Reaching the Marginalized: UNESCO Education for All Report 2010

A decade has passed since world leaders adopted the Education For All goals. While progress has been made, millions of children are still missing out on their right to education. Reaching the Marginalized identifies some of the root causes of disadvantage, both within education and beyond, and provides examples of targeted policies that successfully combat exclusion. Set against the backdrop of the global economic crisis, the Report calls for renewed financing commitment by aid donors and recipient governments alike to meet the Education For All goals by 2015.

Three background papers written by the Young Lives team have contributed to the 2010 Global Monitoring Report.

In Peru, children from indigenous communities face a matrix of disadvantage: their families are likely to be poor, their parents less educated, and they are likely to live in rural areas in the highlands or Amazon region where they lack access to services such as water, sanitation and electricity. Although most of them are now enrolled in school, they attend schools in poorer areas with less infrastructure and bilingual education is available for less than half of them, so they have to learn Spanish very quickly when they start school or fail. Their school achievement is likely to be much worse than their Spanish-speaking peers and they are more likely to repeat a year or drop out. The paper concludes that bilingual education policies are necessary at the school level to provide more resources for the institution as a whole and to support individual students to help them catch up with their peers.

In Vietnam, our case study research with ethnic minority children highlights how children’s experiences in education mirror existing structural inequalities in society. This paper examines the mixed impact of education policies for ethnic minority children, focusing on the teaching and learning of minority languages, scholarships and other support. While access to school has increased, as well as availability of mother-tongue teaching and access to higher education, ethnic minority children are still likely to do less well at school. Inequalities exist between minority groups as well, due to uneven allocation of resources (for example between the highlands and lowlands). While schooling outcomes are heavily influenced by factors that may not relate directly to education policies, it is important to consider how the school system interacts with these external factors in shaping children’s experiences of education and their learning.

Further research looks at the relationship between malnutrition and educational disadvantage. The results are striking and show a strong association between height-for-age (or stunting, an indicator of long-term malnutrition) at age 6 to 18 months and the scores children achieved in tests at age 4 to 5. By age 7 to 8, the disadvantage this creates is likely to be equivalent to the loss of a full term of schooling. Given the high levels of stunting among the Young Lives children, the results underline the significant costs imposed by malnutrition on education.

Reaching the Marginalized: Education For All Global Monitoring Report 2010 – available at: http://www.unesco.org/en/efareport/reports/2010-marginalization/

Schooling as Lived and Told: Contrasting Impacts of Education Policies for Ethnic Minority Children in Vietnam seen from Young Lives Surveys, background paper prepared for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2010, by Troung Huyen Chi – available at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001866/186614e.pdf

Explaining and Overcoming Marginalization in Education: A Focus on Ethnic/Language Minorities in Peru background paper prepared for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2010, by Santiago Cueto et al. – available at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001865/186589e.pdf

Early Nutrition and Late Cognitive Achievement in Developing Countries, background paper prepared for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2010, by Alan Sanchez – available at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001866/186601e.pdf