Transforming education: Current challenges and hopes for the future

Season 4, episode 2

Transforming education: Current challenges and hopes for the future

There are more children in school than out of school today. Yet, millions of them are unable to comprehend simple text. In this episode we explore this learning gap and look at what are the challenges when it comes to getting an education - in the classroom and in getting children to the classrooms.

Host: Saara Chaudry, UNICEF Canada Ambassador

Guests:

Ree-Anna Robinson, UNICEF Jamaica Youth Advocate

Robert Jenkins: Director, Global Director, Education & Adolescent Development, UNICEF

Producers: Sara Faruqi and Priyadarshini Mitra

Composed and Mixed by: Chandra Bulucon

Episode Transcript: 

[00:00:00.00] [DRAMATIC MUSIC]

[00:00:02.43] I am from Nigeria. Now many children are almost completely forgotten when it comes to education, as if they are not children. But education is not an option, or an advantage, or even a luxury.

[00:00:15.28] It is a fundamental human right of every child. A necessity that must be addressed [INAUDIBLE] I am a nomadic child, education is my right. My name is Abdul Baki. Let me learn.

[00:00:33.09] I am from Canada. I am angry and disappointed at the fact that we have such a standardized system all over the world that only caters to formal learning, such as STEM, Math, Sciences, and does not include vocational learning or even just education for creatives.

[00:00:49.02] We do not do a better job at creating systems that make it better for youth. My name is Blanche. Education is my right. Let me learn.

[00:01:01.26] I'm from India I'm a person with learning disabilities and the education system made me believe I was the problem. It made me believe I was incompetent and that I needed to change the ways of my thinking and working to fit into what's available.

[00:01:15.21] I don't feel like I'm the problem anymore. And I am where I am today because of the privilege I had to be able to avail special education separate from what the system had to offer. And that's not a privilege everyone has. My name is Akshaya Akhilan. Let me learn.

[00:01:30.81] [UPBEAT MUSIC]

[00:01:44.29] No matter where you are, education is a right. But as these young people let us know, it isn't always easy. Around the world, children are deprived of education and learning for various reasons. From learning abilities, remote location, to the sort of subjects prioritized, as we heard from Blanche, Abdul Baki, and Akshaya.

[00:02:07.24] Hello, everyone. My name is Sara Chaudhry, UNICEF Canada Ambassador and your host For Every Child podcast. And on this episode, we talk about education.

[00:02:19.00] Education is particularly important to me because growing up I heard the stories of my mom moving from South Africa to Canada because of the education that she was deprived of as a result of apartheid in South Africa.

[00:02:33.79] UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said, instead of being the great enabler, education is fast becoming the great divider. Education systems often entrench rather than reduce inequality, reproducing it across generations.

[00:02:51.61] Despite having more children in school after the pandemic than before, 600 million children around the globe are still not learning basic skills like math and reading, even though 2/3 of them are in school.

[00:03:06.88] In middle to low income countries, this translates into an estimated 70% of 10-year-olds unable to understand simple written text. And these are the ones who were actually able to get an education.

[00:03:22.33] On today's episode, we look at what the greatest challenges are for children around the world when it comes to getting an education. And also, what successes there have been in ensuring every child gets a chance to learn. We also explore the impact of the pandemic on young people, from learning loss to mental health.

[00:03:42.45] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:03:43.58]

[00:03:44.85] For our first story we travel to Kingston, Jamaica, and speak to second-year law student and youth advocate, Ree-Anna Robinson. As a UNICEF Jamaica Youth Council member, Ree-Anna assisted UNICEF and the National Secondary Students Council's report on education in Jamaica.

[00:04:02.79] A large part of this report was to provide a youth perspective, highlighting the experience of nearly 600 high-school-aged students in urban and rural Jamaica. As the pandemic hit, Ree-Anna too felt lost, an experience that pushed her to become a youth mental health advocate leading You Matter, a mental health chat line launched in March of 2022.

[00:04:29.97] Hi, Ree-Anna Thanks for being with us. Can you tell us a little bit about your passion for advocacy, for education, and mental health?

[00:04:39.19] Hi, everyone, all listeners out there. I'm Ree-Anna Robinson. I'm a Jamaican student. I'm 20 years old. I am a second year law student. And my passion for advocacy with regards to education and mental health specifically would've started when I was in high school.

