Ei-iE

With only 12 months left to accomplish the Millennium Development Goals, set in 2000, the New Year comes with a wide range of challenges and opportunities for global education.

As many students and teachers return to school after the holiday break, 2015 brings a clean slate to launch from. Although last year saw many positives, including the award of the Nobel peace prize to education advocates Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi, as well as the general success of Education International(EI)’s campaign ‘Unite for Quality Education’, we are all aware of the struggles we faced, from the kidnapping of 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria to the disappearing of 43 student teachers in Iguala, Mexico.

With each year comes new resolutions, and with this in mind Education International is preparing for a year full of key events, issues to resolve, and goals to be achieved – here are some of them:

• The World Education Forum of UNESCO and UNICEF will take place in Korea in May. A quarter of a century after the signature of the Declaration on Education for All, 58 million children are still out of school. This forum is set to address the challenges that the world has to tackle in order to reach the education levels as defined by the United Nations. You can make your contribution by signing the Up4School petition to help see that every child finds their place in the classroom.

• The annual International Labour Conference takes place this June in Geneva, Switzerland. Education International attends this conference yearly and actively supports its members who present their cases to the General Assembly. This is EI’s work for human and trade union rights at its highest level.

• Education International prepares to hold its Seventh World Congress in Ottawa, Canada, during the last week of July. More than 1500 delegates from EI’s 401 affiliates in 171 countries and participants from all over the world are expected to attend the biggest forum on education in the world to define EI’s strategy for the coming four years.

• September is lining up to be the most important month of the year with the General Assembly of the United Nations on the Post-2015 development goals unravelling in New York, USA. The teaching community has had its eyes fixed on this date for a long time, and EI’s Unite for Quality Education Campaign is part of a global movement to have education included as a standalone goal in the new global development agenda. Until the votes are tallied, EI’s work to push education to the forefront of global will not stop.