Background paper for discussion at the 12th Session of the CEART (Paris, 20–24 April 2015). The increasing importance of early childhood development (ECD) and its ongoing evolution make even more essential the improvement in the one factor that most determines the quality of ECD services: their teachers, facilitators, caregivers, and other personnel who plan, manage and staff these services. Increasing their professionalism and status and making their working conditions more ‘decent’ therefore is an essential element of any comprehensive ECD policy and programme.
This document is the executive summary of the study on the right to education and care in early childhood: perspectives from Latin America and the Caribbean. The study focused on the analysis of national legislations and public policies in force (particularly general education laws) in 10 countries of the region (Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Colombia) and shares understandings of existing early childhood education policies and legislation, as well as financing and justiciability processes, identifying progress and also challenges involved in the realisation of the human right to education of young children. At the same time, it seeks to understand how the principles and purpose of education enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its associated General Comments, appear in those education public policies and legislations.
UNICEF’s first global report on pre-primary education presents a comprehensive analysis of the status of early childhood education worldwide. It also outlines a set of practical recommendations for governments and partners to make quality pre-primary education universal and routine. Noting that at least 175 million children – 50 per cent of the world’s pre-primary-age population – are not enrolled in pre-primary programmes, the report urges governments to commit at least 10 per cent of their national education budgets to scale them up. Such funding should be invested in pre-primary teachers, quality standards and equitable expansion, the report states.
This book is part of UNESCO’s Education on the Move series created to provide policy-makers, educators and other stakeholders with state-of- the-art analyses of topical issues. The book is divided into three main chapters each including vigorous research papers that critically analyse ECCE-related themes. The first part discusses ‘understanding ECCE as a right and development imperative’. The second part provides an overview of ‘meeting the challenges of inequality in and through ECCE; and the third part is dedicated to a scrutiny of ‘ensuring quality ECCE through contextually relevant provisions. Repositioning ECCE in the post-2015 agenda, Investing against evidence: the global state of early childhood care and education, is therefore a must-read offering a useful, multi-disciplinary, liable account of ECCE for all education stakeholders.
The report addresses issues and challenges to the right to education in the digital age, with a focus on higher education. It considers how the norms and principles that underlie the right to education should be upheld while embracing digital technologies. The report concludes with recommendations for ensuring that the use of digital technology in education is in keeping with State obligations on the right to education.
This study examines the relationship between institutional autonomy and the security of higher education institutions from violent and coercive attacks. The paper includes a review of the limited literature available, as well as a series of examples illustrating different forms of attacks. These include arrests related to classroom content in Zimbabwe, sectarian divisions in Iraq, impunity for murders of academics in Pakistan, and physical intimidation on campuses in Tunisia. The study suggests that institutional autonomy plays a direct and indirect protective function. It directly helps protect systems of higher education from government interference, making it more difficult for states to act as perpetrators. It also indirectly helps preserve higher education against actual and perceived politicization and ideological manipulation, which in turn might help insulate it from attacks by nonstate parties. The study suggests a framework for examining questions of autonomy and security which in turn suggests a need to develop strategies aimed at increasing autonomy and security simultaneously. This necessarily requires approaches aimed at encouraging states to fulfill their obligations not to engage in or to be complicit in attacks (negative obligations) and obligations to protect higher education from attack and to deter future attacks by holding perpetrators accountable (positive obligations). The study concludes with brief recommendations on how different stakeholders might work to encourage greater understanding and implementation of these obligations, including further research, expert roundtables and information-sharing, development of guidelines and related advocacy campaigns.
This paper aims to contribute to the discussions regarding the impacts privatisation process brings to the accomplishment of the right to education, taking the Brazilian reality as a reference.
The paper draws up a brief characterisation of the education provision in Brazil, in order to define the situation of educational services and the presence of private sector in the coverage of basic (early years, elementary and secondary education) and higher education schools. Next, it points out the main areas of privatisation of education in Brazil. At the end, it lists, from the analysis of the national context and researches conducted on this topic, the main tension points between the increasing privatisation process and the enjoyment of the human right to education, with reference to the contents of this right in the terms it was established in the General Comment 13.