach far beyond the benefits it offers individuals. Education reduces poverty, boosts economic growth, leads to better health and survival rates and promotes gender equality, to mention a few examples highlighted by a recent Policy Paper from the Global Monitoring Report Team. As such, the Education for All movement is crucial to empower people with the skills they and their societies need to face challenges from the spread of HIV/AIDS to climate change, by promoting good governance and citizens with the necessary skills to hold their governments to account.

Illiteracy in developed countries: ending the taboo

By Nicole Bella, responsible for statistics in the Education for all Global Monitoring Report team. 

The fourth Education for All goal is to improve adult literacy by 50% between 2000 and 2015. Following the International Literacy Day celebrated last September 8^th, Nicole Bella writes a blog post on what is hidden behind the literacy statistics in both the developing and developed world.

The International Literacy Day celebrated on September 8^th since 1965 reminds us every year of the importance of literacy for individuals, communities and societies and therefore of the necessity to keep our promises. Just as with the general concern for education, literacy is a fundamental human right which everyone should benefit from. It is a right that opens the door to other rights and contributes to individual empowerment and to social, economic and political integration. Literacy is also beneficial in several other ways:

• To be able to read, write and count is essential for all other forms of learning
• To be able to read can be vital to live independently in day to day life: deciphering and understanding medical pamphlets, for example, or security instructions are essential for one’s health and security.
• To be able to read, write and count contribute to an individual’s personal development and allow each person to enjoy their individual freedom and better understand and adapt to a constantly changing digital world.

Undeniably, there already exist commitments to fight against illiteracy at the international, regional and national levels. Even so, hundreds of millions of adults around the world remain illiterate. According to the most recent estimate by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, the number of illiterate adults in the world has decreased by 12% since the beginning of the 1990s. Despite this change, 775 million adults were still considered illiterate in 2010. Nearly two thirds of these were women.

Early childhood care and education: Getting off to a good start

The first Education for All (EFA) goal aims to expand and improve comprehensive early childhood care and education, especially for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children. As part of our countdown to the launch of our next report, we look back at the 2007 EFA Global Monitoring Report to see how far global progress on the goal has come.

The first Education for All goal reminds us that education needs to begin before children start in primary school. Indeed, the 2007 EFA Global Monitoring Report, Strong Foundations, showed that early childhood care and education is both a right in itself, ratified by 193 nations through the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and is vital to give children a good start in life. It is also a catalyst towards all the other Education for All (EFA) Goals, and several Millennium Development Goals (MDG) too.

Children who participate in quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) programmes make better transitions to primary school, and are more likely to complete it (EFA goal 2). In addition, many ECCE programmes provide carers with access to parenting education and other forms of support, which can in turn improve adult learning and skills (EFA goals 3 and 4).  Such programmes are also important for promoting gender parity in education (EFA goal 5), as they relieve older sisters and other female kin of care responsibilities, a common barrier to girls’ enrolment in primary school. Furthermore, such programmes are an opportunity to reduce gender stereotypes at an age when children are developing their understandings of identity. Finally, good-quality ECCE is linked with higher achievement at later education levels, and can in that way contribute to the quality of education systems as a whole (Goal 6).

With regard to the Millennium Development Goals, good quality holistic early childhood programmes which monitor children’s welfare at the same time as providing an education, can sport and reduce poverty, hunger (MDG 1) and child mortality (MDG 4), and can help combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases (MDG 6). Given the far-reaching development effects of these programmes, combined with the chronic need to find breakthrough methods to stop the millions of child deaths each year from malnutrition and disease, early childhood care and education should be given much more attention and recognition by the international community.

2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report: One month to go!

In just one month, on October 16, we will release the 2012 EFA Global Monitoring Report Youth and Skills: Putting Education to Work. In addition to its focus on skills development for young people, the Report will publish the most recent data on progress towards the six Education for All Goals.

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Report, we have looked back at previous EFA Global Monitoring Reports over the past weeks. It is timely, as the forthcoming review of the education goals draws close, to look back at the 2008 Report which asked ‘Will we make it?’ With just three years to go until the 2015 deadline, can we answer this question with more assurance now?

