Professor Keith M Lewin will discuss the progress and identify the opportunities that will shape educational development through to 2030 under the new U.N. framework of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The World Conference on Education for All in 1990 hosted by UNICEF, UNESCO, UNDP and the World Bank promised universal access to basic education to accelerate development and deliver rights to education. After a decade of slow progress the World Education Forum met in Dakar, Senegal in 2000 and reaffirmed the commitment to education for all with a pledge that no country would fail to achieve universal access to education and learning goals for lack of resources. This was followed by overlapping commitments to educational development in the Millennium Development Goals. Research undertaken at Sussex helped shape all these events.
Fifteen years later many more children attend school. But in many low income countries one in four of the poorest children are likely to be out of school largely as a result of drop out before completion. Over a third of those in school are seriously ‘over-age’ and a long way behind in their learning achievement. Children from the poorest quintile of income have one fifth the chance of completing primary school than the richest. Less than half of all children enter and complete secondary school successfully.
In this lecture Keith Lewin will discuss education and development over the last two decades and identify opportunities to shape progress under the new U.N. framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. The challenges include reducing persistent inequalities in participation related to poverty and gender; improving quality compromised by ineffective pedagogy and poor school management; new exclusions created by the growth of fee paying low price private schools; growing gaps in cognitive achievement within and between countries; and needs for educational financing that can support universal rights to education from domestic resources. This process needs to build on the findings of recent research and support learning for development.
A New Book “Educational Access, Equity And Development: Planning To Make Rights Realities” published by the International Institute for Educational Planning, UNESCO, Paris will be launched at IDS after the lecture.
About the speakerProfessor Keith M Lewin is Emeritus Professor of International Development and Education at the University of Sussex. He directed the DFID Consortium for Research on Educational Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE) from 2005 and was Director of the Centre for International Education (1995-2011) and founded the International Masters programme in Education in 1979. He holds degrees in Physics, Science Policy, and Development from Manchester and Sussex Universities, is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Chartered Physicist and is an honorary Professor in Beijing and Zhejiang Universities. He was the first graduate scholarship holder of the Institute of Development Studies.
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