The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released its latest Global Education Monitoring Report on Tuesday. Key finding: Less than one in ten countries have laws that help ensure full inclusion in education. The document also notes an intensification of exclusion during the Covid-19 pandemic. He also estimates that around 40% of low- and middle-income countries did not support disadvantaged learners during the temporary school closings linked to containment measures.

The UN agency therefore urges countries to focus on the people left behind when schools reopen in order to make societies more resilient and more egalitarian.

“In order to meet the challenges of our time, it is imperative to move towards a more inclusive education,” said UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay. “Rethinking the future of education is all the more important after the Covid-19 pandemic, which further aggravated and highlighted inequalities. Failure to act will hamper the progress of societies, ”she added.

Persistence of exclusion

The UNESCO report reveals that 258 million children and young people are completely deprived of education, poverty being the main obstacle to their access to education. In low- and middle-income countries, adolescents from the richest 20% of households are three times more likely to complete lower secondary education than those from the poorest households. Among those who have completed lower secondary education, students from the wealthiest households are twice as likely to have basic reading and math skills as those from the poorest households.

Despite the proclaimed objective of achieving universal completion of upper secondary education by 2030, practically no poor young woman living in rural areas completes secondary education in some 20 countries, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

The report also found that 10-year-old students from middle and high income countries who were taught in a language other than their mother tongue generally scored 34% lower than those of native speakers in reading tests. In 10 low and middle income countries, children with disabilities are 19% less likely to reach a minimum level of reading than those without disabilities. In the United States, for example, LGBTI students were almost three times more likely to say that they might have preferred to stay at home because they did not feel safe at school.

Unfair foundations

The team that wrote the UNESCO report also launched a new website, PEER , containing information on laws and policies regarding inclusion in education for all countries of the world. This tool shows that many countries still practice segregation in education, which reinforces stereotypes, discrimination and alienation. In a quarter of the countries, laws require children with disabilities to be educated in separate institutions, more than 40% in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.　

Blatant exclusion

Two African countries still prohibit the access of pregnant girls to school, 117 authorize marriages of minors, while twenty countries have not ratified Convention 138 of the International Labor Organization ( ILO ) prohibiting work children. In several central and eastern European countries, Roma children are victims of segregation in mainstream schools.

In Asia, displaced people, such as the Rohingya, are educated in alternative education systems. In OECD countries, more than two-thirds of pupils with an immigrant background attend schools where they represent at least 50% of the school population, which reduces their chances of success.　

“The Covid-19 pandemic offered us a real opportunity to rethink our education systems,” said Manos Antoninis, director of the Global Education Monitoring Report. “But the transition to a world that values ​​and welcomes diversity will not happen overnight. There is an obvious tension between teaching all children under one roof and creating an environment where students learn best. But Covid-19 has shown us that it is possible to do things differently if we make the necessary effort. ”

Parents’ discriminatory beliefs are a barrier to inclusion: about 15% of parents in Germany and 59% in Hong Kong, China fear that children with disabilities will disrupt the learning of others. Parents of vulnerable children also want to send them to schools that ensure their well-being and meet their needs. In Queensland, Australia, 37% of special school students have left mainstream schools.

The report also shows that education systems often fail to take into account the specific needs of learners. Only 41 countries in the world have officially recognized sign language and, generally, schools are more eager to get internet access than to care for students with disabilities. Some 335 million girls attended schools that did not provide them with the water, sanitation and hygiene services they needed to continue attending classes during their periods.

Alienate learners

When learners are insufficiently represented in curricula and textbooks, they may feel excluded. Girls and women represent 44% of the references in English secondary school textbooks in Malaysia and Indonesia, 37% in Bangladesh and 24% in the Punjab province of Pakistan. The curricula of 23 out of 49 European countries do not address issues of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression.　

Teachers need and want inclusion training, which less than one in ten elementary school teachers in ten French-speaking countries in sub-Saharan Africa reported receiving. A quarter of teachers in 48 countries said they wanted more training to teach students with special needs.

Chronic lack of quality data on people left behind.

Almost half of low and middle income countries do not collect enough data on the education of children with disabilities. Household surveys are essential for breaking down education data by individual characteristics. However, 41% of the countries – where 13% of the world’s population lives – did not carry out surveys or, when they did, did not publish the data collected. The learning figures are mainly drawn from schools and do not take into account people who do not attend them.

“The data are insufficient, which prevents us from having a complete portrait of the situation,” explains Antoninis. “It is therefore not surprising that the inequalities suddenly brought to light during the pandemic caught us by surprise.”