PRESS CONFERENCE BY UNESCO ON ‘EDUCATION FOR ALL GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT’

On a global educational level, progress had been made, over the past year, in getting young children into schools, but not in keeping them enrolled, two representatives of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) told correspondents, this afternoon, at a Headquarters press conference to present the Education for All Global Monitoring Report for 2007.

The theme for this year’s report is “strong foundations, early childhood care and education”.  Speaking on that theme, at the event, were Nicholas Burnett, Director of UNESCO’s Education for All Report and Peter Smith, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education.

Introducing the report and theme, Mr. Burnett pointed out the link between early care and education.  The link, he said, was that both were basic human rights; both were factors in development; both furthered knowledge; and they were factors in reducing social inequality.  Early care and education laid the foundations for later learning and development.

He said the returns on investment, in both areas, were extremely high, but ironically, the poor and the disadvantaged were least likely to receive the benefits.  The solution was to move early childhood care and education higher up on national agendas and to address the factors that affected both the ability to learn and to stay in school, since the drop-out rate was very high globally.

“An open door that turns into a revolving door is just not good enough,” Mr. Smith agreed, emphasizing the fact that staying in school depended on other social factors, under the umbrella of “care”, including a sense of personal security, health and a good environment for learning and teaching.  That tied in with a report UNESCO had released a few months before, on the growing global gap between the number of children who needed good teaching and the number of trained teachers in the world.  In ten years, 18 million children would be in the formal educational sectors, and the need for teachers needed to be addressed now.

He said that while the price tag for providing basic education was rising annually, so was the cost of failing to provide children with a good foundation of early care and education.  Newspapers everywhere bore evidence of the effects.  The battle to provide that care needed to be focused on meeting developmental needs at all levels, on the ground, in the formal and non-formal educational sectors, for both children and their parents.  It also had to be pursued, at the level of creating consistent policy structures and approaches to policy that countries could use, as a basis for programmes, to continue developing their capacity inside each country, to set their own goals and pursue their own objectives, with the confidence that, as policies were implemented, better early care and education were being provided.

Elaborating on the costs of providing early care and education and on addressing the issues that would enable children to stay in school, Mr. Burnett said that assistance to education had doubled, between 2000 and 2004, but that was in part, because rates had declined significantly during the 1990s.  Assistance was expected to continue increasing, based on commitments made last year, including by Heads of State at last year’s United Nations Summit and the G-8, at Gleneagles.  However, the investment was still far below the annual $11 billion needed for education, at the very basic level, if the goals of education, for all, were to be reached by 2015.

In response to questions on the Education for All campaign, Mr. Smith said adult illiteracy was the worst indicator on global education, standing at one in five adults being illiterate.  There were, however, successes with education strategies in the Education for All Campaign, including with the Second Decade for Education in Africa.  In the Middle East, the campaign was now in the late assessment stage of looking at the status of educational components, such as the availability and qualifications of teachers and at the state of physical facilities for teaching.

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