It is a very great pleasure to be here. The Institute of Education has made a stellar contribution to education both in the UK and around the world. I pay homage to this century of achievement.
I commend the UN National Commission for UNESCO for holding the series of seminars on Education for All (EFA) that culminates in this event today. My UNESCO colleagues who have attended previous seminars in the series have been very impressed by their quality. Another very important aspect of this initiative has been to stress that EFA is a concern for all countries of the world by showing that it is a concern of the UK within the UK.
Inevitably, UNESCO’s limited energies and resources have to be devoted primarily to helping the developing countries most in need. However, I know of no developed country that is satisfied with its education system. We will all gain if countries like the UK, as they try to improve their educational systems, place their efforts in the worldwide context of EFA. At the very least this will help us at UNESCO to create twinning relationships between countries that are addressing similar challenges.
The title of this conference: Education for All – Enhancing Educational Quality and Ensuring Excellence, is a very good summary of my current task at UNESCO. Because the quantitative challenge of achieving Education for All is so massive, it is easy to forget that our work is pointless unless we offer people education of quality and encourage them to aspire to excellence. Yet those countries, such as Malawi and Uganda, that have made policy changes in order to increase school enrolments dramatically, have immediately faced the challenge of falling quality.
My job at UNESCO is to drive forward the campaign for education for all that was given fresh articulation at the World Forum in Dakar in 2000 and added impetus by the World Bank and G8 meetings earlier this year. That campaign, like so much else today, brings us bad news and good news. Last week saw the launch, here in London, of the 2002 Global Monitoring Report on EFA. Thanks to the excellent work of Professor Chris Colclough and his team we have wrung every drop of useful information out of the available data on educational performance, on the state of play in planning, and on the extent to which rich countries have delivered on their promises to help.
This address will be in three parts. First, I want to recall why we are doing this. It may seem strange to argue for the importance of education at the Institute of Education but I do not apologise. It is always good to remind ourselves why we are doing things. We often have to argue the case for education to prime ministers, politicians and people. It is good to keep our discourse current. That is because the arguments for education evolve as our understanding of its role in human life evolves.
Second, I shall give you some of the highlights of the 2002 Global Monitoring Report on EFA. I am proud that Chris Colclough and his team have advanced our knowledge of the reality of education around the world by a quantum leap. We must confront it – warts and all.
Third, since this last seminar in the series is focused on quality, I shall say a few words about that. It will be pretty basic, but then the needs are pretty basic. There is always a danger that our fancy constructs about quality education, even if they have some relevance to a country like Britain, are completely irrelevant to developing countries until they have the basics in place.
Why educate?
So, first, why do we educate? Why is Education for All important? I was in Cuba last week and I cannot do better than quote the great Cuban poet and thinker José Marti, who lived from 1853-95. I give you two quotations from him.
First: ‘All people, when they arrive on earth, have a right to be educated; and then in return, they have the obligation to educate others‘.
I note in passing how well Cuba itself has implemented that right and fulfilled that obligation. It gives full educational opportunities to its people and then encourages them to help with educating those in neighbouring countries.
Second: ‘To educate is to give people the keys to the world, which are independence and love; granting them the ability to walk alone, at the happy pace which is that of natural and free individuals’.
In those quotes and his other writings José Marti summarised, more than a century ago, the three reasons that I evoke today to argue for Education for All.
First, education is a human right, declared as such back in 1948 in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This recognises the intrinsic human value of education, underpinned by strong moral and legal foundations. The right to education is the key to unlocking other human rights. Where the right to education is guaranteed, people have a greater chance to access and enjoy other rights.
Second, education is a key to freedom. The key, as Marti put it, to the ‘ability to walk alone, at the happy pace which is that of natural and free individuals’.
Third, education is the route to development Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen puts the case brilliantly for us in his book Development as Freedom, whose title sums it all up. He argues that the purpose of development is simply the expansion of freedom. Development, in his words, ‘consists of the removal of the various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency’.
On the one hand, freedom has a constitutive role in development. This is the importance of substantive freedom in enriching human life. Such freedom starts with avoiding under-nourishment and premature death and continues through the freedoms associated with being literate and numerate to the enjoyment of political participation and free speech. This means that the key criterion for assessing the progress of development is whether people are becoming increasingly free.
