The UN Secretary-General is convening the Transforming Education Summit (TES) on September 19, 2022. The Summit aims to rekindle political commitment, mobilize action on solutions to recover from COVID-19, reimagine education, and revitalize efforts to achieve SDG 4. Summit inputs are being gathered through national consultations, thematic action tracks, and public mobilization.
We are working with our partners on three priorities in the lead up to the TES:
- Shaping a Global Compact for Education Financing: With support from the Global Education Forum, the Commission is helping to shape a proposal for a Global Compact for Education Financing (as part of the TES financing action track) in which countries committed to increasing investments are incentivized with corresponding support from the international community. This includes the operationalization of the International Finance Facility for Education (IFFEd) as called for by the UN Secretary-General.
- Encouraging investments in cross-sectoral win-win solutions: The TES provides a key opportunity to place education at the center of sustainable development and rally action to accelerate progress on the SDGs through education, by focusing on cross-sectoral solutions and partnerships. The success of the TES will be determined by its ability to inform discussions outside our sector and make education a key element in discussions at the G20, COP27, and the 2023 UN Summit of the Future.
- Informing thematic action tracks through our ongoing work on transforming learning (and High Touch High Tech), the education workforce, education delivery, and school health and nutrition: We are providing concrete inputs to the TES action tracks using our analysis and research, national action, and global amplification work in key transformation areas detailed below.
“We can be the first generation in history where every child goes to school. We can develop the potential of every child and not just some children. But we’ve got to do this in September by making the Transforming Education Summit transformational for education itself.”
–UN Special Envoy for Global Education and Education Commission Chair Gordon Brown calling for radical change at the TES Pre-Summit in Paris
Transforming education finance
Last month in Paris, the UN Secretary-General reiterated his call for the International Finance Facility for Education (IFFEd) to be operationalized at the Transforming Education Summit (TES) in September.
This call was underlined by Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed as well as many of IFFEd’s key partners at a high-level side event on IFFEd during the Paris Pre-Summit.
As we prepare for this important moment, here are the latest updates on IFFEd’s development:
- The IFFEd website launched at the TES Pre-Summit. Check it out for the latest news and updates, including the exciting job opportunity to become IFFEd’s founding CEO.
- IFFEd is being registered as a Swiss Foundation. This registration will be complete by September, allowing for its full operation and ability to accept contributions.
- Eligible countries’ strong support was expressed at consultations and events with stakeholders at the Education World Forum in London, the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the TES Pre-Summit in Paris. More than a dozen ministers from eligible lower-middle-income countries have formally voiced their support for IFFEd’s innovative power to unlock new financing for quality education and skills development in their countries.
- The UK Government joined other funders confirming its commitment of seed capital to support IFFEd’s establishment at the TES Pre-Summit.
Transforming cross-sectoral collaboration
Rewiring Education for People and Planet
At the TES Pre-Summit, we co-hosted a high-level event to call for increased cross-sectoral collaboration and mobilize support for win-win solutions that trigger positive impacts for education and other sectors. A flagship report Rewiring Education for People and Planet will be released at the TES in partnership with Dubai Cares, Next Generation Fellows, Restless Development, UN Foundation, and the World Organization of the Scout Movement. Watch the event recording here.
Sustainable Financing Initiative for School Health and Nutrition (SFI)
Today we launched the Sustainable Financing Initiative – an initiative of the School Meals Coalition, a mobilization of nearly 70 governments and partners dedicated to urgently re-establishing, improving, and scaling up food and education systems. SFI will work with governments, donors, and others to research, rethink, and implement sustainable financing solutions to expand school feeding programs in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Watch the launch event here.
Want to learn more about how free school meals could protect children from the global hunger crisis? Read the piece in Nature by Kevin Watkins and Donald Bundy, two leaders from the School Meals Coalition.
Learn more about this and our other cross-sectoral work here.
Transforming the education workforce
Knowledge exchange on school leadership in Sierra Leone
The Education Workforce Initiative (EWI) is expanding its work with Sierra Leone’s Teaching Service Commission (TSC):
- School leadership: EWI is working with Education Development Trust, EducAid, and Fab Inc. to co-design a national school leader professional development program. Education Commission Director of Programs Amy Bellinger was recently in Sierra Leone to kick off the design process. This included a knowledge exchange with other countries – Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Kenya – to learn from their experiences and a workshop on the competencies needed for effective school leadership in Sierra Leone.
- Teacher deployment: In partnership with Ed Tech Hub and Fab Inc., we are testing and analyzing how innovative tools can promote equitable deployment of teachers and what key factors drive teacher preferences. Read about the emerging findings from recent field work in this blog by our EWI research lead Katie Godwin and partners.
In partnership with the Ministries of Education in Ghana, Kenya, and Rwanda and our local partners, the Innovative Pedagogies Project (supported by the LEGO Foundation) has undertaken rapid research and hosted five policy dialogues with policymakers, school leaders, teachers, and other stakeholders to discuss the extent that inclusive, engaging, and adaptive pedagogies are taking place and to co-develop country action plans to address the gaps. Findings will be shared soon.
EWI partnered with GPE to conduct a mapping of existing diagnostic tools and frameworks on teachers and the broader education workforce to guide countries and development partners in selecting tools relevant to their contexts. The mapping also identifies gaps in current workforce tools (e.g. they rarely examine how roles beyond teachers support teaching and learning) and highlights opportunities for future diagnostics. Read our blog to learn more.
Transforming Learning
We are pleased to announce the return of the annual High Touch High Tech Summit. Led by the Education Commission Asia team, the theme of HTHT 2022 is Teachers Meet Tech – with the aim of amplifying teachers’ voices and bringing them together to share innovative class design and teaching experiences.
The HTHT Summit will be held on September 3-5, 2022 online and in-person in Seoul, South Korea. If you would like to be a part of the Summit or know a pioneering teacher who can share their classroom innovations, please email Yealin Im: yealin.im@educommissionasia.org.
Transforming Delivery
Two new members have joined the DeliverEd team! Abril Ibarra (Project Lead) and Neelofar Javaid (Senior Advisor) bring years of experience and would love to connect with you.
We shared preliminary findings of our DeliverEd research at the 66th Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) and the RISE Annual Conference. Learn more about the CIES session here and watch the presentation here.
The DeliverEd research team traveled to Ghana in April to train enumerators for a large-scale survey across 181 districts and 2000+ schools. The survey data will help us understand the use of delivery approaches to improve education policy delivery in Ghana.
In Brazil, the Lemann Center for Leadership and Equity in Education has launched an ambitious leadership program to promote equity and reduce educational inequalities. As part of this program, the Commission has partnered with the Lemann Center to develop training on delivery lab implementation so leaders can put delivery principles into practice. The training started in April 2022, engaging more than 2000 participants from 49 municipalities. The first face-to-face meetings took place in June in nine different cities around the country. Read more about the program here.
The 4th African Policymaker Forum on Delivery Approaches and COVID-19 Response took place in April. Country representatives gathered to discuss how African ministries of education have been implementing and delivering teacher training during the pandemic and ways to monitor and prioritize strengthening teachers’ capacity to respond to students’ needs. Read the recent report from the KIX Observatory on Teacher Training and Support in Africa during the COVID-19 Pandemic and the blog on 7 Action Steps from the 4th African Policymaker Forum to Improve Teachers Trainings Delivery Approaches. We look forward to the next session in August to engage with African policymakers to discuss girls’ education during COVID-19.
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