World still has long way to go to achieve education for all – UN-backed report

Despite significant efforts to increase resources, and record levels of children going to school, many drop out before the fifth grade or graduate without mastering even a minimum set of cognitive skills, threatening global educational goals set in 2000, according to a new United Nations-backed report.

“Overcrowded classes, poorly qualified teachers and ill-equipped schools with scant learning materials remain all too familiar pictures in many countries,” the Director-General of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Koïchiro Matsuura, said.

“Yet, achieving education for all fundamentally relies on assuring decent quality: what children learn and how they learn can make or break their school experience and their subsequent opportunities in life,” he added of the 2005 Education for All Global Monitoring Report launched yesterday in Brasilia.

The study finds that more children are going to school than ever before and that significant efforts are being made to increase resources, broaden access to school and improve gender parity. But exhaustive analysis of research data shows that the quality of education systems is failing children in many parts of the world, and could prevent many countries from achieving Education for All (EFA) by the target date of 2015.

In one-third of countries with data, for example, less than 75 per cent of students reach grade five. National and international assessments also show that performance levels are very weak in low- and middle-income countries and among disadvantaged groups in some industrialized nations.

The report monitors progress towards the six EFA goals set by over 160 countries at the World Education Forum in 2000 in Dakar. These are: wider access to early childhood care and education; universal primary education; improved youth and adult learning opportunities; a 50 per cent improvement in adult literacy rates; gender equality; and an improvement in all aspects of the quality of education.

The report is prepared by an independent international team based at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris and is funded by UNESCO and a number of bilateral agencies. Its findings will serve as the basis for discussions at the Fourth High-Level Group Meeting on Education for All this week in Brasilia.

According to an index based on indicators for the four most measurable Dakar goals – universal primary education, adult literacy, education quality (using survival rate of pupils to grade 5 as a proxy) and gender parity – 41 of 127 countries studied are relatively close to achieving the goals. They comprise mainly industrialized and transition countries, but they also include such countries in Latin America and the Caribbean as Argentina, Cuba and Chile together with five small island States.

Another 51 countries, headed by Romania, Bulgaria and Costa Rica and including many Arab States and Latin American countries are well on the way to achieving some of the goals, but are being held back by slow progress on others, notably quality.

A third group of 35 countries, 22 of them in sub-Saharan Africa, but also including the high population countries of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, are “very far from achieving the goals,” with “multiple challenges to tackle simultaneously if EFA is to be assured.”