Reaching and teaching the most marginalised

A seminar was organised to bring together professionals and practitioners within the United Kingdom to input into the 2010 Global Monitoring Report, which monitors progress towards the Education for All (EFA) goals.

The title of the report has still to be determined, but the report team informed the meeting that the central focus would be on ‘Reaching and teaching the most marginalised’. ‘Marginalisation’ in this context referred to chronic poverty, social exclusion, nomadic populations, and inequalities linked to gender, race and ethnicity, conflict, location, and disability.

The report would explore the factors that perpetuate marginalisation and look at best practices and failures in policy. The two core areas within that overarching theme were: Access to schooling and learning opportunities; and Teaching, learning processes and achievements.

The seminar, held on 5 November 2008, was jointly organised by the UK National Commission for UNESCO (UKNC) and the Commonwealth Secretariat.

Professor Seamus Hegarty, Chair of the EFA Working Group of the UKNC, welcomed participants and said that this was the third year that the UKNC had brought expertise within the UK to input into the report. He noted that the number of people who turned up was a reflection of the importance of the topic of the work each one was engaged in and their willing to share their experience and expertise.

“People here have worked in developing countries, worked with marginalised populations, and they have fed their perspectives in a very useful and constructive way,” said Professor Hegarty. “I think that their experience will improve the shape of the report when it is finalised.”

He was not convinced that a lack of resources was the problem in not being able to reach the marginalised because if there was a natural disaster, resources would be found. Professor Hegarty argued that the problem was a lack of good intelligence, inadequate understanding of the culture and of the way of life of the children and their communities, the rectification of which would help bring the marginalised into education and training.

“Marginalisation is an issue for education systems everywhere,” said Dr Pauline Rose from the EFA Global Monitoring Report Team. “There are groups of children and adults who are consistently left out of the education process. Unless we do something about it, EFA will certainly not be achieved by 2015.”

Dr Rose then gave a presentation on the proposed outline of the report. The first track would involve monitoring the progress of the EFA goals.

The second track will involve monitoring the extent of marginalisation between countries and to see to what extent this has to do with political, social or economic policies, and other reasons. The report would also look within countries and examine to what extent marginalisation was a regional issue or an issue related to areas of marginalised pockets - urban slums, areas of extreme poverty, ethnic or religious areas, rural and arid areas.

The challenges of getting this information should not be underestimated and the report team would be happy for participants to share: their experience in the field and the information they had collected; case studies that could inform the debate and inform policy; best practices on reaching and teaching the most marginalised; identification of data sets that were sufficiently disaggregated (any analysis that had been made at global and country level); and financing and aid-related issues with respect to reaching and teaching the marginalised.

“The focus of the day was marginalisation and participants came to understand that that concept was more challenging than had been thought,” said Professor Hegarty.

“There is a particular difficulty in producing a report, incorporating quantitative data on a group that, by definition, has never been counted before. The provision of robust data should enable people to critique, correct and develop the data. It is also an important starting point in taking hold of issues to do with people marginalised from mainstream systems.”

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