16th Commonwealth Conference of Education Ministers (16 CCEM) - Opening Ceremony

Date: 11 Dec 2006
Speaker: Secretary-General Don McKinnon
Location: Cape Town, South Africa

16CCEM - Opening Ceremony, speech by Don McKinnon

Listen: To listen to excerpts from Mr McKinnon's opening address click here.

Minister Pandor, Minister Manuel,

Ministers, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

– a very warm welcome to the 16^th Commonwealth Conference of Education Ministers!

I could thank our hosts; I could thank you all; I could talk about 16 CCEM. And of course I will …. But not yet.

First, let me briefly take you outside this conference hall, away from us in our suits and ties, beyond the huge screen behind me and even the TV screens around Africa and the world on which our meeting will be shown….

I’d like just to tell you about a little boy I met a year ago, in a village about an hour north of Freetown.

It was just after one of the mid-term Commonwealth education review meetings which came out of the last CCEM. I was invited to the opening ceremony of a rural school newly built to replace one destroyed in Sierra Leone’s civil war.

I remember a sea of smiling faces: pupils and parents. I remember a boy of about 7 standing proudly in his uniform. I can’t forget him: he had one leg; he was leaning on a rough crutch made from a tree. Now since the conflict had ended 5 years earlier, I worked out he must have been one of its youngest victims. On that day, he was just so very happy to be in school again. Glad to be alive; glad to be with his friends; glad to be looking ahead to all that life could offer him.

What’s more, the whole community was involved in the rebuilding of that school. It was a very poor place. What little money there was could just about cover the costs for the buildings, but not the costs of anything to go inside them. So the parents themselves had made rough desks and chairs for the classrooms.

It was an unforgettable day – and I share it with you now because these are the types of challenge – of real pupil, parent, and teacher – which we are dealing with at 16 CCEM.

How many times have I said that nothing – but nothing – is more important to our Commonwealth citizens and societies than education? Education is the key to everything. It’s the key to peace and democratic stability, the key to jobs and economic growth …. to good health … to respect and harmony between the sexes, and between different faiths, ethnic groups and communities. It is the key to literally billions of unique human beings fulfilling their unique potential. Many of you will know that yesterday was International Human Rights Day: my statement said that universal and equal access for boys and girls to primary education is not just a development goal – it’s a fundamental human right

All this, I think, we know….

… but what we’re still finding out – and what we’re here in Cape Town this week to discuss – is how we can make this the reality for all, not just for some.

So these Commonwealth education meetings are meeting the kinds of challenge faced by those good people in Sierra Leone.

They are about renewing commitments, sharing ideas, building coalitions. They are about agreed positions: the communiqués that we produce by Thursday will be read and acted upon around the world.

But above all they are about action: I want to see all Commonwealth ministers and officials going back home and putting what we discuss here into practice. The Commonwealth is on hand to help where it can – so are other donors, NGOs, businesses. But ultimately it’s for each country and its leadership to grasp that nettle and transform its own society.

Education, like democracy, is work-in-progress. Not one Commonwealth country can say it’s as good at educating its citizens as it wants to be – as it should be. Rich, poor and mid-income countries alike: all have very good reason to be here.

Let me remind you: in September 2000 at the UN’s Millennium Summit in New York, 191 nations of the world committed themselves to achieving universal primary education by 2015. And at the end of 2006, Commonwealth countries like Ghana, Pakistan, Nigeria, The Gambia, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and the Solomon Islands are missing that target, with between only 6 and 8 out of 10 of their children in primary school.

The clock is ticking: the small print of the 2nd Millennium Development Goal reads that all young children must complete a full cycle of primary schooling by 2015, and that means they must be in primary school by the end of 2007.

And few remember that we made another commitment in New York, to get equal numbers of boys as girls into primary and secondary education by the end of last year, 2005. The deadline came and went, and 94 countries missed it. Had that target been hit, another 14 million girls would be in school right now, with 6 million in India and Pakistan, and 4 million in Africa.

There are 115 million children worldwide who are not in primary and secondary school, and about 75 million of those are in the Commonwealth. And we estimate that over 30 million of those are the ones who never even make it to primary school.

These are the statistics that should keep us awake at night.

Let me give you just one more. It’s about teachers. It’s based on the simple fact that – if I said earlier that education is the key to everything – then now I say that teachers are the key to education. You can have a school without a building, without books and pens and desks and blackboards. But you can’t have a school without a teacher. It’s as simple as that.