At the time of the 2008 report’s release, the data were showing some encouraging trends since world leaders met at Dakar in 2000, but it was clear even then that renewed energy and importance had to be given to education goals if the 2015 deadline was to bring positive results. An initial deadline  had been set to eliminate gender disparities in both primary and secondary education by 2005. The 2008 Report declared this goal way off track in a vast majority of countries.

A full review of whether this and other goals are on track will be set out in the 2012 Report to be released in one month. Some key statistics already made public, including in our recent policy paper co-published with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, can help with a quick stocktake. From 1999 to 2008, when ‘Will we make it?’ was published, the latest data showed the number of out of school children had dropped by 35 million to 73 million. Since then, the figure has dropped by a further 12 million to 61 million, but has stagnated in recent years. With only three years to go until 2015, the task of universal primary education looms large.

Other data also suggest a worrying trend. Over the ten year period to 2004, 783 million adults were announced as illiterate, 64% of which were women. Having just celebrated the International Day of Literacy, we heard that there are 775 million adults illiterate still today, of which women still make up almost two-thirds. While population growth is an obvious challenge, and the global figures mask some impressive improvement in individual countries and between regions, it does beg the question: can we still make it?

The tenth edition of the EFA Global Monitoring Report, that you can download here from October 16, will look into more detail in the trends of these and other goals. Join us as we provide new evidence on whether we will make it. Come to one of our over 40 launches worldwide. Watch the live webcast of the global launch from Paris, France at 9am local time hosted on this website. Or, join our live Tweetchat from 2pm French time on October 16 where you can ask your questions to Pauline Rose, the Director of the Report, and to other organisations mentioned in the Report.

The yearly stocktake will be revealed on Twitter when the report is released. Follow us and find out more.

Illettrisme dans les pays développés : en finir avec un tabou

Par Nicole Bella, responsable des statistiques d’éducation dans l’équipe du Rapport mondial de suivi sur l’éducation pour tous

Le quatrième objectif pour l’éducation pour tous est d’améliorer de 50% les niveaux d’alphabétisme des adultes entre 2000 et 2015. Dans la foulée de la Journée internationale de l’alphabétisation célébrée le 8 Septembre dernier, Nicole Bella écrit un blog sur ce qui se cache derrière les statistiques de l’alphabétisme dans le monde développé et en développement.

La Journée internationale de l’alphabétisation célébrée le 8 septembre depuis 1965 vient nous rappeler chaque année l’importance de l’alphabétisation pour les individus, les communautés et sociétés, et donc la nécessité de maintenir nos engagements. Tout comme l’éducation en général, l’alphabétisation est un droit humain fondamental dont tout un chacun doit jouir, un droit qui ouvre la voie à d’autres droits et contribue à l’autonomisation des individus et à leur insertion sociale, économique et politique. L’alphabétisation a aussi des effets bénéfiques sur tous les plans :

• Savoir lire, écrire et compter sont des fondements pour tout autre apprentissage;
• Fonctionner de manière autonome dans la vie de tous les jours : savoir lire, décrypter et comprendre une notice de médicament, par exemple, ou des instructions de sécurité sont des compétences indispensables pour sa santé et sa sécurité.
• Savoir lire, écrire et compter contribue à la réalisation et au développement personnel des individus, et permet à chacun de jouir de sa liberté individuelle, de mieux comprendre un monde sans cesse en évolution à l’ère du numérique, et de s’y adapter.

Des engagements certains pour lutter contre l’analphabétisme existent aux niveaux international, régionale et national. Pour autant, des centaines de millions d’adultes à travers le monde demeurent analphabètes. Selon les estimations les plus récentes produites par l’institut de statistique de l’UNESCO, le nombre d’adultes analphabètes dans le monde a baissé de 12% depuis le début des années 1990. Malgré cette évolution, 775 millions d’adultes étaient toujours considérés comme analphabètes en 2010. Deux-tiers environ d’adultes analphabètes dans le monde sont des femmes.

