Education: Measuring for Success in Today’s World

It’s been said that learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21^st century. Sound a little exhausting? The fact is that there are fewer and fewer jobs being created that rely on rote tasks and memorization. There are more and more jobs that require creativity, teamwork, problem solving, and ongoing learning. Indeed, it’s fair to say that the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. Children need to start acquiring these skills and attitudes early on, which is why education systems around the world are increasingly focused on reforms that involve setting and measuring new goals for learning that will better ensure their graduates’ success in today’s world.
Experience reveals three key lessons to keep in mind for those wishing to pursue these kinds of reforms:



 
Lesson 1: Benchmark learning globally

In a global economy, the primary benchmark for success is no longer improvement by national standards, but the best-performing education systems internationally. (Having said that, it’s also important for countries to set and measure learning goals that reflect their own national priorities and values.) This usually means participating in one of the many international assessment programs that test the math, science, problem solving or other competencies of students at the same grade or age level in different education systems around the world. Countries – particularly developing and emerging economies – may feel at a disadvantage in this global benchmarking, but should keep in mind that steady improvement over time is the important thing. Korea, which has shown remarkable progress in its education performance on the global stage over the past decade or so (with its economy as the beneficiary), is a good example of this.

Lesson 2: Believe that all children can learn

You must commit to the belief that all children can achieve. No longer can there be a ‘fast’ track for some students and a ‘not so fast’ track for others that leads to dead-end opportunities. One of the secrets behind the highest-performing education systems (think Finland, Singapore, and Japan) is a belief that every child can learn and succeed no matter where they are from or where they go to school. Measuring for success in today’s world means measuring for everyone’s success.

Lesson 3: Spend wisely to make a difference in learning

More money makes a difference up to a point. After that, what matters for learning is the quality of the spending choices. When it comes to measuring key learning goals for today’s world, one of the best investments is to build capacity in the classroom. This includes developing and retaining high-quality teachers who are able to engage in the kinds of instructional and assessment practices that support student learning in areas that are harder to measure on traditional tests, such as creativity and team work. These so-called non-cognitive or 21^st century skills are vital to success in today’s workplace.

Next week, Russia will host a high-level global conference on the theme of “Measuring for Success” in St. Petersburg. The conference will explore a variety of student learning goals – for further study, work, and life – and the key role that measurement and assessment play in monitoring and achieving them. The conference is the result of a five-year partnership between Russia and the World Bank to support the improvement of learning outcomes at the global and country level. Countries such as Armenia, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Vietnam will share their successes and challenges ahead. These countries are proof that education systems that take learning and measurement of learning seriously are creating a foundation that will better ensure success for all their children in today’s world.

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Education for All by Worldbank

 
Education for All (EFA) is an international initiative first launched in 1990 to bring the benefits of education to “every citizen in every society.” To realize this aim, a broad coalition of national governments, civil society groups, and development agencies such as UNESCO and the World Bank Group committed to achieving six specific education goals:

1. Expand and improve comprehensive early childhood care and education, especially for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children.
2. Ensure that by 2015 all children, particularly girls, those in difficult circumstances, and those belonging to ethnic minorities, have access to and complete, free, and compulsory primary education of good quality.
3. Ensure that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life-skills programs.
4. Achieve a 50% improvement in adult literacy by 2015, especially for women, and equitable access to basic and continuing education for all adults.
5. Eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005, and achieve gender equality in education by 2015, with a focus on ensuring girls' full and equal access to and achievement in basic education of good quality.
6. Improve all aspects of the quality of education and ensure the excellence of all so that recognized and measurable learning outcomes are achieved by all, especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills.

In 2000, 189 countries and their partners adopted the two EFA goals that align with Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 2 and 3, which refer to universal primary education and gender parity. The World Bank recognizes that achieving these goals requires supporting the full EFA commitment.
Why is EFA important?
Although there has been steady progress towards achieving many EFA goals, many challenges remain:

• Today, an estimated 250 million children around the world are unable to read and write, even after spending three or more years in school.
• In 2012, 58 million children were out of school; half of these children lived in conflict-affected countries.
• In sub-Saharan Africa, girls accounted for 56% of out-of-school children in 2012.
• In 2011, only 60% of countries had achieved gender parity in enrollment at the primary level and 38% at the secondary level.
• In around one-third of countries, fewer than 75% of primary school teachers are trained according to national standards.
• In 2011, around half of young children had access to pre-primary education, and in sub-Saharan Africa the share was only 18%.

