We live in a world where critics talk of “bloated” international aid budgets, and yet our generosity barely reaches a growing inequality problem, one that is rapidly coming home to haunt us.
Half of all children born this year will leave school without even the most basic of qualifications. Even by 2030, the UN deadline for delivering universal primary and secondary education, more than 800 million of the world’s 1.6 billion school-age children will not attain the literacy, numeracy and computational skills they will need to get jobs.
Among them are refugee children who will never enter a classroom, child labourers denied the chance to go to school, young girls forced into early marriage and yet more girls denied an education simply because of their gender. To their number is added the millions more in classrooms today who are failing to learn because education standards are so pitifully low and teachers are undervalued.
Click here to read more from Gordon Brown’s opinion piece in The Guardian.