Introduction
Access to education is a universal human right. Expanding access to education is also a universal good. Education transforms lives and lifts up nations. As knowledge is the backbone of economic growth, giving everyone the knowledge they require and the skills they need to make sense of the world should not be up for debate. A world-class education should be the birthright of every child.
The economic case for investment in education is as strong as the moral one. UNESCO analysis shows that an individual’s earnings increase by 8 per cent for every year spent at primary school and 13 per cent for each year of secondary school. At country level, when average educational attainment rises by a year, annual per capita GDP growth increases from 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent. Ensuring all young people in low-income countries (LICs) are literate would lift 171 million people out of poverty.
Yet today, for far too many children, a good education is out of reach. Around the world, systems struggle to deliver high-quality education at significant scale and sustainable cost. There is unprecedented and unmet demand for education, with more than 270 million new secondary-school places a year needed by 2030. Funding of education is insufficient and inefficient, with just 0.5 per cent of global education spend directed to low-income countries where the need is the highest, while high-income countries face rapidly diminishing returns. There is staggering inequity of educational outcomes both between and within countries, with more than 260 million children in the Global South leaving primary school unable to read, and one in five 15-year-olds in OECD countries lacking minimum proficiency in reading, maths or science. Education systems today do not have the capacity to change at the pace required to meet the needs and aspirations of learners and best support economic growth.
Technology holds the promise of overcoming these fundamental challenges – a promise that so far remains unfulfilled.
The Enduring Importance of Schools
The global expansion of access to education is one of the great success stories of the last century. A hundred years ago, only a third of the world’s population was literate. Today, 86 per cent are. Central to that expansion was the creation of functioning schools. Forged in the Industrial Revolution, the practice of compulsory schooling became a quintessential institution of 20th-century government, delivering a standardised minimum level of education at significant scale and creating robust, predictable and enduring routes to learning.
Schools also play an important broader role in our society, as the disruption caused by Covid-19 has proved. In addition to aiding the cognitive development of children, schools have a supervisory function, providing a safe environment for children during the day and freeing up parents to go to work. They provide effective structures for socialisation, helping children to develop and internalise societal values, identities, expectations around behaviour, and attitudes to citizenship and civic life. Finally, they validate knowledge and skills to support students’ participation in further education or the labour market. It is the combined impact of these roles that makes education such a powerful force for individuals, societies and economies.
But the education crisis is real and urgent. The design of school systems today, like other offshoots of industrial-era government, is fundamentally mismatched to the challenges and rapid pace of change driven by the 21st-century technology revolution. Schools prioritise consistency over responsiveness and suffer rapidly diminishing returns to scale that make access to high-quality education a matter of luck. Admitting that this is the case is not the same as saying that schools are modelled on factories or that education hasn’t changed in a hundred years, as a popular – and self-evidently false – cliché would have it. As we consider what needs to be done to fulfil the promise of universal education in the 21st century, we must consider what aspects of education systems work well and why they have not become the norm everywhere.
The Education-Crisis Trilemma
The answer to this last question can be expressed in terms of a trilemma. Unlocking the benefits of world-class education for every child in the world requires grappling with three policy goals:
- Delivering a high-quality education that meets the learning needs of children in a safe environment free from harassment and discrimination.
- Meeting the logistical and systems-design challenges of providing equal access to education for all children.
- Funding the education system at a public cost that is sustainable in the long-term.
Figure 1 – The education-crisis trilemma
Source: TBI
The fundamental reason for the education crisis is that these three policy goals are in tension with each other and the current design of school systems is not equal to resolving these tensions. At best, they accomplish two out of three. For example, many low- and lower-middle-income countries have been able to massively scale up their primary education systems in the past two decades at relatively low cost. Yet, as the World Bank has noted, being in school is not the same as learning and the quality of education in these systems is often inadequate. On the other hand, there are some standout examples of high-quality education all around the world, but the fundamental logistical constraints imposed by the design of today’s systems mean their cost is only sustainable at the scale of a single school, school chain or perhaps, in a few cases, of a small country.
Few debates highlight this trilemma better than the vexed issue of class sizes. Research has consistently shown that one-on-one or small-group tuition produces better learning outcomes, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Reducing class sizes has therefore come to be an emotive policy issue, seen as a simple path to improving quality: hire and retain more teachers, achieve smaller classes and better outcomes. In practice, for reductions in class sizes to have an impact, they need to be significant (limiting numbers to fewer than 20 pupils in a class, and ideally closer to 12 to 15), meaning you would need to increase teaching-staff numbers in the developed world by 30 to 50 per cent (and by far more in the Global South).
Staff salaries are already the largest budget item in education, making class-size reduction prohibitively expensive at current salary levels. In the US, for example, decreasing the average student-to-teacher ratio by one would cost $12 billion a year. Reducing that outlay would make it difficult to attract qualified teachers, cancelling out any gains in quality while still incurring large costs. This is one reason why small class sizes have also become one of the selling points of private education, where resources are less constrained and student numbers are small, illustrating with painful clarity the trilemma of quality, scale and cost. It is also one of the reasons why the OECD found no direct link between class size and student performance. It has been shown that systems with relatively large class sizes, for example in Singapore or some cities in China, can perform well.
*To be continued
Afro-Global Education Deliveries 