Achieving the Education for All goals is critical for attaining all eight MDGs—in part due to the direct impact of education on child and reproductive health, as well as the fact that EFA has created a body of experience in multi-partner collaboration toward the 2015 targets. Simultaneously, achieving the other MDGs, such as improved health, access to clean drinking water, decreased poverty, and environmental sustainability, are critical to achieving the education MDGs.
What is the World Bank doing to achieve EFA?
The Bank supports EFA through multidimensional efforts to:

• Improve educational quality and learning outcomes
• Improve primary school access and equity
• Improve the dropout and retention rates of girls, as well as their learning outcomes
• Promote early childhood development

Protect EFA prospects in fragile statesThe Bank helps countries achieve their education goals through finance and knowledge services in the forms of analytic work, policy advice, and technical assistance.

Policy work is a key component of the Bank’s work to realize EFA. The Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Education Results Initiative (SABER), for example, collects and analyzes policy data on education systems around the world, using evidence-based frameworks to highlight policies and institutions that matter most to promote learning for all children.
The World Bank Group also supports the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), as a Board Member, host of the GPE Secretariat, trustee and supervising entity for the vast majority of GPE grants.
Finally, the World Bank also supports EFA efforts through analytic work and sharing of global knowledge and good practice. The Bank’s analytic work has, for example, helped establish benchmarks for quality, efficiency, and resource mobilization in the education sector.
Last Updated: Aug 04, 2014

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Where Health and Education Meet, Children Win

Every mom wants a healthy baby. And in the early days of a child’s life, parents and doctors understandably focus on how the baby’s physical development—is she gaining weight? Is he developing reflexes? Are they hitting all of the milestones of a healthy and thriving child?

But along with careful screenings for physical development, there is an excellent opportunity to tap into those same resources and networks to promote early cognitive, socio-emotional, and language development. This helps children everywhere have a strong start in life, ensuring that they are able to learn as they grow and fulfill their potential throughout childhood.
Save the Children works with partners around the world to integrate early childhood development interventions into programs in innovative ways—figuring out what works in local contexts and building an evidence base with governments to effectively support children and parents in the early years.

In El Salvador, for example, we worked jointly with the Ministry of Health and National Academy of Pediatricians to design a screening tool to measure development in children under five. This empowers doctors and health workers to screen for development alongside health check-ups. Now when parents take their children to “healthy child control’’ checkups, children receive a comprehensive developmental evaluation so that the medical staff can identify risks early and advise on age-appropriate activities. By encouraging parents to exclusively breastfeed for the first six months or mimic the babbling sounds that their two to four-month old baby makes, these health experts are putting parents and young children on the path to success.

Medical staff in communities throughout El Salvador have been trained on this screening tool, and among 100 health centers evaluated, Save the Children found that not only are medical staff using the screening tool, but 95% are using it properly. The program has been brought to schools nationwide, and the Ministry of Health expects to reach hundreds of thousands of children, from birth to age five, in the early years of implementation.

Non-state actors like Save the Children can work with governments to find innovative approaches that meet the specific needs of the local population, and government commitment can turn this approach into scalable, sustainable change for children. This type of partnership is a win-win: When all parties are willing to look at a problem from new angles, real and lasting solutions can help children in those critically important first few years of life.

Thanks to our early experience and success, Save the Children was invited to be part of the El Salvadoran government’s team to design the new national early childhood development curriculum. We are now, along with other organizations, supporting the national roll-out of the curriculum and providing feedback to the government on community and center-level implementation.

Early childhood development is not limited to health, and it begins long before a child enters the classroom. Now, thanks to the leadership of the El Salvadoran government, the partnership of NGOs like Save the Children, and the support of health workers, parents and communities, children across the country are getting a stronger start in life—and the chance to build a better future for themselves.

 

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Leveling the Playing Field from the Start: The Power of Early Childhood Development

Today, I had the pleasure of participating in a keynote discussion at the Education World Forum in London--a large annual gathering of education decisionmakers from around the world. We focused this morning on how to use and translate data generated by education systems into better policies and effective results.

My fellow panelists which included Baroness Lindsay Northover, Parliamentary Undersecretary of State at the UK’s Department for International Development, and Professor Eric Hanushek from Stanford University, made excellent points about the link between education outcomes and economic growth. They also spoke about the ways to reach the 58 million children from marginalized communities who remain out of school.

