Achieving quality education for all

Knowledge and skills are the key resources in the 21st century. And knowledge and skills can best be acquired through quality education. Teaching and Learning: Achieving Quality for All is the 11th edition of Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report, which provides a timely update on progress that countries are making towards the global education goals that were adopted in Dakar, Senegal, in 2000.
This evidence-based document shows that a lack of attention to education quality and a failure to reach the marginalised have contributed to a learning crisis that needs urgent attention. It also describes how policy-makers can support and sustain a quality education system for all children, regardless of background, by providing the best teachers. The report monitors progress towards the goals across some 200 countries and territories, and acts as an authoritative reference for education policy-makers, academics, development specialists, researchers and the media.
The latest edition of EFA Global Monitoring Report is divided into three parts. Part 1 provides an update on progress in the six EFA goals; 1) Early childhood care and education, 2) Universal primary education, 3) Youth and adult skills, 4) Adult literacy, 5) Gender parity and equality, and 6) Quality of education.
With the deadline for the EFA goals less than two years away, it is clear that despite advances over the decade, not a single goal will be achieved globally by 2015. For the first EFA goal, this report assumes that at least 80 per cent of young children should be enrolled in pre-primary education programmes by 2015, but only 5 in 10 countries are likely to reach this target. If progress continues to be as slow as in the recent years, 53 million children will remain out of school in 2015.  Universal primary enrolment (Goal 2) will be reached to just over half the world's countries by 2015. For primary school completion, less than 1 in 7 countries have achieved this target. The third EFA goal has been one of the most neglected, in part because no targets or indicators were set to monitor its progress. The 2012 Report proposed a framework for various pathways to skills - including foundation, transferable and technical & vocational skills - as a way of improving monitoring efforts, but the international community is still a long way from measuring the acquisition of skills systematically.
Some countries have made fast progress towards improving adult literacy (Goal 4), reaping the benefits of having their basic education systems expanded. In some regions, however, the rate of improvement has not kept pace with population growth. As a result, the number of illiterate adults worldwide remains stubbornly high at 774 million. The world will be much closer to ensuring that equal numbers of boys and girls are enrolled in primary education (Goal 5). By 2015, 7 in 10 countries will have reached the target. It is difficult to estimate the number of countries yet to achieve the sixth EFA goal -improving the quality of education to ensure that all are learning. To help give education quality the greater focus that it deserves after 2015, this report proposes ways to strengthen international and regional assessments so that progress towards a global learning goal can be measured.
Insufficient financing is one of the main obstacles to achieving Education for All. Unfortunately, donors seem more likely to reduce their aid than increase it in the coming years. Unless urgent action is taken to change aid patterns, the goal of ensuring that every child is in school and is learning by 2015 will be seriously hampered. It is widely accepted that countries should allocate at least 20 per cent of their budget to education. Yet the global average in 2011 was only 15 per cent, a proportion that has hardly changed since 1999.  
The second part of this report demonstrates not only education's capacity to accelerate progress towards other development goals, but also how best to tap that potential, most of all by making sure that access to good quality education is available to all. And the schooling that children receive needs to be of good quality so that they actually learn the basics. One of the benefits of increased education is that educated parents are likely to have more educated children. Analysis of household surveys from 56 countries finds that for each additional year of the mother's education, the average child attains an extra 0.32 years, and for girls the benefit is slightly larger. Educated mothers are more likely to know about appropriate health and hygiene practices at home, and have more power to ensure that household resources are allocated so as to meet children's nutrition needs.
Improving education is a powerful way to help increase awareness as well as reduce the incidence of infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS.  In South and West Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, literate women were as much as 30 percentage points more likely than those who were not literate to be aware that they had the right to refuse sex or request condom use if they knew that their partner had a sexually transmitted disease. Education can empower women to claim their rights and overcome barriers that prevent them from getting a fair share of the fruits of overall progress. Having the freedom to choose one's spouse is one such right. Likewise, ensuring that girls stay in school is one of the most effective ways to prevent child marriage. Education has an indispensable role in strengthening the bonds that hold communities and societies together. In Latin America, people with secondary education were 47 per cent less likely than those with primary education to express intolerance for people of a different race.
Part 3 of this document highlights the extent of the global learning crisis, which afflicts children and young people from poor and vulnerable households in particular. Quality education is at the heart of the EFA goals but millions of primary school-age children have not acquired even the most basic literacy and numerate skills. Unable to read or understand a simple sentence, these children are ill equipped to make the transition to secondary education. The extreme inequalities in achieving the most basic learning requirements, both between and within countries, add up to a global learning crisis that calls for urgent action.
The quality of an education system mainly depends on the quality of its teachers. Policy-makers need to give teachers every chance to put their motivation, energy, knowledge and skills to work in improving learning for all. The UNESCO Report describes the four strategies that governments need to adopt: (1) Teacher recruitment policies and strategies should be designed to make teaching attractive to highly qualified candidates with diverse backgrounds and good subject knowledge. (2) It is crucial to make sure that all teachers, irrespective of how they enter the profession, receive adequate training that strikes a balance between theory and practice and that makes up for any shortcomings in subject knowledge.  (3) A mix of incentives, such as good housing, extra allowances or bonuses, is needed to get trained teachers who will accept teaching positions in the rural and remote areas and maintain their commitment to teaching. (4) Improving pay and conditions and providing an attractive career path are the best ways to retain good teachers.
To solve the global learning crisis and unlock teachers' potential this report also identifies the 10 most important teaching reforms that policy-makers should adopt to achieve equitable learning for all: i) Fill teachers' gaps, ii) Attract the best candidates to teaching, iii) Train teachers to meet the needs of all children, iv) Prepare teacher-educators and mentors to support teachers, v) Get teachers to where they are needed most, vi) Use a competitive career and pay-structure to retain the best teachers, vii) Improve teacher-governance to maximise impact, viii) Equip teachers with innovative curricula to improve learning, ix) Develop classroom assessments to help teachers identify and support students at risk of not learning, and x) Provide better data on trained teachers.
To ensure that all children are learning, teachers also need the support of an appropriate and well-designed curriculum and assessment system that pays particular attention to the needs of children in early grades, when the most vulnerable are in danger of dropping out. Moreover, children who have had to leave school before achieving the basic skills need a second chance to acquire these skills. Beyond teaching the basics, teachers must help children gain important transferable skills, and can also help them become responsible global citizens if issues such as critical thinking, problem-solving, advocacy, environmental sustainability, conflict-resolution and peace-building are integrated into a curriculum that focuses on practical action.
The latest evidence in this UNESCO publication demonstrates not only education's capacity to accelerate progress towards other development goals, but also how best to tap that potential, most of all by making sure that access to good quality education is available to all, regardless of their circumstances. Now it is time for the policy-makers as well as donors that they renewed their commitment to quality education not only as a human right and a key goal, but also, crucially, as an 'investment' that pays off in every sphere of people's lives and aspirations.
The writer is an independent researcher. [email protected]