In an effort to mobilize its member organizations and the international community, EI has decided to focus its activities between now and World Teachers’ Day in October 2014, on highlighting the need to achieve the highest quality of education for all, which is attainable in each country. This mobilisation is intended to involve all EI member organisations throughout the world, and organizations with similar aims, together in a concerted effort to highlight the importance to the future of society of ensuring that everyone has access to such high quality education.
The pursuit of quality education for all is the key goal of Education International and its 400 member organizations.
What is a Quality Education?
Quality education enables people to develop all of their attributes and skills to achieve their potential as human beings and members of society. In the words of the Delors Commission “education is at the heart of both personal and community development; its mission is to enable each of us, without exception, to develop all our talents to the full and to realize our creative potential, including responsibility for our own lives and achievement of our personal aims.”
Quality education is a human right and a public good. Governments and other public authorities should ensure that a quality education service is available freely to all citizens from early childhood into adulthood. Quality education is one of the most basic public services. It not only enlightens but also empowers citizens and enables them to contribute to the maximum extent possible to the social and economic development of their communities.
Quality education is based on three pillars:
(i) quality teaching – ensured through the recruitment of high calibre candidates to teaching, the provision to them of high quality initial teacher education and the support throughout their career of continuous professional development. Teaching must provide an attractive career choice, and must remain sufficiently attractive, in terms of salaries and conditions of employment, to retain the best teachers in the service;
(ii) quality tools for teaching and learning – provided, in particular, through the application of information and communication technology, that is, by harnessing the enormous power of the internet and the capacity and accessibility of modern technology to assist and support teaching and learning;
(iii) quality environments for teaching and learning – supportive, comfortable, safe and secure, with the appropriate facilities to encourage student learning and to enable teachers to teach effectively. A quality environment also engages parents, students, teachers, school authorities and support staff in a community working together to achieve the goal of providing quality education for all of its students.
Why a global campaign? What is the impact of the Crisis on Education?
Education policies in many countries today are dictated by inter-governmental organisations. Global financial and development organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which provide the finance to maintain the viability of many economies, provide that finance with restrictions on the extent to which it may be used to support public education and, indeed, set conditions on the extent to which publicly funded education may be provided. In Europe the EMF and the European Union set budgetary parameters for countries which have resulted in austerity measures which have had a severe impact on education provision in many countries.
Education and economic policy development organisations, like the OECD, have a strong influence on the education policy initiatives which are taken in many developed countries. The OECD’s PISA reports on the performance of national education systems have become perceived as the benchmark for quality by many governments.
Since the adoption of the MDGs and the Dakar Education For All Goals, Education International has lobbied intensively amongst the international community for full implementation of those goals by 2015. While much progress has been made it is clear that Education For All will not be a reality for many young people by 2015.
In the discussions among international organizations on the post MDG objectives, education is not receiving the priority status it needs, and that its importance to personal development and to the development of productive citizens and just and fair democratic societies, warrants. In this context EI wishes to restate and renew its commitment to quality Education For All and to seek the support and collaboration of the global community in efforts to achieve that objective.
The quality of current education provision is under attack in many countries throughout the world. The effects of the economic crisis and of government policies determined by political ideologies, hostile to public provision of education, together with the increasing interest in, and pursuit of, the privatization of potentially profitable education services by free enterprise interests, have placed the public provision for education under threat and also resulted in cutbacks in state support for education services and in salaries and terms and conditions of employment for those working in the education sector. As a result the existing quality of education is now being undermined in many countries, where the actual public provision for education for all was at acceptable or at least sustainable levels.
Think Global, Act Local!
It is in this global context that the aggressive promotion of quality education, which meets EI standards and criteria, is essential. Many EI member organisations are already engaged in activities designed to promote and defend the quality of the education services in their countries. Whether it is in campaigns for better salaries and conditions for teachers, better pension arrangements, more planning time, improved teacher training, continuous professional development, better curricular support or better school environments and facilities, member organisations are campaigning for better quality education, because all of these elements contribute to better quality education.