I chose to focus on investments in the youngest children, from birth to age 5, before they even enter primary school.
Why? Early childhood development is a very important topic that we don’t talk enough about. It’s critical to level the playing field at this early stage.

In fact, investing in young children through early childhood development programs—ensuring they have the right stimulation, nurturing and nutrition—is one of the smartest investments a country can make to address inequality, break the cycle of poverty, and improve outcomes later in life.

What are the advantages of early childhood development programs? First, these ensure healthy development and protect learning ability. Second, the programs have a long-term impact. They can nurture future productivity and raise income in a child’s adult life. Third, they can be designed in a cost-effective way.

Far too few children, especially those from the poorest families, benefit from this critical service. Consider the data:

• Less than 50%  of three-year-old to six-year-old children in developing countries receive any form of pre-primary education.
• Developing countries spend 12 times less on preschool education than the average OECD country.
• A quarter of all children under age five worldwide are physically stunted, which harms brain development and delays school enrollment.

If we want to improve basic learning outcomes across the world, especially among children from poor families, we need to invest in quality early childhood programs that support growth and cognitive development from a very early age.

I know from firsthand experience in my home country, Brazil, what a difference these programs can make: from Saturday classes for parents who stay at home  with their children to day care centers- targeting the poorest families- staffed with certified and trained early childhood teachers. This is indeed possible and the results are eye-opening and measurable.

The key question is: how can we use data to work together with policymakers to expand the coverage of these programs at a low enough cost that it is affordable and sustainable…given all the existing demands on public resources?

I am pleased to say that early childhood development is an important component of the World Bank Group’s Learning for Insurance Education Strategy. Over the past 14 years, we have invested $4 billion in early childhood development through multi-sectoral projects, including health, nutrition, education and social assistance.

Last month, we presented a new publication for policy makers and practitioners about how to invest in young children titled “Stepping up Early Childhood Development.” This guide identifies 25 essential interventions that span the education, health, nutrition, water, sanitation, and social protection sectors. We also recently launched an eLearning course on strategies to help children get a head start.

In addition to financing projects and research, we are expanding the global knowledge. Impact evaluations of early childhood development programs in low and middle-income countries are already influencing the policy dialogue. The most famous impact evaluation on the subject comes from a 20-year study of a group of children in Jamaica, which found that combining health and education interventions in early childhood increased future earnings by 25%.

Another example is the World Bank’s evaluation of a community-based preschool program in Mozambique run by Save the Children, which showed that children enrolled in preschool were better prepared for the demands of schooling than children who did not attend preschool and that they were more likely to start primary school by age six. Mozambique has now invested more in young children.

We know that early nutrition and well-designed parenting programs through home visits can be very effective in avoiding stunting and improving the interaction between caregiver and children under two. Quality, center-based care, such as in preschools, for children aged three to six has also shown positive impacts in a number of settings. Cash transfers have been documented as having significant, positive impacts in a child’s development, particularly when cash grants are paired with parenting information. There is a valuable discussion on the importance of parenting practices and mindset in our latest World Development Report on Mind, Society, and Behavior, in its fifth chapter.

What is the next step? We (collectively) need to redouble our efforts to continue to think outside of the box and experiment with different approaches/alternatives (technology and media, for example, have a huge untapped potential; rigorously evaluate along the way; and refine our projects and policy advice accordingly and on an ongoing basis.

At the World Bank Group, we are committed to use data to continue ramping up our support to early childhood development programs and knowledge generation. I invite you to tell me about your experience.

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Background information on education statistics in the UIS Data Centre

Background information on education statistics in the UIS Data Centre

The following symbols are used:

…                   No data available

^*                                  National estimation

^**                                UIS estimation

For regional averages: Partial imputation due to incomplete country coverage (between 33% to 60% of population)

-                      Magnitude nil or negligible

.                Not applicable

Data releases

The UIS releases data on its website concerning formal education systems three times every year – in January, May and October. Stay informed of the latest data releases by signing up for the UIS email alert service at www.uis.unesco.org.

Data sources

The UIS collects education statistics in aggregate form from official administrative sources at the national level. Collected information encompasses data on educational programmes, access, participation, progression, completion, internal efficiency and human and financial resources. These statistics cover formal education in public (or state) and private institutions (pre-primary, primary, basic and secondary schools, and colleges, universities and other tertiary education institutions); and special needs education (both in regular and special schools).

