Education for all: the challenges of achieving universal early childhood care and primary education

We discussed the Education for All (EfA) initiative in a previous issue of this journal when we joined with UNESCO (EfA 2011a) in welcoming the World's seven billionth child (Brundrett 2011). The EfA initiative is supported by UNICEF who argue that education is a basic human right that it is universal and inalienable regardless of gender, religion, ethnicity or economic status. We noted that the EfA originally sprang out of a conference in 1990 which agreed six goals aimed at providing education to every citizen in every society including:

• Expanding and improving early childhood care and education, especially for the most vulnerable children.

• Ensuring that by 2015, all children, particularly girls and the disadvantaged, have access to quality free and compulsory primary education.

• Eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005, and achieving gender equality in education by 2015.

• Ensuring that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life skills programmes.

• Achieving a 50% improvement in levels of adult literacy by 2015, especially for women, and offering equitable access to basic and continuing education to all adults.

• Improving all aspects of the quality of education and ensuring excellence (UNESCO 2011b).

Underlying these goals was the realisation that access to education was not sufficient and the quality and duration of education was equally important since, in many developing countries, less than 60% of primary school pupils who enrolled in the first grade reached the last grade of schooling. We have also noted in previous issues of this journal that the 164 countries that attended the World Education Forum in 2000 adopted the Dakar Framework for Action, which reaffirmed the EfA goal of achieving high-quality basic education for all by 2015. Later that year, two EfA goals were incorporated in the millennium development goals (MDGs) for achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women. The six goals are universally to be applauded and must be viewed as unexceptionable to anyone who is interested in equality and human rights but the EfA goals, nonetheless, require a global commitment by governments, civil society, and development agencies to help every child to realise his or her inalienable right to a quality education (UNESCO 2011b).

The 11th EFA Global Monitoring Report on the attainment of the goals has been published recently and is entitled Teaching and Learning: Achieving Quality for All (UNESCO 2014). It makes a powerful case for placing education at the heart of the global development agenda after 2015. In the foreword to the report the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova notes that in 2008, the EFA Global Monitoring Report asked – ‘will we make it?’ and she is forced to point out that with less than two years left before the original deadline of 2015, it is clear that the laudable targets will be missed by some margin since 57 million children are still failing to learn, simply because they are not in school. Moreover, poor quality education is holding back learning even for those who make it to school since one-third of primary school-age children are not learning the basics, whether they have been to school or not (UNESCO 2014, i). For this reason, the report calls on governments to redouble efforts to provide learning to all who face disadvantages, whether from poverty, gender, where they live or other factors (UNESCO 2014, i).

The Director-General goes on to point out that an education system is only as good as its teachers and that unlocking their potential is essential for enhancing the quality of learning. A total of 1.6 million additional teachers are believed to be needed if the goal of achieving universal primary education by 2015 is to be met and the report identifies four strategies to ensure the best teachers to provide children with a good quality education including:

• Selecting the right teachers to reflect the diversity of the children they will be teaching.

• Training teachers to support the weakest learners, starting from the early grades.

• Overcoming inequalities in learning by allocating the best teachers to the most challenging parts of a country.

• Providing teachers with the right mix of incentives to encourage them to remain in the profession and to make sure all children are learning, regardless of their circumstances (UNESCO 2014, i).

The report goes on to analyse in more detail the progress towards all of the goals set out in 2000, two of which are of especial interest to readers of this journal. Goal 1 relates to early childhood care and education and the authors note that the foundations set in the first thousand days of a child's life are critical for future well-being, making it vital that families have access to adequate health care, along with support for mothers and babies and access to good nutrition so that children's immune systems and cognitive abilities can be developed to their fullest. Happily, improvements have been made and under-5 mortality fell by 48% from 1990 to 2012, but, sadly, 6.6 million children still died before their fifth birthday in 2012 and it appears that only eight countries will reach the target of reducing child deaths by two-thirds from their 1990 levels. Also of concern is the fact that some 162 million children under 5 are still malnourished with three-quarters of those affected living in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia. On a more a positive note, since 2000, pre-primary education has expanded considerably from 33% in 1999 to 50% in 2011 but has reached only 18% in sub-Saharan Africa and in many parts of the world there is a wide gap in enrolment between the richest and poorest nations and regions. The report argues that part of the reason for this is that governments have yet to assume sufficient responsibility for pre-primary education since, in 2011, private providers were catering for 33% of all enrolled children and the cost of private provision is one of the factors that contribute to inequity in access at this level. A pre-primary education gross enrolment ratio of 80% has been set as a target for 2015, but it is projected that only 48% of countries will reach the goal (UNESCO 2014, 1–2).

Goal 2 focuses on the fulfillment of universal primary education by 2015 and it is very distressing to note that this is likely to be missed by a wide margin since 57 million primary-age children were still out of school in 2011. However, even this is a significant gain since between 1999 and 2011 the number of children out of school fell by almost half. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region causing most concern, with 22% of the region's primary school-age population still not in school in 2011. By contrast, South and West Asia experienced the fastest improvement, contributing more than half the total reduction in numbers out of school. Notably, girls make up 54% of the global population of children not attending school and in the Arab States the share is 60%, a figure that is unchanged since 2000. In South and West Asia, by contrast, the percentage of girls in the out-of-school population fell steadily, from 64% in 1999 to 57% in 2011. Almost half the children out of school globally are expected never to make it into education of any type, and the same is true for nearly two of three girls in the Arab States and sub-Saharan Africa. Using household surveys, the report estimates that 14 countries had more than 1 million children out of school in 2011, including Afghanistan, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Sudan (pre-secession) and the United Republic of Tanzania. One of the most neglected problems appears to be that of children with disabilities and new analysis shows that children at higher risk of disability are far more likely to be denied a chance to go to school, with differences widening depending on the type of disability. Overall, it appears that universal participation in primary school is likely to remain elusive in many countries by 2015 (UNESCO 2014, 2–3).

The brief summary above is merely a snapshot of a large and illuminating report that covers more than 180 pages of facts, figures, comment and analysis that repays reading since it provides one of the most comprehensive analyses of the issues facing education globally. One of the things that is most striking, apart from the immensely distressing statistics on the numbers of children who still suffer the most challenging of starts in life, is the fact that many of the findings can be applied at the micro level as well as the macro level. For instance, the challenges noted by the Director-General in relation to supporting the weakest learners, overcoming inequalities in learning by allocating the best teachers to the most challenging parts of a country, and providing teachers with the right mix of incentives to encourage them to remain in the profession, can all be applied not only to developing countries but also the advanced nations where the problems may not be as deep or the inequalities so great but the issues remain the same. For instance, in the UK and in much of Europe, social inequality has been widening rather than declining in recent years and the problems of training and supporting teachers have been noted in many of the richest as well as the poorest nations.

We must hope that countries redouble their efforts to achieve the millennium goals, as is requested by the Director-General of UNESCO (UNESCO 2014, ii), and that social inequality is seen to decline further and faster than in the past. Those of us with a special interest in primary education must be especially desirous that the aim of universal primary education, based on sound and humane principles, is achieved within the coming years. Education 3–13 prides itself on being an international journal and we hope that the publication of a wide range of theoretical, empirical and analytical material from around the world will contribute something to these goals, however large or small that contribution may be.