[00:04:59.64] I've always been that person that speaks out about injustice as I see around me. Always being that representative body or person within my classroom when students had any issues.

[00:05:13.09] Thanks, Ree-Anna. So you have written and spoken about the need for equitable and resilient education systems in place for students in Jamaica. Can you elaborate a little bit on this?

[00:05:24.99] In Jamaica, equity is so important when it comes down to education because we have completely divided our education system, right? We focus so much on exam-based results and preparing students for exams and tests that we miss out on the fact that education is supposed to be fueled and fostered by curiosity, and talent, and love for something, just love for something.

[00:05:50.67] It's just reaching one level to the next level to the next level. We're just pushing them through our system. We're not looking at the individual growth of that student and who we want them to be, or who they want to be, and the impact that they want to leave on society.

[00:06:06.81] We're focused on just ensuring that they make it through. And I think we kill those dreams and we kill that passion inside of our students because we tell them that that dream isn't worth it, you need to focus in this direction, right?

[00:06:20.20] And we stream our students after the primary level, we stream them to what we call traditional schools, which would be the better end of the spectrum, and nontraditional schools, which are at the lower end of the spectrum. And it really ought not to be that way, right?

[00:06:36.75] And we have socioeconomic barriers to education and that really stifles our dreams as well, especially at the tertiary level. I think, just under 30% of young people in Jamaica actually make it to University. We don't think we can make it past that structure that we've created in our society.

[00:06:57.01] So in our lower stream schools we can find that more technical skills are taught there and more vocational skills. What that says to that person is that those types of skills are for people who can't go into traditional education.

[00:07:14.48] That's the lower end, right? Those are the persons whose dreams aren't really worthy so you have to just stick with that. And that even limits people who want to do those things. So it's so multifaceted in terms of what needs to be done in terms of barriers.

[00:07:33.19] Thanks, Ree-Anna. So you've touched upon this in the beginning of our conversation, how after being a youth advocate for education, during the pandemic, you also became one for mental health. So can you tell us a little bit more about this?

[00:07:50.63] Yes, so I think I was 17 when COVID just came around. Wow, it seems like so long ago, but we're still kind of living in this reality, this new normal. For me, every day was hard and I think each day got harder while school was closed.

[00:08:09.44] So definitely, COVID-19 had a huge impact on not just my country, but the region that I live in, the Caribbean region, and if you want to add in Latin America as well. So we can start where schools closed in March of 2020. And there were various avenues put in place to reach students to ensure that they were still connected, right?

[00:08:32.35] And what we failed to realize sometimes is that within our communities here in Jamaica and all the Caribbean countries, school is so much more than academics. School is where some young people get their only meal for the day or only two meals for the day. School is where they get the only emotional support that's available to them, the only psychosocial support that's available to them.

[00:08:54.44] So my mental health advocacy was personal at first because we started during that period. Personally, mental health was important but it was kind of superficial in the sense where we talk about depression, and anxiety, and all the things that we see on suicidal ideation, but it never really becomes real until it hits home, until it ends up at your doorstep.

[00:09:20.23] And that happened for me during the COVID-19 pandemic. And that's where my advocacy started from. And I want to see more of those things happening within my education system.

[00:09:30.82] I want a safer for school environment, increased access to mental health services, resources, normalizing conversations through holistic sensitization of all stakeholders who interact with young people.

[00:09:45.31] For that, for me, that literally means that it can't be left to teachers alone, it can't be left to guidance counselors where there's three guidance counselors to 1,700 students.

[00:09:56.08] We have to ensure that every single stakeholder, which means even students themselves, have to be sensitized to what these struggles look like so that they can help themselves and they can help their peers.

[00:10:08.11] Increased access to resources, increased access to mental health services, that's what I want to see within my country across sectoral policy which promotes and protects mental wellness of our people. If we say that we're serious about mental health, we need to have serious actions. And that's what I want to see.

[00:10:26.74] For myself, I really hope that I'm able to remove some of these lids that I mentioned earlier, in terms of these lids that we've created in society for how far we think we can go based on where we're from, and worse circumstances, and classism, and all those other issues that have a part to play in why it is that we believe that we are stuck in a box.

