14 December 2012: Commonwealth education ministers have agreed on a set of core recommendations for a framework to succeed Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in education.
Representatives from 12 Commonwealth countries, including the education ministers from six, met in London, UK from 12-13 December 2012, to conclude their recommendations on the post-2015 development agenda for education. The Ministerial meeting was chaired by the Minister of Education and Human Resources of Mauritius, and attended by delegations from Bangladesh, Barbados, Cyprus, India, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda. The meeting was part of the work of the working group set up by the Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers to develop recommendations for the post-2015 development framework for education. The working group consists of representatives from 13 Commonwealth countries – the 12 mentions above as well as Malawi.
The Commonwealth recommendations propose three principal goals for education in the post-2015 development framework, as follows: completion by every child of a full cycle of a minimum of nine years of continuous, free basic education; strategic expansion of post-basic education to meet the needs for knowledge and skills related to employment and livelihoods; and reduction and elimination of differences in educational outcomes among learners associated with household wealth, gender, special needs, location, age and social group. These three principal goals would be supplemented by six more detailed sub-goals. The recommendations also highlight that the core Commonwealth concerns of access, equity and quality would be implicit in the principal goals and explicit in the sub-goals.
Other recommendations made include that: targets and deadlines should focus on 2025, and options should be available for individual countries, depending on starting point, ambition and capacity; and that the architecture of the framework should reflect four underlying themes that should be mainstreamed across the goals: education in emergencies, migration, gender, and education for sustainable development.
Ministers and representatives submitted the proposals to the office of David Cameron, Prime Minister, UK, co-chair of the UN High-level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda (HLP). The proposals will feed directly into the HLP and the UNESCO Global Education for All Meetings. [Publication: Commonwealth Recommendations for the Post-2015 Development Framework for Education] [Commonwealth Press Release]