This comparative report reviews and analyses a range of selected educational issues in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)+6 countries, which include 10 ASEAN member countries plus Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, and the Republic of Korea. In particular, it highlights the key issues, challenges and opportunities for improving system performance and reducing educational disparities across ASEAN+6 countries. It thus provides useful inputs for informing policy options for education development in these and other countries. The issues reviewed are grouped into three policy areas: 1) sector policy and management frameworks, 2) secondary education, and 3) technical and vocational education and training (TVET), all of which are of critical importance in the context of formulating and operationalizing education reform agendas in these countries. The reports informs about legislative and policy frameworks. The report focuses on quality, teachers and financing.

In 2009, India enacted the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, which provides for free and compulsory education to all children aged 6 to 14. However, the evidence presented in this report indicates that despite the 3 year deadline to implement the key provisions of the Act, it has yet to be adequately implemented.

This lack of implementation, enforcement and monitoring particularly affects children from marginalised groups, such as children with disabilities, girls, and Da lits. Children from these groups are excluded and discriminated against, affecting access, participation, retention, achievement, and completion of elementary education.

This report examines the obstacles preventing certain children from attending school and the government’s failure to take the steps necessary to address the problem.

‘This study is about the impacts of strategic litigation on equal access to quality education in Brazil, India, and South Africa. It is intended to look beyond strategic litigation solely as a means to ensure equal access to education, and to examine the use and effectiveness of strategic litigation in advancing education quality once access is won. This study is the second in a series of four thematic studies undertaken by the Open Society Justice Initiative and independent experts in 2014-2016 to interrogate the impacts of strategic litigation as a catalyst for social change.’

Based upon Plan International's dataset of 1.4 million sponsored children, the report compares sponsored children with a disability to those without, from 30 countries worldwide. The report, produced in collaboration with London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, reveals that children with disabilities in developing countries are being held back from an education. The findings will help Plan International - and other researchers and organisations - to improve responses to the needs of children with disabilities, particularly their health and education.

The UNESCO Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP-UNESCO) has just published six case studies from Asia and the Pacific to inspire and inform open school data policies in and beyond the region, and to empower citizens to fight corruption in education.

The case studies look at a range of school report card initiatives (both government-led and citizen-led) to create a new evidence base for more informed policy-making on how to use school-related data to create a more transparent and accountable education system.

They look at who publishes school data, what type of data is published, and the level of accessibility and use by various stakeholders. Each case study also draws from a survey of some 250 school-level actors to understand how users of school data currently interact with various school report card initiatives. The case studies conclude with a number of recommendations for more effective school report card design and implementation.

 

Around the world, higher education communities are overwhelmed by frequent attacks on scholars, students, staff, and their institutions. State and non-state actors, including armed militant and extremist groups, police and military forces, government authorities, off-campus groups, and even members of higher education communities, among others, carry out these attacks, which often result in deaths, injuries, and deprivations of liberty. Beyond their harm to the individuals and institutions directly targeted, these attacks undermine entire higher education systems, by impairing the quality of teaching, research, and discourse on campus and constricting society’s space to think, question, and share ideas. Ultimately, they impact all of us, by damaging higher education’s unique capacity to drive the social, political, cultural, and economic development from which we all benefit.

Through its Academic Freedom Monitoring Project, Scholars at Risk (SAR) responds to these attacks by identifying and tracking key incidents, with the aim of protecting vulnerable individuals, raising awareness, encouraging accountability, and promoting dialogue and understanding that can help prevent future threats. Since 2015, SAR has been publishing Free to Think, a series of annual reports analyzing attacks on higher education communities around the world.

Free to Think 2021 documents 332 attacks on higher education communities in 65 countries and territories. This year was marked by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed more than five million lives. For higher education, the pandemic continued to disrupt academic activity, keeping many institutions in remote states of operation and suspending most academic travel. For scholars and students, the pandemic also continued to raise questions, concerns, and criticisms about state responses to public health crises, government accountability, and societal inequities. Scholars and students took on these issues in the classroom and more public venues, in-person and online, asserting their academic freedom and their rights to freedoms of expression and assembly. They also responded to acute and more long-standing political conflicts, from Myanmar’s coup to the steady erosion of human rights in Turkey, demanding civilian led government and the protection of fundamental freedoms. Frequently, however, individuals and groups opposed to their questions and ideas sought to silence them.

The aim of this document is to create a set of key building blocks for developing a model national regulatory framework for private schools, that can be adapted by states to their context. As such, the starting point is not a pre-determined framework, but a content analysis of provisions that exist in the laws of India’s states and union territories. At the same time, the principal suggestive frameworks for similar legislation made by principal stakeholders working on these issues from diverse ideological positions and entry points are also included. These include the FICCI Arise (from the perspective of the private schools themselves), the All India Parents’ Association (from the perspective of parents) and the NCPCR (from the perspective of children).