The active support and participation of EI member organisations in the MQE initiative will enhance the impact and influence which EI advocacy has on the intergovernmental organisations which are dictating policies on education and on education expenditure to governments. Working in partnership with the many organisations of parents, students and others, which support better provision for quality education, we will succeed in putting quality education, publicly funded and accessible to all, at the top of both the national and international agendas.
EI will seek the support of kindred organizations representing students, parents and school authorities for this initiative. It will seek to form alliances with them with a view to obtaining their support for demonstrations and rallies and other activities in favour of the MQE objectives. The purpose of such rallies and demonstrations is to bring home the message to decision makers at Government and intergovernmental level that communities across the globe who are concerned about the development and welfare of young people are convinced that QE is vital to their future.
The strategy will highlight successful educational practices and activities and seek support for making them available to all. It will emphasize the role of the qualified professional teacher and the need to support such teachers with decent terms and conditions of employment and with modern teaching and learning tools and high quality learning environments. It will emphasize the factors recognized as contributing to the success of education in some countries and the need to promote a culture of valuing education and respecting and valuing the contribution of professional educators.
EI will seek to build new alliances with organizations with an interest in pursuing the same objective and seek the support of partners with the resources and capacity to support the development of places of learning with quality teaching and learning tools and quality learning environments. It will also seek to enter into partnerships with appropriate commercial and other organizations that are prepared to contribute resources to achieve the MQE objectives.
The overall aims of this initiative are
(i) to create awareness among governments, inter-governmental agencies and society generally that quality public education provision for all is one of the fundamental pillars of a just and equitable society,
(ii) that undermining public education provision is detrimental to the interests of society, and
(iii) that, since the MDG and Dakar EFA goals will not be achieved to a satisfactory extent by 2015, it is essential to ensure that the quality EFA Goal is a central part of any global post-2015 Development Strategy, with EI, and professional educators generally, at the forefront of those leading the implementation of the strategy.
The key objectives of the initiative are:
· To promote the message that the provision of high quality education for all is recognised as fundamental to the development of humanity and of just and fair democratic societies;
· To support those who oppose cutbacks in public education provision;
· to ensure that education is one of the central planks of post-2015 Development Strategy;
· to ensure that EI, as the international representative of professional educators, has a leading role in the development of the post-2015 Development Strategy;
· to mobilise EI member organisations and their own individual members to participate in the activities which are organised as part of the initiative;
· to mobilise the staffing and other resources of EI itself to contribute effectively to the implementation of the initiative;
· to build alliances with kindred organisations which are committed to the quality education for all;
· to develop partnerships with commercial and other organisations which have the capacity and financial resources to make a substantial contribution to the achievement of quality EFA.
Learning-the Treasure Within, the Delors Report, UNESCO, 1996 (http://www.unesco.org/delors/utopia.htm), states the principal aim of education as:-
“education is at the heart of both personal and community development; its mission is to enable each of us, without exception, to develop all our talents to the full and to realize our creative potential, including responsibility for our own lives and achievement of our personal aims.”
A UNICEF Paper states that Quality Education includes:
This definition allows for an understanding of quality education as a complex system embedded in a political, cultural and economic context.
EI and the Open Society Foundation have established jointly: “Ten Principles for a Post-2015 Education and Development Framework”. Focused on rights, access and equity, the 10 principles continue to define access as the provision of quality education from qualified teachers who have the resources to provide students with “a broad approach to learning.” According to the framework, “Teachers are the most important educational resource for students and a critical determinant of educational quality, yet their contribution is not always fully appreciated. Teachers are routinely blamed for deficiencies in the education system and teacher training is sometimes dismissed as unproductive and expensive, resulting in the hiring of untrained and often barely educated teachers. This must stop if we are to turn education around. Teachers must be treated as respected professionals and given the training and support they need…”