On the other hand, freedom has an instrumental role in development. The achievement of development is thoroughly dependent on the free agency of people. The creation of opportunities makes a direct contribution to the expansion of human capabilities and the quality of life. These in turn enhance people’s productive and creative potential and thus promote economic growth and cultural enrichment.
So, because education is the key to freedom it is also the key to development. A new generation of economic growth models gives human resources a central position in increasing development returns. We know that schooling improves productivity in rural and urban employment. We know that literate people have fewer and healthier children.
Rights, freedoms and development benefits make up a powerful triangle of arguments for Education for All. The challenge for each country is to recognise the validity of these arguments, define their own distinctive policy priorities and map their own route to achieving Education for All.
Education for All: is the world on track?
I turn now to the second part of these remarks. Education for All is vital, but is the world on track to achieve it? That is the question that the 2002 Global Monitoring Report on EFA sets out to answer. To summarise the situation that it finds I cannot do better than quote from the report itself:
This report has shown that progress towards the six Dakar goals is insufficient: the world is not on track to achieve education for all by 2015. This judgement is based on a number of strands of evidence. …Three of the goals – universal primary education, gender equality and literacy – can presently be monitored quantitatively. Only 83 countries (accounting for just over one-third of the world’s population) have already achieved the three goals or have a high chance of doing so by 2015 on the basis of recent trends. In 43 countries (with 37% of the world’s population), at least one goal is likely to be missed, while a further 28 countries (with 28% of the world’s population) are not on track to achieve any of them. Two thirds of those in the latter category are in sub-Saharan Africa, but they also include India and Pakistan.
Of the three goals, literacy most frequently risks not being met: at present rate of progress, 79 countries will not be able to halve their rate of adult illiteracy by 2015. Universal primary education is unlikely to be reached in 57 countries, 41 of which have recently even been moving in the wrong direction. The position is slightly better as regards the gender goals, with 86 countries having already achieved gender parity in primary enrolments, and a further 35 countries being close to doing so.
So it’s not a pretty picture. I realise that I may be getting ahead of myself for those of you who have not been able to attend all the seminars in this series and cannot recite the six Dakar goals by heart. I remember them with the acronym GET EQUAL and here they are:
The first target concerns girls and gender. The goal is to eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005 and achieve gender equality by 2015 - with a special focus on ensuring full and equal access for girls to basic education of good quality.
E is for elementary or primary education, where the deadline is to ensure that by 2015 all children, especially girls, children in difficult circumstances, and from ethnic minorities have access to and complete free and compulsory primary education of good quality.
T is for training, to ensure that the learning needs of all young people are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life skills programmes.
The next E is for early childhood. The goal is to expand and improve comprehensive early childhood care and education, especially for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children.
QU stands for quality, without which all the rest is pointless. The Dakar Forum charged us to improve all aspects of the quality of education to achieve recognised and measurable learning outcomes for all – especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills.
Finally, AL stands for Adult Literacy, the challenge of achieving a 50 per cent improvement in levels of adult literacy by 2015, especially for women, as well as equitable access to basic and continuing education for adults.
So there are three quantitative targets with deadlines and three that are qualitative. At this meeting I expect that you are particularly interested in the targets related to literacy, continuing education, life skills and quality.
In trying to summarize the results for each of the three quantitative Dakar goals the authors of the Monitoring Report have devised a system of quadrants using two dimensions, one static and one dynamic. The static dimension is the distance that a country was from a particular Dakar goal in 2000, whether close to it or farther away. The dynamic dimension is the change between 1990 and 2000, whether a country is moving towards the goal or away from it. This gives four boxes. Two boxes show countries that are close to the Dakar goal. In one box are the countries where the indicators went backwards between 1990 and 2000, suggesting that the goal will not be reached, in the other box are countries, which progressed between 1990 and 2000 and have a high chance of achieving the goal.
Two other boxes show countries that are far from the goal. Those that are moving away from it are, of course, very unlikely to meet the goal without drastic change. Those that are moving towards it are unlikely to meet it because the gap is too large to close in the time.
