Sustainable Development Goals

Mark Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Member for Bath (Ben Howlett) for initiating this debate and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for speaking with even faster delivery than normal, to ensure that I can say a few words.

I am speaking on the back of an event we held in Speaker’s House yesterday with the all-party group on global education for all, which I co-chair, ParliREACH, Results UK and the Malala Fund, following an incredibly inspirational showing of the film “He Named Me Malala”.

I want to talk in particular about education. First, I commend the far greater detail of the SDGs on educational issues—something on which civil society has been campaigning for years. We have heard about goals 3 and 5. I want to talk about goal 4 and the necessary depth that the SDGs have gone into. I will remind Members of goal 4.1:

“By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete”—

“complete” being the key word—

“free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes.”

Goal 4.5 is:

“By 2030, eliminate gender disparities in education and ensure equal access to all levels of education and vocational training for the vulnerable, including persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples and children in vulnerable situations”—

something that the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) mentioned. Finally, goal 4.c is to increase the supply of qualified teachers by 2030, which is essential.

We have built on the success of the MDGs, but we must now set a target to ensure that the term we used in those goals—out-of-school children—is made redundant in the next 15 years. Globally, 200 million young people still have not completed primary school education, with 60% of them being women. It is about ensuring quality primary and secondary education. The Malala Fund is adamant that we should ensure 12 years of education—not just primary, but meaningful secondary education as well.

Our all-party group has been to Kenya. We talked to many people there who asked us, “What happens then?”—“then” being when primary education finishes. We need to ensure that schooling is adequately resourced in terms of both physical and human resources. While the old MDGs had an emphasis on quantity, we had a healthy debate in New York, and we won talking about quality.

Malala was clear in her film about discrimination against young girls and women. Of course, we must ensure that we address the biggest minority of all: the disabled. In the few seconds I have left, I commend to hon. Members the all-party group’s report entitled “Accessing inclusive education for children with disabilities in Kenya”. I reiterate the point that many hon. Members made today: the Government’s objectives need to be data-related. In other words, data need to be the starting point and we need to know how the Government’s intentions will be monitored. I look forward to the regular progress reports on how we are meeting the all-important SDGs.

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

I ask the Front Benchers to follow the example of the Back Benchers and confine their remarks to about five or six minutes to give the Minister and Mr Howlett time to respond to the debate.

Sustainable Development Goals

Mark Williams Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to say a few words, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to the request of the hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) to hold this important debate.

As chair of the all-party group on global education, I will restrict my comments to the cause of global education. Members of the House would be forgiven, given the enormity of the refugee crisis, for being unaware that Tuesday was International Literacy Day. I echo the words of the director general of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, who rightly described literacy as “a human right”, “a force for dignity” and

“a foundation for cohesive societies and sustainable development”.

How right she was that promoting literacy must be at the heart of the new agenda. By empowering individual women and men, literacy helps to enhance sustainable development across the board, from better healthcare to food security, eradicating poverty and promoting decent work. Few would deviate from that sentiment, and it is borne out in goal 4 of the new sustainable development goals.

The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) is right to describe the millennium development goals as a success. We should not characterise the past 15 years as a failure, but we must be mindful of the need to build on those goals and of the challenge. We need to set the goals for the next 15 years in a spirit of challenge.

There are 250 million children in schools who are not learning basic skills, despite the fact that half of them have spent at least four years in school. There has been success in getting many millions of children into school. The hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) and I went on a trip to Nigeria to see the policies that are getting children who were out of school into school. However, we need to look with renewed vigour at the quality of the education in those schools and at the value we place on the teaching profession across the world. I say that as a former primary school teacher here.

There is a continuing gender divide between boys and girls, although great strides have been taken and DFID has undertaken excellent work to bridge the gap. There remain 774 million illiterate adults in the world—a decline of just 1% since 2000. Some 58 million primary school children remain out of school and 59 million adolescents remain out of secondary school. UNESCO has described this as a global learning crisis, and it is right. In short, this is a period of vastly unfinished business.

If the SDGs are to be effective, they will demand more stability and predictable funding from existing funding mechanisms. The hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) spoke about the different funding cycles, with the 15-year cycles of the targets and the three-year cycles under which DFID operates.

[Mrs Helen Grant]

Funding is essential. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that attracting private finance and embracing the BRIC countries is important?

[Mr Williams]

Given the enormity of the task before us, that is an inevitability. There will be a mix of funding prospects and I will move on to talk about one of them now.