Improving teaching and learning is crucial, especially for the marginalized

By Dr. Yusuf Sayed, Reader in International Education at the University of Sussex

The sixth Education for All goal was the focus of the 2005 EFA Global Monitoring Report, The quality imperative. As part of our 10^th anniversary countdown to the launch of the 2012 report on October 16, we asked Yusuf Sayed, a former member of the EFA Global Monitoring Report team, to assess progress in education quality.

Meaningful learning is crucial to ensure that children enrol, stay on and complete education. Unfortunately, progress on providing quality education is still lagging behind advances in enrolment. Regional patterns vary, but the global divide between rich and poor countries and rich and poor learners is marked.

This divide is one reason the UN Secretary General’s Education First initiative, to be launched at the end of this month, has a core focus on teachers and learning. Learning is also central to the debate about what happens in the post-2015 Education for All agenda.

A quality education is one that satisfies basic learning needs, and enriches the lives of learners and their overall experience of living. Quality is the focus of the sixth Education For All goal, established at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, in 2000: “Improving all aspects of the quality of education and ensuring excellence of all so that recognized and measurable learning outcomes are achieved by all, especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills.”

Literacy: Let’s listen to what adults want to learn

By Anna Robinson-Pant, Professor of Education, University of East Anglia

The fourth Education for All goal is to halve adult illiteracy between 2000 and 2015. How is the world faring? To mark International Literacy Day on September 8, we asked Anna Robinson-Pant, who belonged to the advisory group for the 2006 EFA Global Monitoring Report, Literacy for Life, to weigh progress and look to the future, as part of our countdown to the launch of the 2012 report on October 16.

The rapid pace of events in the Middle East provides a glimpse of how ordinary people are harnessing the Internet through Twitter, Facebook and other social media to organize and mobilize people for radical change. This seems a world apart from what we often talk about as ‘literacy’, particularly in low income countries. Yet the goals of empowerment are not so very different from those early adult literacy classes that Paulo Freire pioneered in the Brazilian slums in the 1960s: people learning to ‘read the word and the world’. At that time, only literate people could vote in the country’s presidential elections. Voting was a tangible right that came along with literacy, an opportunity to challenge social and political marginalization.

Literacy has long been recognized as central to addressing inequality, particularly for ensuring that people have a say in decisions that affect their lives and societies. Basic literacy and numeracy are also regarded as essential elements of the skills agenda. So why have we made so little progress on the EFA goal to halve illiteracy by 2015? While many of those aged 15 to 24 are now literate, this is largely a reflection on the improvements in schooling systems of many countries of the world. Adult literacy still hardly features within any government and aid agency educational budgets. Education For All has all too often been reduced to Education For Children.

Not surprisingly – given this lack of resources and political commitment – the adult literacy programmes that do run tend to be poor quality, relying on untrained and semi-volunteer teachers who struggle to keep up attendance night after night. There are exceptions: some NGO and government programmes have demonstrated how properly resourced adult education can help facilitate real change within rural communities.

I have spent a lot of time in rural adult literacy classes over the years. I remember the many times that both teachers and students told me what a  pain it was to come every night. The teachers either saw the literacy class as casual labour that would last for six months at a very low rate of pay, and then disappear when the programme moved to another area. Or they started with a real commitment to contributing to their community, but quickly found it hard to teach if the participants found the materials boring or too difficult (especially if not in their mother tongue).

The women attending classes were so tired after a day’s work in the fields and at home that they were often late, literally fell asleep or complained  when they could not see the page to read in the dim lamplight. By the end of six months, only the younger unmarried women (some of whom had previously been to school and saw this as a refresher course) would have managed to finish the course. Then it was a question of what next?

Alongside this image of adult literacy classes is the reality of adult women and men learning to use mobile phones in these same rural communities – learning to text and carry out transactions across distances that they would never before have envisaged. This informal literacy learning is taking place in everyday life. Yet many adult literacy programmes continue to adopt what I see as a ‘schooling for adults’ approach – based on a textbook telling women how to improve their lives (build latrines, adopt family planning and cook nutritious food). It is not surprising to me that providing access to this kind of literacy – with the huge gulf between the literacy class and everyday learning – is seen as the last priority by both communities and governments.