Here are selected results from around the world and all the results that are available for Europe. The problem is that there is no data for most of the OECD countries. You can see that three European countries, Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina and Portugal are likely to reach the literacy goal whereas Malta, although having relatively high literacy, has been regressing rather then progressing in recent years.
While we are on the subject let us look at the similar tables for Primary Education and for Gender Parity. There is not room on these slides to list all the countries in each box but the total numbers are noted. This slide shows the 1999 value of the net enrolment rate (NER) at primary level and in which direction they are moving. You can see that universal primary education remains a huge challenge.
Here is the analysis for Gender Parity, which is the Dakar goal with the earliest deadline. This is not an encouraging picture either. Here the static measure is the Gender Parity Index (GPI) in 2000. Those more than 10% away from unity, either because of a higher proportion of boys or a higher proportion of girls, are considered far away.
Finally, as far as this general data is concerned, the authors of the EFA Monitoring Report have put together a composite index for the three Dakar goals where we have quantitative measurements: primary education, literacy and gender parity.
First, here are the results for the E9 countries, which include nearly half the world’s population and more the half the world’s illiterate adults.
Here are the results for Central and Eastern Europe, which are more encouraging, and for Western Europe and North America. The picture becomes less rosy, but still encouraging in Latin American and the Caribbean. When you move to the Arab states and North Africa there is a bunching of states in the ‘insufficient progress’ column, whereas further south in sub-Saharan Africa we see where the world’s educational challenge really is, with a majority of states at serious risk of not achieving education for all without drastic changes to their present trajectories.
What about quality?
Let me leave the analysis there and turn to the third part of my address. What about quality? You saw that Dakar enjoined us to improve all aspects of the quality of education to achieve recognised and measurable learning outcomes for all – especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills. How are we faring?
In trying to address this issue the Monitoring Report has first to address the vexed issue of what is quality. The authors use an input-process-output framework to identify various factors, which can be assessed. As inputs they take the school, the characteristics of the student and the characteristics of the household the student comes from. The process includes the school climate and teaching and learning. The output involves achievement, attainment and standards. All this, of course is embedded in various contextual factors peculiar to the country concerned.
When you turn from this to the hard reality of the data available, you find that date on human and financial resources are available on a global scale, so the authors examine how expenditure on education has evolved in relation to primary enrolments and also how it has evolved in relation to the pupil teacher ratio. They also look at repetition as an indicator of system efficiency and at the number of hours in class, both the official and actual figures. They also look at what data there are on standards, attainment, and achievement.
What do they conclude from all this? I summarise their four statements. First some countries and sub-regions have shown that good performance and excellence is possible, even with modest means. Cuba is an exception, with some of the best results in the world from its school system, but the Anglophone Caribbean also punches well above its economic weight.
Second, the tendency for girls to perform better than boys is increasingly widespread, so great human potential will be unlocked when gender parity is achieved. Third, in all countries, from Britain to Bangladesh, parental income and education have a major income on learning outcomes. In developing countries urban schools do better than rural schools.
Finally, school characteristics are very important in the developing countries, whether we are talking about teaching in shifts, the availability of textbooks and materials, and the presence of experienced teachers.
Indeed, my last remark on quality is to recall the statement – I don’t know the author – that 90% of success is showing up. The great unspoken truth is that the main problem in many developing countries is that the teachers simply do not turn up. In Honduras the teacher absenteeism, according to Martin Carnoy, is 50% at any given moment. Some francophone African countries have significant numbers of teachers who draw their salaries in the capital city and never go near the provincial town to which they were assigned. When teachers are poorly paid or not paid at all they have to make a living. When relations between the teachers unions and the government make those here between the Fire Brigades Union and the government look positively amicable reform becomes very difficult.
Conclusions
It is time to conclude. I flew in yesterday from Nigeria where I had attended the second meeting of the High-Level Group on EFA. I will share some of the conclusions of that meeting with you.
References
- Sen, Amartya, (1999) Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press
- UNESCO (2000) The Dakar Framework for Action. 77pp.
- UNESCO (2002) Global Monitoring Report Education for All: is the world on track? 310pp.