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Education
Investment in strong, trained leaders will give every child everywhere a chance at lifelong learning opportunities. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
NAIROBI, Oct 31 2024 (IPS) – Global education is facing a critical moment amid severe setbacks. Millions of children are out of school, learning levels are falling, and millions are leaving school without the skills they need. New out-of-school figures reveal that global progress in reducing the number of out-of-school children has been just 1 percent since 2015, leaving 251 million behind.
Although an additional 110 million children are enrolled in school, there has been just a 1 percent rate of improvement in out-of-school rates. If the same rate of progress had been maintained from 2010-2015 to today, there would be 27 million more children in school. These findings are contained in a new UNESCO GEM report released today, October 31, 2024.
Titled Lead for Learning, the report explores the key role of leadership in driving educational change while also highlighting progress toward SDG4. While numbers of youth completing secondary school have improved by 40 million since 2015, 650 million still leave school without a secondary school certificate.
Manos Antoninis, Director of the GEM Report, told IPS that the key to changing the trajectory of education is leadership.
“Instructional leadership is crucial for addressing the education crisis, especially in Africa, where barely one in five achieves minimum proficiency in reading. Good school leaders not only inspire change but are vital to improving student outcomes. However, many lack the necessary training and resources to make a meaningful impact. We must empower our education leaders to navigate these complexities and create an environment where every child can thrive in their education,” Antoninis told IPS.
The report finds that leadership accounts for up to 27 percent of the variance in student outcomes and that under two-thirds of countries have competitive recruitment for school principals. Gaps in management and diversity also persist. Overall, barely half of principal training programs focus on key leadership dimensions.
Half of principals in high income countries have no preparation training before taking post. While autonomy positively correlates with better student outcomes, currently, “37 percent of principals have control over school content, and 28 percent have input on teacher salaries. Almost 40 percent of all countries do not recognize higher education institutions’ autonomy by law.”
Principals in low- and middle-income countries spend 68 percent of their time on administrative tasks and one-third of public-school principals in the richest countries report lacking sufficient time to focus on teaching and learning. In all, 29 percent of countries base teacher hiring and firing decisions on political views, adding to instability in education systems.
Without investment in strong, trained leaders to reverse this trend, the global community risks deepening inequality and losing another generation. Yet, according to the report, “funding in many low-income countries (LICs) and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) remains low. In 2022, LICs and LMICs, on average, spent just USD55 and USD309 per child annually, respectively—far below what is needed to ensure quality education and address the learning crisis.”
Furthermore, “for every USD 100 spent per child in high-income countries, less than USD 1 reaches children in low-income countries, further exacerbating inequalities. Low-income countries face overwhelming debt pressures, with six out of ten nations at risk of debt distress. In Africa, countries spent almost as much on debt servicing in 2022 as they did on education.”
Of the 251 million children and youth out of school worldwide, 71 million are not in primary school, 57 million in lower secondary, and 120 million in upper secondary education. Of these, 122 million are girls and 129 million are boys, with the starkest inequalities evident in poorer countries. While only 3 percent of children in wealthier countries are out of school, that figure jumps to 33 percent in the poorest nations.
According to the report, “since 2015, net enrollment in early educational development programs—under the age of three—has increased by over 10 percentage points in sub-Saharan Africa and that net enrollment rate in preprimary has stayed at 19 percent since 2015. Over half of all children out of school globally are in Sub-Saharan Africa. The out-of-school rate in sub-Saharan Africa has fallen from 22 to 19 percent in primary, rose from 32 to 33 percent in lower secondary and dropped slightly from 47 to 46 percent in upper secondary.”
However, “the share of sub-Saharan Africa in the global out-of-school children population has increased, from 32 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in 2023, and even faster in the global out-of-school adolescent population in this period, from 25 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in 2023. Notably, the population of out-of-school children in sub-Saharan Africa has not changed since 2000, while the population of out-of-school adolescents and youth in the region did not change between 2000 and 2015 but increased by 26 percent from 2015 to 2023.”
The percentage of children proficient at reading at the end of primary fell from 31 percent to 30 percent and in mathematics from 12 percent to 11 percent in Africa. The Assessment for Minimum Proficiency Level (AMPL) is a new source of evidence on learning in Africa and was administered in English and French at the end of primary education in six African countries, including Burundi, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Senegal and Zambia. Each country sampled between 220 and 300 schools.
Selected results from six of the countries that administered the AMPL at the end of primary education in 2021 and 2023 show that only about one in ten students reached the minimum proficiency level in reading, except in Kenya, where one in four students did. In contrast, apart from in Côte d’Ivoire, a larger proportion of students achieved the minimum proficiency level in mathematics: 16 percent in Zambia, 20 percent in Lesotho, 24 percent in Burkina Faso, 34 percent in Senegal and 37 percent in Kenya.
Notable progress has been made in access to basic drinking water in sub-Saharan Africa—from 44 percent in 2016 to 53 percent in 2022 in primary schools and from 54 percent in 2015 to 63 percent in 2023 in upper secondary schools. Meanwhile, spending on education stayed roughly the same across the region—from 3.6 to 3.7 percent as a percentage of GDP and from 16 to 15 percent as a percentage of total government spending.
In all, the 2024/5 Gem Report calls for decisive leadership to improve education globally. It shows that school leaders in particular are important for improving learning outcomes at the school level and should be invested in. And reveals that school leadership styles in Africa differ from elsewhere.
A review of six studies in Africa suggested that there were few expectations on school principals to be instructional leaders. But in high-income, mainly anglophone countries, the rise of standardized testing and accountability mechanisms has placed high expectations on principals to be responsible for student achievement.
African countries are in tandem strengthening their selection systems for principals to have the strongest people leading schools, but challenges remain. For instance, since 2008, Rwanda has prioritized the merit-based selection of school principals. Kenya’s Teachers Service Commission has developed career progression guidelines for teachers and a policy of merit-based selection for school principals that prioritizes qualifications, experience and training.
IPS UN Bureau Report
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