I saw at first hand the approach of the Global Partnership for Education in Tanzania, as well as the funding it secured. It built a partnership between government, civil society, international organisations, students, teachers, foundations and the private sector, and got them all working together. But—and this is a big but—despite the UK making the largest pledge of any donor, the Global Partnership for Education fell well short of its £3.5 billion target. The UK pledge is contingent on the UK making up no more than 15% of donor contributions, and there is concern about the conditionality of that pledge. Although it has already been called for this afternoon, it is critical that the Government continue to put as much pressure as they can on other countries throughout the world to make pledges or to increase their pledges, specifically in the area of education.

Time is short, but I want to reflect quickly on one other issue. One omission from the millennium development goals in respect of education was the issue of disability and access. There was no mention in 2000 of disability. I commend DFID for its disability framework, which is now being enacted, but it is staggering to reflect that disability was not mentioned then. It is mentioned in the sustainable development goals, but, if we are to meet meaningful targets on disability and access to education, we need the data as well. I visited schools in Nigeria and Tanzania, and I will shortly go to Kenya with the all-party group. I do not want to see what I have seen elsewhere, which is little evidence of provision for the disabled or differentiation in treatment. We need data to make a judgment on success and where we need to go.

Finally, SDG 4 makes impressive reading. Many of the overriding omissions in the MDGs—matters we have been campaigning for over many years—have been dealt with and are now included. I do not want, in 15 years’ time, anybody to be talking about vagueness, vacuousness or a lack of enthusiasm in the targets. I therefore suggest that, when the goals are accepted, DFID put in place an overarching strategy for SDG delivery with reviewing and reporting mechanisms, as we have heard this afternoon, so we can assess whether the targets are being met and the wish list, the entitlements of the goals, are practically delivered on the ground for the benefit of humanity.

Sustainable Development Goals (Education)

Mark Williams Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered education and the sustainable development goals.

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Walker. I am glad to have the opportunity to talk about education and the sustainable development goals and financing global education, hot on the heels of the recent debate initiated by the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), who I am glad to see here in the Chamber. I am glad to see the Minister, too. I speak today as co-chair of the all-party group on global education for all. I believe that we cannot raise these matters too often, not least because the sustainable development goals will be finalised at the United Nations meeting in September.

I praise the great Send My Friend to School campaign, which many hon. Members will be aware of in their constituencies. Last week, I was delighted to welcome to the Jubilee Room representatives from schools across the country, including schools in the constituency of the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), who with impeccable timing has just arrived in the Chamber, along with young ambassadors who represented the UK in Ghana. I have visited schools in my constituency, as many hon. Members do, most recently—last Friday— St Padarn’s school in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, where I met children from years 2, 3, and 4 who have been engaged in the cause of getting the 58 million children across the world who are out of school into education.

The World Vision group has declared that the success of the post-2015 framework that replaces the millennium development goals must be measured by its ability to reach the most disadvantaged and vulnerable children in the hardest places to live. Trips I have undertaken with the all-party group to Nigeria and Tanzania in the past two and a half years have convinced me that any new goals on promoting global education will not be delivered by simply doing more of what we are already doing.

Significant progress has been made in recent years in improving the state of the world’s education systems, with the number of children out of school dropping by 48 million since the MDGs were agreed in 2000. However, 58 million children of primary school age still remain out of school; 59 million adolescents are out of secondary school; and, critically, 250 million children—I say this as a former primary school teacher—are in school but failing to learn the most basic of basics. UNESCO has described this as a “global learning crisis”. Adult literacy levels globally have barely improved: between 2000 and 2011 there was a decline of just 1% in the number of illiterate adults. I cite those figures because the majority of the world’s out-of-school children are in sub-Saharan Africa, where many of the Department for International Development’s target programmes—commendable projects—are located.

Education remains the key to successful development, and in that context this year is critical. Last year, the UN’s open working group on sustainable development set 17 goals and a total of 169 targets, to be identified and prioritised in September, which will carry on the work of the MDGs. Education rightly has its own stand-alone goal—goal 4—to

“Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”.

The long list of targets covers universal primary and secondary education; pre-primary, technical, vocational and tertiary education; skills for employment; universal literacy and numeracy; and enabling targets on school infrastructure and supply of qualified teachers. In short, goal 4 of the proposed SDGs is about ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education.

Underpinning the new goals and targets, the current Government and the previous one have led calls for a framework that leaves no one behind, ensuring that

“no target is considered met, unless met for all social groups—with progress on targets disaggregated by wealth, disability and gender.”

