'Education First' must put the marginalised at the centre

Pauline Rose:

Goal-setting often leads to attention being paid to low-hanging fruit - those easiest to reach, making it possible to show progress most quickly. Unfortunately, in education, this approach has left 61 million children - many of them poor, girls and those living in remote rural locations - missing out on the push towards getting all children into school by 2015.

It is welcome that one of the three areas being addressed by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, in his new global initiative launched on September 26, 2012, "Education First" is putting every child into school.

To achieve this important intention, future goals and any discussions of a post-2015 agenda must include equity-based targets so that the marginalised benefit from progress. This is a remediable injustice and one which we must all work to resolve.

Ensuring progress in education reaches the marginalised has been a recurrent theme in our Education for All Global Monitoring Report, the next edition of which is due in just over two weeks.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 26, 2012 1:57 AM
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