And Africa alone reckons that it needs 5 million new teachers if it is to achieve universal primary education by 2015. The issue of teachers – above all in Africa and Asia – is never far from us.

These statistics and these challenges are the background to our 16 CCEM debates, under the theme of ‘Access to Quality Education: For the Good of All’. They are what lies behind the issues we will wrestle with …

… like how to train teachers of a sufficiently high quality

… like how to ensure similar quality in school curricula, particularly in a current global climate in which education - more than ever - needs to lead to the public good

… like how to support education that is provided by others than governments, such as private suppliers, charities or faiths

… like how to ensure that education is for all and not for some, and that it builds individuals and communities.

These are the mountains we have to climb….

And I am confident that we can do so.

This is the 16th CCEM. The first was in England in 1959 when, like today, Ministers were discussing the quantity and the quality of teachers who – back then – were tasked with grooming the young of newly independent, and expectant, nations.

At 15 CCEM in Scotland, we in the organisations of the Commonwealth were given 6 main ‘action areas’ to work on, plus some additional mandates. I am delighted to say that have taken substantial action on all of those, and indeed I recommend you the various documents you’ll see which summarise our activities.

In fact, a number of our works are coming to fruition in this very meeting: establishing a Commonwealth Teachers Forum; making the first Commonwealth Education Good Practice Awards; launching a new human rights curriculum for use in universities; and – watch this space for an announcement on Wednesday…. – developing a ground-breaking programme through the Commonwealth of Learning, which will strengthen distance learning in 24 of the lowest income ‘Small States’ of the Commonwealth – all with populations of less than one million.

So we can achieve mighty things in education, when we act as one Commonwealth. All of us, for instance, can take huge shared pride in the way that the Commonwealth Teacher Recruitment Protocol is now official ‘best practice’ in UNESCO and the ILO. As you may know, it gives guidelines on how to manage the migration of teachers from poorer to richer countries in a way that benefits both, while safeguarding the interests of the teachers themselves.

But all of us have countries to return to, and our success or failure will hang on individual countries’ responses to their individual challenges.

Here, I salute Commonwealth countries like Bangladesh, India, Tanzania and Uganda, whose primary school enrollment rates have gone up significantly.

And here – finally! and with huge gratitude and admiration …. – I salute and thank our hosts South Africa.

Thank you, Minister Trevor Manuel, for honouring us with your presence today. Thank you for South Africa as such a valued member of our Commonwealth. I wrote recently that South Africa suffered with 33 years outside the Commonwealth – but it is the Commonwealth as much as South Africa itself which has benefited enormously from your 12½ years of membership. A 53-nation family uniting rich and poor, and people of every colour and creed, was the natural home of the new Rainbow Nation in 1994. And South Africa – with two remarkable Presidents in Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki – has been at the forefront of our councils ever since.

Thank you also to Naledi Pandor, South African Minister of Education, for hosting 16 CCEM. The achievements in South African education in 13 years are nothing short of heroic. The first task you faced was putting together the 19 separate Departments of Education that existed under apartheid into just one Department, serving all children equally, regardless of their ethnicity or race. And now hear this: this year’s school leavers are the first to have spent their entire school careers in a free and democratic South Africa. From a system which excluded the vast majority of its learners, South Africa can now proudly say that 98% of its children aged 7-15 are in school, and that just over 70% of its young people aged 16-20 are engaged in some form of further education or training. We congratulate you on those extraordinary achievements, and we thank you for the extraordinary creativity and efficiency with which you have organised and are organising this huge event in the beautiful city of Cape Town. We know that you couldn’t have done any of this unless your heart was well and truly in it – in the cause of education and securing our children’s future.

And finally thank you to each and every one of you – some 1000 delegates in five parallel meetings: the Ministers’ meeting, the senior officials’ meeting, the stakeholders’ meeting, the first ever teachers’ meeting, and the youth meeting.

I end with the Youth Forum, and for very good reason. This Conference is not about people in their 60s like me. It is about our young Commonwealth. Of our nearly 2 billion people, a third are under 18, and a quarter under five.

Remember that haunting figure: over 30 million Commonwealth children out of primary school.

Remember that for those who are schooled, then the next set of challenges kicks in: those of making a living, and of taking an active part in a society that embraces them whatever their fortune, their colour or their creed.

Remember that smiling, one-legged boy – and all the potential bound up in his young life and in millions of others like it.

To South Africa, to 16 CCEM and to you all – I wish you every success.

Thank you.

ENDS

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