Global Education for the Most Marginalised Debate
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Kate Osamor
Main Page: Kate Osamor (Labour (Co-op) - Edmonton and Winchmore Hill)Department Debates - View all Kate Osamor's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Global Education for the Most Marginalised
Kate Osamor Excerpts(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Kate Osamor (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) on securing this important debate off the back of a new report from the Send My Friend to School coalition. One of the recommendations in the report is:
“Ensure Official Development Assistance to education is free from commercial interests, does not support for profit providers, and ensures education is free and universally available at the point of use.”
On that basis, I want to use this opportunity to add to the debate by speaking about the people I met in Nairobi, as their voices are not in the room.
Last year, while in Nairobi, I heard at first hand from parents and teachers about the problems they face with low-fee private schools. Parents spoke about unaffordable fees, and teachers spoke about poor labour standards. The situation was so extreme that they felt driven to lodge a complaint with the World Bank about Bridge International. The report findings are echoed by the International Development Committee. Its inquiry into DFID’s education work expressed concerns about the inability of Bridge to reach the poorest and most marginalised children, and questioned the sustainability of the costs of providing education in that way.
Supporting a model that leaves out the poorest and most marginalised means that we would fail in our commitments under the SDGs to ensure that no one is left behind. I am pleased that DFID no longer uses official development assistance to fund Bridge schools, but I want reassurance. First, do the Government agree with Labour that that model of low fee for-profit education is not the way to deliver education to the most marginalised children? Secondly, will the Minister, in her summing up, guarantee that the Government will commit to not supporting such education models in future?
I welcome the recommendations of the new Send My Friend to School report, in particular the one calling on the Government to ensure that education ODA is “free from commercial interests” and does not support for-profit providers, and that
“education is free and universally available at the point of use.”
I recognise that children in the global south deserve the same standards that we expect for our children in the UK.
As I come to a close, I will echo what the hon. Member for Glasgow East said. I too believe that no one in this debate would disagree that all children in the UK have the right to access free public education, regardless of their postcode. I also believe that that standard should be core to our overseas development work on education.