Education for all is still an important goal

Fifteen years ago, world leaders made a promise to children around the world that by 2015, every child would have the chance to go school.

We promised Education for All. The year 2015 has arrived, great progress has been achieved, but 121 million children and youth remain out of school.

On the eve of the next gathering of world leaders at the World Education Forum in Incheon, the Republic of Korea, some might doubt the wisdom of a new round of promises and goals — why should we support new pledges if the last set has not yet been achieved?

Education for All was ambitious. Calling for anything universal is a challenge, especially for countries in conflict and those where infrastructure has to be built from scratch and cultural barriers surmounted.

Yet the drive to include every child resulted in 80 million more children and adolescents going to school since 2000, closing gender gaps in primary schools in two-thirds of the world’s countries.

The results are there for all to witness. Over the past 15 years, Afghanistan increased the percentage of girls attending school from 4 per cent to 87 per cent. India reduced its out-of-school population by more than 90 per cent.

Algeria increased the percentage of children attending pre-primary school from almost nothing to 80 per cent.

Uganda scrapped school fees and saw disadvantaged children enrolling in school for the first time. Brazil, Nicaragua, and Mexico designed social protection programmes and helped close gaps between rich and poor accessing education.

As always, money matters to make a promise stick. Although many governments substantially increased education spending since 2000, aid to this sector has stagnated for the past five years and a finance gap has grown.

The 2015 Education for All Global Monitoring Report shows that, even with substantial increases in government spending on education and given current international aid, an additional $22 billion must be found each year to achieve universal education by 2030.

Turning to a new set of targets does not mean turning our back on unfinished business. On the contrary, the new education goal, to be included in the Sustainable Development Goals to be adopted by the United Nations next September, is deeply rooted in the continuation of the past agenda.

Achieving it requires governments to make at least one year of pre-primary education compulsory. Education must be free: fees for tuition, textbooks, school uniforms, and transport must be abolished.

Education must be relevant to be useful. Literacy policies should link up with the needs of communities.

And we must make sure we are teaching students about respect and tolerance, new forms of global citizenship, and how to bring about sustainable change. Teacher training should cover gender-sensitive strategies and teaching styles must better reflect cultural and classroom contexts.

Targets and goals have been vital in measuring progress and helping us understand what works and what does not. The evidence gathered over the past 15 years must now help us shape the sustainable development agenda after 2015. Education for all means exactly that, and we will hold world leaders and governments to account until this is achieved.

The writer is the director-general of Unesco