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Quality education is key to reducing the numbers of children who cannot read and write and those out of school. It is also vital for every individual’s potential to become a global citizen. That’s according to UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova, who was speaking at a high-level discussion organised by UNESCO and the Permanent Mission of Denmark to the United Nations (UN).

The discussion, “Moving from access to learning in the post-2015 dialogue: Why indicators matter and how we can use them well”, was held in support of the UN Secretary-General’s Global Education First Initiative (GEFI).

“We need to widen our focus from access to access and learning, I mean learning broadly, not just basic skills, but the competences every individual needs to become a global citizen,” said Bokova.

“To build the future we want, we must give every woman and man skills to escape poverty and unemployment, and to live lives of their choosing. Education is vital also for social mobility in some countries, it is crucial for justice and equity across the world.

“This is why, less than a 1,000 days before 2015, the deadline for Education for All, we must put education at the top of the political agenda. This is about individual human rights, but it is also about fostering sustainability and, fundamentally, it is about the health of our societies, about stability and, in some cases, even about security.”

Despite progress made, no Education for All by 2015

Even if tremendous progress has been made since 2000 in strengthening education systems, she mentioned, UNESCO’s 2012 Global Monitoring Report on education shows that 250 million children of primary school age cannot read, write or count well, whether they have been to school or not, she said.

New data from UNESCO reveals that 57 million children were out of school in 2012; as many as one in four children who went to school will leave early before reaching the last grade of primary school.

“We are not on track to achieve universal primary education by 2015,” Bokova said. “At the same time, for the first time since 2002, we see a drop in aid to basic education by seven per cent between 2010 and 2011.

“Figures tell us education systems have been failing children for years in some parts of the world. Instead of empowering, poor quality education has often reproduced and exacerbated social inequalities, even reinforcing discrimination.”

For UNESCO, this is a crisis, Bokova said, a crisis that jeopardises social cohesion, economic development and political stability, a crisis that undermines the transformational power of education. This is why access and quality must move together.

“It means training more and better teachers, key actors for quality. It means sharpening curricula to promote basic skills along with skills for life,” she insisted.

Need for specific measurements

It means also monitoring progress in education quality, she noted. “We know indicators of quality and access can play a critical role in exposing weaknesses, in pointing to new directions for investment. Indicators can map trends and show policymakers how and where to proceed to monitor performance, to improve quality and to support teachers. This calls for sharp indicators, indicators that are holistic, that are tried and tested.”

This is the reason UNESCO has convened the learning metrics task force through the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the Brookings Institution, with whom it has embarked on an intensive global consultation.

This task force is exploring three questions:

• What learning is important globally?
• How should it be measured?
• How can measurement of learning improve education quality?

Bokova detailed areas to be measured throughout the school journey: literacy and communication, numeracy ad mathematics, but also other dimensions, such as social and emotional, culture and the arts, physical wellbeing, science and technology.

Need for teachers’ involvement

The President of the US National Education Association (NEA) and EI Vice-President, Dennis van Roekel, also highlighted the unions’ role in leading positive change towards quality education.

“One of the first things we know about system change is that if you want to change a system, you cannot do that without the involvement of the people in the system,” he said. “So as we work in our role as unions, we must also engage with people in all parts of that system if we are ever going to change and accomplish what we want for every single child in this world.”

On the role of the teachers, he noted that everyone seems to agree that once children are in the classroom, the influence of the teacher is huge.

Therefore it is important to look at the professionals, van Roekel stressed: who is recruited, how they are trained, and how they are brought into the profession so that they are ready to be there with students.

“We also believe that the union must play an absolutely incredible role in leading those changes,” said van Roekel. “It is not enough to point out things that are wrong or solutions you may not agree with or we believe do not work, we must also offer our own solutions about what we believe will change what is happening to kids.

“EI and its 400 member unions around the world are very much involved in support to the GEFI, because we realised that there is so much we must yet do for the 61 million primary school age children and the 71 million adolescents who are not in school, and the 775 million adults who remain illiterate, two-third of them being women.

“In 2011, EI at a World Congress adopted a resolution on building the future through quality education. We are now in the process of putting that into action all around the world; we are talking and working for the mobilisation for quality public education. We agree that, more than access, it is also about quality.”

Three international summits on the teaching profession have been held, said van Roekel, where education ministers and union leaders from the top performing countries according to the international assessment of PISA have met.

The aim of these events is to debate what can those involved in education do together to make a greater difference to students?

The involvement of teachers is an important issue for EI, van Roekel reiterated. “One of things about developing these indicators I want to make clear: teachers are not opposed to tests! We invented them! For 23 years, I never went a week without assessing whether my students were learning what I hoped they learned.”

Need for debating the purpose of indicators and align standards

But what is the purpose of those assessments or developing these indicators, van Roekel asked.

“In my classroom, when I gave a quiz over the first two or three sections in a chapter, I wanted to assess whether or not they understood the materials. If they didn’t, I had to find a new way of presenting them. So the involvement of teachers in the development of indicators is absolutely critical.”

It is important to align standards, and then develop an assessment tool actually measuring whether or not a student meets those standards.

The curriculum must be aligned, he said. “We have a situation where, in a high school in Seattle, Washington, the faculty said that they did not want to administer a test that was required by law. They said they did not want to administer that test because, number one, it was not aligned with the state’s standards and, number two, it was not aligned with the district-required curriculum. And their point was, we are in a professional dilemma: why would you ask me to take class time and administer tests to students - that makes no sense if it is not aligned with the standards or the curriculum.”

Van Roekel also called for a true partnership between teachers and education authorities to develop that alignment, and decide what to expect students to know and be able to do. “We must then develop an assessment tool and indicators that tell us whether or not a student has mastered that and, number three, we must develop curricula for educators in order to use to ensure that every student learns.

“The issue of equity is critical,” he acknowledged. “It is unfair to students when you hold them to different standards, some high, some low. Because if students held to very low standards believe they are ready for a career or college or a future, they are being cheated and lied to.”

Click here to watch the video of the event.