These data are gathered annually by the UIS and its partner agencies through the following three major surveys that can be downloaded from the UIS website at www.uis.unesco.org/UISQuestionnaires

i)     UIS survey

The UIS education questionnaires are sent to UNESCO Member States annually. The questionnaires are based on international standards, classifications and measures that are regularly reviewed and modified by the UIS in order to address emerging statistical issues and improve the quality of data.

ii)    UOE survey

UNESCO-UIS, the OECD and Eurostat (UOE) have jointly administered this annual data collection since 1993. The UOE questionnaire compiles data from high- and middle-income countries that are generally members

or partner countries of the OECD or Eurostat. The UOE survey gathers more detailed education statistics.

iii)   World Education Indicators (WEI) programme

The WEI programme provides a platform for middle-income countries to develop a critical mass of policy-relevant education indicators beyond the global core set of education statistics. This also allows for direct comparisons to countries participating in the UOE survey. The collection of data from WEI countries is based on a common set of definitions, instructions and methods that were derived from the OECD Indicators of National Education Systems (INES) programme.

Participating countries in the WEI data collection are Argentina, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Jordan, Malaysia, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Uruguay.

Population estimates

Population data are based on the 2012 revision of the World Population Prospects by the United Nations Population Division (UNPD). The UNPD does not provide data by single year of age for countries with a total population of less than 50,000 inhabitants. Where UNPD estimates are not available, national data or UIS estimates are used.

For more information on UNPD estimates, please visit http://www.un.org/esa/population/unpop.htm

Economic statistics

Data on economic indicators such as Gross domestic product (GDP) and Purchasing power parity (PPP) are World Bank estimates as of December 2013. For countries where GDP estimates are not published by the World Bank, data are obtained from the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD).

Technical notes

A. Education data and indicators

Regional averages are based on both publishable data and on non publishable estimated or imputed data. They are calculated based on data of April 2013.

There are cases where an indicator theoretically should not exceed the maximum value (for example the adjusted net enrolment rate), but data inconsistencies may have resulted in the indicator exceeding the theoretical limit. In these cases, “capping” has been applied, while maintaining the same gender ratio (For more details, please find the capping definition in the online glossary http://glossary.uis.unesco.org/glossary/en/home).

Due to rounding, Gender parity indices (GPI) may differ from those based directly on reported values.

The percentage of females (% F) is included to provide information on the proportion of girls enrolled with respect to the total enrolment. For gender parity, a more relevant measure is the GPI.

Two Special Administrative Regions – Hong Kong and Macao – are reported separately from data for China.

Data on pre-vocational or pre-technical programmes: Data for pre-vocational programmes for ISCED levels 2, 3 and 4 for countries carrying out the UIS regular education survey are included in those for general programmes. For countries carrying out the WEI/UOE survey, data for pre-vocational programmes for these ISCED levels are included in those of technical/vocational programmes. Therefore, data users are kindly requested to take this into account when comparing data by type of orientation for the two groups of countries.

Adult education: Educational programmes that are specifically designed for adults are not within the scope of the UIS regular data collection. These programmes are covered by the WEI/UOE data collection but countries are requested to report enrolment data for these programmes separately. To ensure comparability of enrolment data and the related indicators for all countries, adult education data are removed from data published by UIS for all WEI/UOE countries which provide appropriate breakdown of enrolment data. However, adult education data may still be included for few countries, which may slightly affect the comparability of their enrolment data and indicators with the rest of countries.

B. Education finance

Expenditure on pre-primary education or from international sources – both of which are often comparatively small – have been treated as negligible in cases where data were in fact missing. In these cases, the totals may be underestimated.

C. Population issues

Azerbaijan: Education data do not cover the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, whereas UNPD data do. Therefore the population data used for the calculation of indicators were provided by national authorities and exclude Nagorno-Karabakh.

Cyprus: Enrolment data for Cyprus do not include schools that are not under government control. The population data used for the calculation of indicators were provided by the government of Cyprus and only cover the population living in the government-controlled area.

Republic of Moldova: Enrolment data do not cover the region of Transnistria and population data for this region were excluded when calculating population-based indicators.

Palestine: Enrolment data do not include data for East Jerusalem, whereas the population data do. Indicators are not internationally comparable and should be interpreted with caution.

Serbia: Education data do not cover Kosovo, whereas the UN population division data do. Therefore, the population data used for the calculation of indicators were provided by Eurostat and exclude Kosovo.

United Republic of Tanzania: Enrolment data do not include Zanzibar, whereas the population data do. The population of Zanzibar is approximately 3 per cent of the total population of Tanzania. Indicators should thus be interpreted with caution.

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