Post-2015 Development Agenda

Mark Williams Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I will not take 12 minutes and will avoid repetition, because there have been some strong messages from hon. Members of all parties, often tempered by our own experiences in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Malawi, and Nigeria, for example. I will mention Nigeria as well. I co-chair the all-party group on global education for all, and part of that work took me to Nigeria a year ago, focusing on education. We were delighted to see other projects, including in schools in urban and rural settings, near Abuja, the capital, and Lagos. I shall talk about education, although not exclusively.

The second millennium development goal called for all children to be able to complete a full—I emphasise “full”—course of primary education. Yes, there is great cause for celebration in what has been achieved so far, as we have heard, in the past 13 years. None of us, wherever we come from, are under any illusion. There is much work to be done. Some 61 million primary schoolchildren remain out of school and 250 million children are unable to read and write by the time they should be reaching stage 4 at school. If we are to reach the goal, we require another 1.7 million teachers, 1 million in Africa alone. Some 775 million adults are illiterate, two thirds of those being women.

Education is widely recognised as one of the most effective development interventions. Equal access to education for all reduces inequality and poverty and increases empowerment. I was struck by the case for community empowerment made by the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), in terms of business and enterprise and getting community engagement in projects. The hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) mentioned community empowerment in schools.

We visited a school-based management committee in Lagos. It was particularly inspiring to see people who have not been engaged in education in any way at all—traders and local people from various backgrounds— coming together on a committee to demand the rights that are enshrined in Nigerian law at federal level, right the way through to provincial level, although often ignored by governors. The school I visited lacked a tin roof and the school-based management committee got together and, by weight of numbers, forced the governor to invest the money that was required. That is real empowerment, and also, critically, it is educating parents about the value of education as well. It is not just about the practicalities.

There is concern as we head towards 2015. As UNESCO reported in its 2012 global monitoring report,

“the world is not on track”

to achieve universal primary education by 2015. Yes, we are right to celebrate, but as the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) said in terms of health, we have to reaffirm our commitment to the simple, clear, concise goals. But the education goal must be at the forefront. Inequalities in education are a huge barrier. We have heard about the gender issues. Although education for girls is being addressed, it still remains a fundamental issue for many countries.

We visited a school in Nigeria with a sound DFID-sponsored scheme, promoting girls’ clubs in schools. Challenges, such as parents being unwilling to send their children to school, and issues to do with sanitation, water supply and hygiene, could be tackled by the girls and talked about with them, in a spirit of solidarity, and sometimes those issues were taken to the schools’ management.

There is a huge disparity in some countries between rich and poor. Globally, in the poorest fifth of households, less than two thirds of all school-aged children enrol in school, compared to 90% of children from the richest families. In Nigeria, there could not be a starker contrast between the rich families who have benefited from Nigeria’s economic prosperity, in some urban areas in particular, and those in rural areas.

[Mr Graham Brady in the Chair]

Children in rural areas who live in informal settlements also face difficulties in accessing education and if they do so it is of poor quality. We heard an encouraging story from the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch about a teacher training college. But when we were there we heard that the majority of children in Nigerian primary schools are being taught by teachers with fewer qualifications than the children aspire to. That was a real worry. I used to be a primary school teacher in this country and it was a joy to go back to a classroom and teach in a Nigerian school, I hope with some experience and knowledge to impart. The teachers were enthusiastic and they have strong teaching unions behind them that are enthusiastic on their behalf, to get proper recognition for the teaching profession. Hearing that some teachers in some states in Nigeria had not been paid for several weeks, if not months, hardly inspires people to enter the teaching profession.

Disabled children and those with learning difficulties in many countries that we are talking about face huge barriers to accessing education. Being disabled more than doubles a child’s chance of never enrolling in school, in some countries, and primary school completion and literacy rates for disabled children are consistently below those of non-disabled children. Certainly, in the schools we visited there was no evidence of differentiation in what was taught, to use teacher speak—what teachers are delivering—or what was learnt and little recognition of the facilities required for children with special educational needs.

What should those goals be and how should we reaffirm them, post 2015? Of course, all countries need urgently to try to achieve MDG 2 by 2015—all children having access to primary education, a basic necessity. The UK plays a key role as a world leader and provides aid for education. Like everybody, whatever our backgrounds, we hon. Members welcome what was said yesterday. We wish the Prime Minister well in the leadership role that he will be pursuing on our behalf.

Some would argue that MDG 2’s scope had too narrow a focus, compared with the education for all girls scheme, agreed in Dakar in 2000. This has led us to focus on access rather than completion; on getting children into primary schools, in particular, rather than keeping them there. We have heard about the transition to secondary school and then on to tertiary education. That needs to be dealt with. The primary education that we are striving to get for each child needs to be completed and needs to be worth completing.

We need to focus on quality as well as quantity and look at provision of teacher training across the board. We must also concentrate on teaching materials. We need more teachers to deliver a better quality of education. It would be fair to characterise most Nigerian education as “chalk and talk,” with someone standing in front of a blackboard and addressing the class. We got rid of that in this country in the 1960s, but whether that was a good thing or a bad thing is for another debate. I am a former teacher, and I would like to think that I was progressive. Chalk and talk does not always get the best results from children, and it needs to be addressed.

As every previous speaker has said, we need to aim for a more interconnected set of goals. We need to recognise that nutrition and hunger affect education. Children must be nourished to concentrate on learning. When I was a teacher, this country debated whether children should have plastic bottles of water on their desk to avoid being dehydrated so that they could concentrate better and gain more from lessons. At the school I visited near Abuja, the bore hole had long since dried up, so there were 600 children with no water supply whatever.

We must ensure that both boys and girls are able to access education, and significant progress has been made on that through MDG 3. Skills and employment have already been mentioned, but fundamentally we need to consider equality so that wealth, location and disability are not an impediment to accessing education.

Measurement of those goals is important. Groups such as Results UK, ADD International and others have called on DFID to ensure either that separate indicators are included in future development goals or that standalone goals are established for things such as disability. The Under-Secretary of State for International Development, my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) met representatives at an early stage to discuss those matters, which is important.

I am conscious of time, and I know that more distinguished speakers than I wish to speak. The hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) talked at the start about political leadership, and he talked about this country using polite muscle and friendly dialogue with other countries. From my Nigerian experience I am conscious that those countries have a responsibility to feed through policies from the centre. Words written on great sheaves of documentation at federal level must permeate through to provincial and village levels with the appropriate resources.

Taxpayers in this country are conscious of where their money is going, where it is being spent and whether it is being utilised properly, so the Government should continue to do everything they can to ensure that the aid directed by this country delivers results on the ground. My simple plea is that the Government reaffirm that “education, education, education” is at the top of the post-2015 agenda.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—