Education is the cornerstone for building a more peaceful, prosperous, equitable and sustainable world. Children who are in school enjoy better health, job prospects, higher earnings as adults, and are less vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
Yet globally 250 million children are out of school and the world requires 44 million additional teachers to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) of universal access to quality education by 2030.
On International Day of Education, the National Education Unions calls on the UK Government to take the following action to address the key barriers to children globally accessing quality education:
- Expand the right to free education
Support a new Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child to extend the right to free education to pre-primary and secondary education. - Protect and prioritise ODA to education
Commit to progressively increase education’s share of the aid budget to at least 15%, and support reforms that enable countries to increase domestic resources for education. - Tackle the global teacher shortage
Develop a new FCDO global teacher strategy; and prioritise teachers in emergency contexts and reform of the international finance architecture to address the most persistent drivers of the global teacher shortage.
Background
In the face of a worsening global education crisis, the UK Government has dramatically cut aid spending on education, allocating just 3.5% of its bilateral aid to education in 2023. This is far below the international benchmark for countries to allocate at least 15% of Official Development Assistance to education and puts the UK 25th against other OECD Development Assistance Committee donor countries in the proportion of ODA it spends on education.The world has also witnessed how sudden disruptions can deny millions of children the opportunity to learn.
Sudan’s war has created the largest education crisis in the world, with 17 million children currently lacking access to formal education.
In Gaza, schooling has entirely stopped for 625,000 children for over 15 months, and the Education Cluster estimates that 95% of schools have been partially or completely destroyed. Nearly 88% of school buildings (496 out of 564) now require significant reconstruction to be functional again.
In Ukraine, over 3,800 education institutions have been damaged or destroyed since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. In the face of ongoing bombings and blackouts Ukrainian children have now spent almost three years learning underground in bomb shelters and online.
In 2025, negotiations will also begin to expand the right to free education beyond that currently guaranteed by international law to include a right to free pre-primary and secondary education. More than 50 states - including fellow G7 nations France, Germany and Italy - have already pledged their support for a new Optional Protocol (OP4) to the Convention on the Rights to Children which would guarantee all children an explicit right to at least one year of free pre-primary education and free secondary education.