Education International has presented its own assessment of the last 15 years of EFA at the World Education Forum in Korea, which states that without a consistent engagement of teachers in education policy, future strategies are bound to fail.
According to the latest Education for all Global (EFA) Monitoring Report by UNESCO, not a single one of the six Education For All goals adopted in Dakar in the year 2000 will be fully achieved. EI’s report highlights that a major barrier to efforts linking policy, research and practice was the failure to engage practitioners themselves.
EI’s EFA assessment was presented yesterday in a room full to the brim at the World Education Forum. EI’s president Susan Hopgood, who presented the results of the research, underlined that its principal aim had been to “bridge the gap between the school reality and the global debate on education.”
“We wanted to make recommendations to ensure that when the global community meets fifteen years from now we do not have to resign ourselves to saying we failed to meet our goals again. If we fail to meet our goals again we will have in fact failed more generations of children from realizing their right to quality education.”, Ms Hopgood said.
Broad, holistic approach
The research has been carried out through five regional consultations over two years that have involved teacher representatives of 65 countries (39 from Africa, nine from Asia-Pacific, seven from Latin America, and 10 from the Middle East and North Africa). In addition, EI’s report draws from the results of a global survey it conducted in 2014 that captures the point of view of over 14.000 teachers and education support personnel from 129 countries.
The assessment is based on four thematic pillars that governments agreed to at the last World Education Forum: commitment and resources that governments have invested in education, dialogue with and participation of teachers in the decision-making process, policies and legislation adopted to achieve EFA, and the impact of EFA in the classroom.
Reasons for failure
The results of the research indicate two main reasons for the failure to achieve the EFA goals.
On the one hand, political commitment has rarely been translated from speech to action, with many countries failing to increase their education budget sufficiently. Moreover, for governments relying heavily on foreign aid, education planning has not been carried out effectively due to the unpredictability of available funding. This has also led to a critical shortage of qualified teachers, with less than 75% of them trained to national standards.
Secondly, governments have largely failed to set up well-functioning structures for civil society’s participation in the implementation and monitoring of the goals. Teachers have not been consulted, often due to the absence of effective communication mechanisms. This has led to a lack of understanding of the education system from the side of the governments, and hence to a poor implementation of the strategies.