[00:10:49.54] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:10:50.42] Thank you so much, Ree-Anna. Your experience of learning through the pandemic is definitely shared by so many young people around the world. My next guest today is Robert Jenkins, the Director of Education at UNICEF. He has been working tirelessly to understand and address the challenges and opportunities around education globally.

[00:11:14.72] Robert, in your 20 years of international development and having worked across so many countries, how do you explain to others the impact education can have on individuals, families, and society?

[00:11:27.51] So I think the best way to describe the value of education is to see it like a springboard, a springboard for a child to spring off of into their future and to realize their dreams.

[00:11:42.80] That springboard, it comes in many different ways and dimensions. Both the acquisition of foundational skills like reading, writing, math, and digital skills, and entrepreneurship, and et cetera.

[00:11:56.75] But also in terms of respect for diversity, and communication, and engagement, and problem solving. And it's a springboard for individual children, but it also is a springboard for communities, and societies, and economies more generally.

[00:12:16.01] And I've seen it myself around the world and having this amazing privilege to work in very different contexts with UNICEF over years. And when you see the impact of enabling a child to have access to education for the very first time or you see the impact of improving the quality of their learning experience so that indeed it becomes a springboard for them, it's an amazing experience to watch.

[00:12:45.05] A few months ago I was in Afghanistan. I traveled to rural parts of Afghanistan and saw and engaged with adolescent girls and younger girls in community-based education centers, very challenging circumstances.

[00:13:02.60] I saw 12, 13-year-old girls learning their letters for the first time. And that's just an amazing experience to see how excited they are, how they can see. It's like a passport into their futures.

[00:13:17.72] And something where, in challenging circumstances like Afghanistan but in many other contexts, we're doing all we can to harness that and realize those dreams of those children.

[00:13:30.53] Right so you speak of Afghanistan, and I think that's just one of the many examples of the challenges we're seeing on education and learning in the world. From climate, to conflict, to recovering from COVID-19, what can we expect in terms of future challenges when it comes to putting every child in school?

[00:13:49.79] Well, you're right to bring up those challenges. And I was in Pakistan a couple of months ago, and visited Sind province, and saw the impact flooding has had on schooling there.

[00:14:01.67] And went to areas of that province in which we were providing temporary learning opportunities for children. And indeed, incredibly challenging situation there and in many other countries. And globally, we are experiencing a global learning crisis.

[00:14:21.08] Now having said that, we also have to recognize we have more children in school today than ever before, including gender parity at the primary level, meaning the same numbers of girls and boys attending primary school.

[00:14:38.90] And some of our fears of significant dropouts as a result of school closures due to the pandemic have not been realized, meaning some of those worst case scenarios of tens of millions of children not returning to school has not happened.

[00:14:57.56] Children have come back to school in general across the world. And we have an unprecedented opportunity with so many children in school to improve the quality of that education experience and ensure each of those children are provided the tools and the skills for them to realize their dreams and realize their full potential.

[00:15:21.27] So the challenges, however, still include increasing disparities in many countries and globally between children with different characteristics. We still have very much disparities between boys and girls, especially at older ages, learning outcomes, in access to schooling in some contexts, particularly for adolescents and youth.

[00:15:48.80] We still see a very real gender divide as children exit the school system and enter the labor force and continue on in their learning pathways, like in vocational and a tertiary education.

[00:16:04.11] We see significant disparities between children in the poorest quintile of societies compared to the richest quintile. Children living in remote locations and children with different abilities.

[00:16:15.51] And these are very real divides that have grown during the time of the pandemic. And that's why UNICEF is increasingly focused on reaching marginalized children, children that live in very challenging countries and fragile countries, but also within countries that children that face barriers.

[00:16:38.37] And so that's our focus, and has been our focus for years, but increasingly intensified focus on those marginalized children that face barriers to accessing school or benefit as they're in school.

[00:16:51.54] But also seize the opportunity to transform education systems due to the disruption of the pandemic. But now with technology and other renewed commitments to transform education, we're doing all we can to leapfrog education systems into the future.

[00:17:09.16] So overall, we have a global learning crisis. Now barriers that children face, there is barriers to learning within classrooms and within schools, but also in accessing those schools.

[00:17:22.89] So when you say within schools, can you elaborate a little more? In one way it seems we seem to have gotten to the goal of getting the child in school, but I guess the next step is, now what? How can we ensure that they get that quality education?

