Education strategy 2010
4.1 Increasing access, delivering equality
How can we increase access and deliver equality?
What we think is required is:
- A change of thinking: access is more important than enrolment
- Doing more in more difficult environments
- A continued focus on gender inequality
- Innovative strategies and partnerships to remove the obstacles to education
participation for excluded groups in societies
However, there are still further questions to answer. Please read and respond to these in the following sections.
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Our thanks for all the comments submitted. All of the ideas and suggestions put forward will feed into our new policy, helping to shape the direction of our work.
Once the final policy document is released you will be able to find it at www.dfid.gov.uk
The foci on gender equality, working in ‘difficult environments’ and removing obstacles for excluded groups are very welcome. However, the United Kingdom has both explicitly committed itself to implementing the recommendations of the Salamanca Statement, and recently ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, although with a reservation to Article 24. On these bases, a commitment to at least moving towards inclusive education for all, in terms of both access and quality, is the appropriate way to include girls and children in zones of conflict and other difficult environments, as well as other excluded groups, including but not limited to, children with disabilities.
It is good that Dfid is focusing on the education of children in conflict affected and fragile states. The focus on gender equality is also comendable. Why no focus on disability? When over one third of the 75 million primary aged children currently not in school are estimated to be disabled, why do you not have a priority for the getting disabled children into school? Surely this is an important ‘equality’ issue?
1. Reducing the cost of education can increase access to education.
2. The global climate change, globalisation, IT, poverty, war, race and religion conflict have become the attention by many. However the upbringing aspect of modern children and youth have been neglected. Divorce and family breakdown have become the world’s trend in many countries. Every human/society faces three basic stages of life-cycle – ie born, live and die. Each stages has its own ‘life management and its main objective is to produce a caring society’. To build the common future, the inner part of every young individual should carefully be developed. Through the school education systems, we can easily produce world young leaders among the youths, but they may not be ethically or socially educated. This is what is missing in most of the education systems in the world.
3. Gender inequality at home, at workplace and in education can be minimised if the role of man and women can be integrated and gender could be taught in school.
There should be more support for students with dyslexia and other learning disabilities with further opportunities to learn in different more practical ways than just pen and paper.