Efforts to secure inclusive and equitable education for all have prompted calls for greater engagement by the private sector, asserting that businesses and foundations can play significant roles as partners in achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4).
In recent years, given shortfalls in public financing and the need for urgent responses, private actors have increasingly become involved in various aspects of educational programming for education in emergencies (EiE). The arrangement, however, can produce tensions between private engagement and humanitarian response in education, which needs to be addressed and in turn requires extra coordination, advocacy and attention. This brief explores some of these tensions and makes recommendations to support the prioritization of safe, equitable, and quality public education for all children and young people affected by crises.
INEE supports every young person’s right to education and recognizes the State as the primary duty-bearer of schooling, in alignment with international declarations, frameworks, and legal instruments that assert and protect the right to education
The efficient design and delivery of early childhood policies and services are critical to ensuring long-term learning opportunities and improved learning, behaviour, employment, and health outcomes amongst individuals. Research in neuroscience, developmental psychology and cognitive science has revealed that quality early childhood education, supportive communities and a positive family environment serve as important building blocks to promote healthy development amongst infants and toddlers.
The World Health Organization identified the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, and by February 2021, two-thirds of LMICs were reported to have reduced their public education budgets (Education Finance Watch Report, 2021). Although many challenges to achieving full access to quality early childhood services existed before the pandemic, this finding dramatically reveals how the pandemic threatens to erode hard won gains already achieved for children and families, and could continue to have exceedingly negative impacts on child development, early learning, family well-being and all types of early childhood services.
The Global Partnership Strategy (GPS) for Early Childhood was created to counter this negative trend in education and to overcome the reduction and closure of services for health, nutrition, sanitation, and child protection in all world regions. Well designed and implemented policies and services for Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) and Early Childhood Development (ECD) enable all countries to protect and guarantee child rights, achieve high rates of return on their investments in child and family development and widen avenues for transforming societies and lives.
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.
Quality education is fundamental to sustainable development. Education is the one of the most powerful tools by which people can lift themselves out of poverty and fully participate in their communities. SDG 4 sets specific targets to address the challenges of achieving quality education universally, and provides a comprehensive framework to reaching inclusive and equitable quality education for all. Beyond enrolment rates, SDG 4 puts a welcomed emphasis on quality education and learning outcomes. This Guide takes a deep dive into how the law can play a large role in achieving SDG 4.
Changes in the media market after the end of the cold war, the development of new technologies and the hindering consequences of multiple economic crises have strengthened collaboration between journalists, photographers, videographers, and NGOs. Media reporting on conflict zones can play an enhanced role in helping civil society organisations (CSOs) to document attacks on education and CSO knowledge and connections could help journalists uncover important stories from the front lines.
This brief encourages a systematic collaboration focused on collecting and sharing data that may help advance the right to education in emergency situations. It is part of a Right to Education Initiative (RTE) series of briefs designed to help civil society organisations monitor and advocate for the right to education, such as the guide on Monitoring Education Under Attack from a Human Rights Perspective.
Definitions
Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE): The International Standard Classification of Education 2011 (ISCED) classifies early childhood education (ECE) as a school-based or otherwise institutionalised care and learning for a group of young children. It can be centre-based, community-based, or home-based. ECE is often referred to in different terms across the world. These include early childhood care and development (ECCD), early childhood care and education, early childhood development (ECD), early childhood education (ECE), early childhood education, care, and development (ECECD), and early childhood education and development (ECED). ISCED further classifies ECCE into two subcategories by age group:
Early childhood educational development (Child Care) for children ages 0-2 years. It is a child care unit that includes creches and child care services in an organised setup.
Pre-primary education: Pre-primary education or preschool is defined as the initial stage of organised instruction, designed primarily to introduce young children aged between three years to the age of compulsory education (usually between four-six) to a school-type environment, that is, to provide a bridge between home and formal schooling.
Therefore for the purpose of this survey,
Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) refers to all programmes for children between ages zero to the start of primary education. This includes both early childhood educational development (ECED) and pre-primary education.
Early Childhood Educational development (ECED) mainly refers to child care services meant for children between the ages of zero to 2 (or) 3
Pre-primary education refers to children who are in pre-school between the ages of 3 to the start of primary education.
Education provider: An organization that provides education, either as a main or ancillary objective. This can be a public educational institution, as well as a private enterprise, non-governmental organization, or non-educational public body.
Formal education is education that is institutionalised, intentional, and planned through public organizations and recognised private bodies, and – in their totality – constitute the formal education system of a country. Formal education programmes are thus recognised as such by the relevant national education or equivalent authorities, e.g., any other institution in cooperation with the national or sub-national education authorities.
Private institutions refer to educational institutions that are not operated by a public authority but controlled and managed, whether for profit or not, by a private body, such as a non-governmental organisation, religious body, special interest group, foundation, or business enterprise
This brief will primarily be used by Just Fair and other NGOs across the UK to inform their approach to the seventh periodic review of the UK by the CESCR. The first part analyses the concerns repeatedly raised in the UK’s six Concluding Observations from 1980 to 2016 on its implementation of ICESCR’s substantive rights. Secondly, based on a systematic keyword search of three different databases – Ebsco Discovery, UK Westlaw and International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) – potentially relevant concerns since 2016 are identified and analysed for each of the substantive rights with a view to the UK’s seventh periodic review. In each of these sections, particular attention is given to funding, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and nondiscrimination, when relevant.
This document lists the international and regional instruments that refer to the right to higher education.