[00:17:40.41] There are still around the world challenges of size of classrooms, of the level, meaning how many children are in classrooms. I was in Myanmar 18 months ago and there is classrooms in certain remote locations in the country of over 100 children in a class, with many other countries in that situation.

[00:18:03.07] We also have under-supported teachers, meaning they haven't been provided the tools to deliver the curriculum in an effective way and they themselves need additional education, and support, and pay, and other means of support, ongoing support. We have a lack of learning materials in many countries.

[00:18:25.75] So within classrooms and within schools, we still very much have a challenge all over the world, high and low income countries alike, to enable children to acquire the skills, foundational skills, but also 21st century skills, meaning problem solving, creative thinking, et cetera, but digital skills and entrepreneurship skills.

[00:18:49.47] And the key toolbox that the children need as they-- children, adolescents, and youth as they exit school systems in order to participate fully in their communities and society.

[00:19:01.50] Right. And then briefly, Rob, the challenge of accessing an education, what are some major ones we see?

[00:19:11.02] So in general, schools are in education systems are not sufficiently accessible in remote locations in many countries. I was in Haiti last year. And in rural Haiti, you can see that access to schools often requires long distances. And definitely as a child moves into middle school or secondary school, it becomes even more challenging and schools are even farther away in many cases.

[00:19:41.25] But children with disabilities face specific barriers to accessing school and benefiting within school itself. But also the cost of schooling now. The cost can sometimes be very tangible as in a tuition and just enrollment fees, but it could also be other associated costs like paying for transportation to and from school, but also a uniform cost and other costs.

[00:20:08.25] And then the opportunity cost of attending school. Meaning if I'm a 13, 14-year-old, if I attend school, that means I cannot support my family and potentially, I'm working in agriculture and the fields. Or helping to take care of younger siblings, et cetera. So we see children also facing those barriers.

[00:20:32.70] So in order to transform education and to reach every child, we really do need a comprehensive approach, both in the quality of the education that's provided and the support to transform education systems, but also the comprehensive support to families and to children themselves to enable them to access and continue to attend school.

[00:20:59.46] Let me also, just one last thing, I just want to raise, just on this point which is, something that we've known for a long, long time but it was very explicit and it could not be ignored while schools were closed and the impact of the pandemic was the important role schools play in enabling psychosocial support, and mental health of children, and the impact the pandemic has had, and the impact school closures had on children's mental health and psychosocial well-being, and a sense of safety, and normality.

[00:21:35.52] And so that's another area as schools now have reopened enabling children to be welcomed back in school and provided the full holistic approach to support that they require, mental health, psychosocial support, nutritional support. In many of the countries in which UNICEF works, water and sanitation, but also a sense of safety and protection that schools can offer.

[00:22:03.15] Let's also recognize, in many countries schools are the only service and community platform, if you'd like, that children attend and benefit from. So it's absolutely critical that we also leverage that experience or leverage that platform for children to receive a wide range of services.

[00:22:21.57] That's particularly important for marginalized children that I've been discussing because they, of course, have very unique needs. Those needs are often exacerbated or are greater now as they return back in school. So UNICEF is also doing all we can to enable them to be welcome back with its full range of services.

[00:22:39.44] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:22:44.40] Thank you to all of our guests on this episode of the podcast. The goal of getting each child to school requires a lot of hard work. From getting families, educators, and decision makers on board, to having shared goals and priorities.

[00:23:00.39] The momentum that we have now despite the losses during the pandemic needs to continue. We know investing in education provides the best return for the future of children and the following generations to come.

[00:23:15.96] As Canadians, the majority of us are lucky to have access to quality education. But for so many young people across the world, the reality is quite different. Many don't have the chance to even acquire basic literacy skills.

[00:23:32.52] Each of us can play a role in transforming education systems globally, to create systems that give young people an opportunity, to thrive, to succeed, and to see their dreams become a reality.

[00:23:45.06] Our global leaders must play their parts too. I urge the government of Canada to continue its commitment to global education and invest at least 10% of its bilateral development assistance in quality education in budget 2023.

[00:24:02.37] That's the thought with which I'd like to close our episode today. Thanks for listening. See you back here next month.

[00:24:08.73] [MUSIC PLAYING]