• Education:
• Education:
• Universal Primary Education

Universal Primary Education

We help to achieve completion of universal primary education

• Sharing best practices across the Commonwealth, e.g., double shift schooling system, community schools, learning in national languages to encourage access and ensure retention.

These also include:

• Addressing the impacts of HIV/AIDS on schools;
• Education of children in difficult circumstances;
• Citizenship education (tolerance of diversity, democratic values).

Achieving Universal Primary Education (UPE) is one of the key Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which still remains an over-arching concern for the Commonwealth. The MDGs call for ensuring that by 2015, children everywhere are able to complete a full course of primary schooling (Goal 2).

Considerations towards achieving UPE encompass to a certain extent all the other Action Areas, and are also relevant within the broader goals of Education for All.

Assessing the current progress, Commonwealth member countries exhibit varied levels of success towards the attainment of UPE. But despite recent promising reports of UPE gains in Commonwealth Caribbean and Pacific countries, a large proportion of countries that are currently off-track on achieving the UPE MDG are in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Highly populated Commonwealth members within those regions therefore make this MDG a large Commonwealth responsibility on a global level.

An estimated 30 million children are out of primary school in Commonwealth countries (2004), accounting for 35 per cent of the world’s total. Fifty seven per cent of these are girls.

Access to primary schooling remains the first obstacle to UPE, but further issues of inclusion and retention become key in the attempt to maintain children's participation within the education system.

Poverty and societal issues relating to gender, class and ethnicity all contribute to the current numbers out of school. Other factors, such as the migration of qualified teachers from developing countries to wealthier ones, and the impact of HIV AIDS on the education system, also play a major part by deepening the inability of those countries to provide quality primary education for their growing numbers of school children.

A major barrier to achieving UPE by 2015 in many Commonwealth countries is girls' lack of access to education. Cultural and socio-economic factors have been found to contribute to this disparity. In some countries where there is no free primary education, families will favour boys over girls for entrance into school. More generally, the broader obstacle of poverty and livelihood constraints continue to keep girls (and boys) in varied labour environments in order to help their families subsist. In other situations, the fear of girls being exposed to unacceptable peer practices in co-educational schools -- such as sexual orientation that could result in pregnancy, or violence and general harassment -- prevents parents from allowing their female children to access basic schooling.

For those Commonwealth countries that have made progress in eliminating gender disparity in favour of boys' access over girls and are near attainment of UPE as a result, a growing concern over boys' underachievement and in some cases increasing drop-outs - particularly in the crucial latter stages just prior to secondary transition, is casting a shadow over these gains.

Other major barriers to accessing quality UPE also need to be addressed. The unabated issues of poverty and child labour have already been mentioned. The dynamics of these will vary from country to country, from young boys in Southern Africa dropping out of school to go and work in the mines or to tend family cattle; to the reduced access for children from unemployed and disadvantaged families in Brunei Darussalam. Added to these constraints in the Commonwealth are other issues, such as providing quality education to nomadic children and reaching rural and geographically remote communities that have poor physical infrastructure and teaching resources.

The absence of early childhood interventions and acknowledging the place of first language/mother tongue within education is also a factor in the provision of quality education, such as the needs among the San children of Botswana. Providing basic education continuity for children in conflict/post conflict circumstances remains a major obstacle, as is the broader constraint within many Commonwealth countries of working with depleted teacher numbers as a result of migration and/or the impact of HIV AIDS.

The over-arching issue of sustaining UPE once 100 percent enrolment intake has been achieved is a longer-term concern, and one that will be ongoing within the Commonwealth well-past the 2015 UPE deadline, although consideration on how to achieve this is required as early as possible.

The researches clearly show that as one moves towards the last segment of the population to bring them under the fold of schooling, the constraints become complex and multi-layered, asking for specific interventions.

Maintaining adequate retention rates and Universal Primary Completion figures that will see children completing five/six years of primary schooling and make smooth transitions to secondary is the goal. Achieving UPE therefore, becomes a sector-wide endeavour that will also require long-term investment within all other educational sub-sectors. For example, adequate interventions at secondary and tertiary levels are also needed to ensure an ongoing supply of qualified teaching staff. Education systems within many Commonwealth developing countries need to build capacity with which to support accelerated rises in primary enrolment.

Lack of funding that will provide adequate infrastructure and qualified human resources present major challenges that need to be addressed in order to create sustainable educational environments between now and 2015.

These concerns present larger assumptions on national macro-economic issues and the work of the international donor community, placing the importance of education provision (and UPE in particular) within a far broader framework.

Documents

Achieving Universal Primary Education - Workshop Report