Young Lives welcomes the opportunity to contribute to DFID's public consultation on its draft strategy for education in 2010. Education is a key theme of Young Lives because of its importance to children's lives, to their futures and to national development strategies.
Our response is based on our research to date as well as ongoing thinking about how our work needs to develop as the two cohorts of children in our study go through school and confront opportunities, constraints and choices in their education and daily lives.
We are encouraged by DFID's shift towards a broader understanding of access to education, beyond just looking at enrolment. We also emphasise that access needs to be understood in terms of access to quality education. In each of our study countries our research reflects the global picture that despite progress on enrolment, there remain huge inequalities in quality. Although the power of the MDGs as an international call to action is widely acknowledged, the emphasis on enrolment has not created the incentives to engage with the quality imperative, nor has basic equity in access been achieved.
We strongly endorse DFID's emphasis on early childhood intervention and the need to establish and protect cognitive development in early childhood. As with primary education, the quality of early years interventions is both important and often neglected, with evidence of the most disadvantaged children being least likely to access quality early childhood interventions.
Young Lives research speaks to acute disadvantages in education due to ethnicity, language and wealth in particular. Much research, including our own, indicates that both access and achievement are significantly lower for the poorest 20% of society. We would therefore encourage DFID to take an approach that explicitly recognises the interplay of factors inside and outside the classroom, and ensuring that social protection strategies support education.
A major insight from our interaction with policymakers to date is that more should be done to move beyond a heavy reliance on measures of (hard) infrastructure quality to examine the impact of the school environment and teaching styles on children's learning. We have identified four broad aspects of school quality: Infrastructure and facilities; School effectiveness and organisation; Opportunities to learn; and Quality of the learning process.
Young Lives welcomes the opportunity to contribute to DFID's public consultation on its draft strategy for education in 2010. Education is a key theme of Young Lives because of its importance to children's lives, to their futures and to national development strategies.
Our response is based on our research to date as well as ongoing thinking about how our work needs to develop as the two cohorts of children in our study go through school and confront opportunities, constraints and choices in their education and daily lives.
We are encouraged by DFID's shift towards a broader understanding of access to education, beyond just looking at enrolment. We also emphasise that access needs to be understood in terms of access to quality education. In each of our study countries our research reflects the global picture that despite progress on enrolment, there remain huge inequalities in quality. Although the power of the MDGs as an international call to action is widely acknowledged, the emphasis on enrolment has not created the incentives to engage with the quality imperative, nor has basic equity in access been achieved.
We strongly endorse DFID's emphasis on early childhood intervention and the need to establish and protect cognitive development in early childhood. As with primary education, the quality of early years interventions is both important and often neglected, with evidence of the most disadvantaged children being least likely to access quality early childhood interventions.
Young Lives research speaks to acute disadvantages in education due to ethnicity, language and wealth in particular. Much research, including our own, indicates that both access and achievement are significantly lower for the poorest 20% of society. We would therefore encourage DFID to take an approach that explicitly recognises the interplay of factors inside and outside the classroom, and ensuring that social protection strategies support education.
A major insight from our interaction with policymakers to date is that more should be done to move beyond a heavy reliance on measures of (hard) infrastructure quality to examine the impact of the school environment and teaching styles on children's learning. We have identified four broad aspects of school quality: Infrastructure and facilities; School effectiveness and organisation; Opportunities to learn; and Quality of the learning process.