In May, the declaration made at the World Education Forum in Korea reaffirmed education as a human right, a public good, and main driver of development in achieving the other proposed SDGs. It set financial targets of 4% to 6% of GDP and contained positive language on access, equity and marginalised groups. There is a strong commitment to teachers who are

“empowered, adequately recruited, well-trained, professionally qualified, motivated and supported”.

The Global Partnership for Education was specifically acknowledged and recognised in the document, with a recommendation that it be part of the future 2030 education agenda.

This is all very positive, but there is concern that with so many goals and targets, laudable though each and every one is, Governments will in a position to pick and choose the ones they work on, and people will be left behind. Will the Minister update us on the outcomes of the separate negotiations on education for all that took place in Korea, and the broader SDG framework? Do the Government regard the two frameworks—the SDGs and education for all—as consistent, or is there risk of mismatch and duplication? We need to clarify that we are moving beyond MDG 2—getting more children into primary school—and doing so in an achievable manner that provides a good-quality education. How is DFID ensuring that the “no target is met unless met for all” principle is underpinning all discussions about the SDGs?

Turning to funding, DFID has a good record of supporting 10 million children in primary and lower secondary education, and particularly in prioritising the most marginalised children in hard-to-reach places, such as children with disabilities and those in conflict areas. I commend in particular the work it has undertaken on the girls’ education challenge, a programme that aims to support an additional 1 million of the world’s poorest girls into school and learning. I have seen at first hand in Nigeria how that works and how it draws young girls into schools, despite the many pressures on them to do otherwise.

I reiterate plaudits for the UK’s pledge of up to £300 million over four years for the Global Partnership for Education. I am sorry to have missed the Welsh-born chair of GPE, Julia Gillard, who was in my constituency on Tuesday getting an honorary degree from Aberystwyth University—a well deserved award.

On a visit to Tanzania with the all-party group, I saw GPE’s work at first hand. Its ethos—being a partnership of Governments, civil society, international organisations, students, teachers, foundations and the private sector, all working together—is the correct one: it is genuinely about partnership. However, despite the UK making the largest pledge by a donor, GPE fell well short of its funding target, with $2.1 billion pledged of a target of $3.5 billion. The UK’s pledge is contingent on the UK making up no more than 15% of total donor contributions, and there is concern—perhaps the Minister can reassure me—that the UK is placing more conditionality on the pledge, potentially reducing further the amount of money to be delivered to GPE.

I am told that the £300 million target, which is conditional on other countries’ pledges, amounts in reality to £210 million—not an insignificant sum, but some way short of £300 million, and it is, of course, consequential on the Government’s getting other countries on board. What success has the Minister and his Department had in getting other countries on board and making pledges and increasing them? In that spirit, I encourage the Government to use their strong position at the third international conference on financing for development in Ethiopia—the hon. Member for Glasgow North mentioned this during business questions in the House today—to ensure that more finances are available to make the SDGs work.

Last December, my noble Friend Lady Northover, then a Minister in the Department, launched the disability framework, which I welcome. I know that work is ongoing, but the framework is an important pledge that the UK will prioritise disability more systematically in overseas aid. The need is clear. There are 93 million disabled children globally, and in most countries they are more likely than any other group to be out of school. In some countries, being disabled more than doubles the chance of a child never going to school, and disabled children are less likely to remain in school.

For far too long, this has been a niche area of development policy. With 80% of disabled people living in developing countries, it is staggering to think that disability was not even mentioned in the millennium development goals of 2000. Disability is a cause and a consequence of poverty. The UN has called the disabled the world’s largest minority, yet in the schools I have visited overseas, there is little evidence of provision for the disabled or any differentiation in treatment or special provision in any guise. The issue needs to be addressed.

Critically, DFID has said that it will work with the GPE, UNICEF and UNESCO and others to improve data on disabled children, and will also share learning and good practice on inclusivity from its programmes in Pakistan, Tanzania and Rwanda, and the girls’ education challenge. What progress has been made in the six months since the launch of the disability framework? If the framework is to be updated and republished annually—an important principle—will the Department consider further commitments on education, such as, for example, ensuring that UK-funded teacher training programmes include inclusive education, if they are not already doing so?

Early childhood development was the subject of a visit to Tanzania by the all-party group and Results UK, the charity that supports the group, at the end of 2013. We produced a report, “You can’t study if you’re hungry”, with which the Department may be familiar. Its central message was that nutrition and early years learning are intrinsically linked. The World Bank has estimated that 200 million children in developing countries under the age of five will not reach their potential. Research and practice are increasingly highlighting the importance of better integration across development policy areas from health and nutrition, education and social protection to water, sanitation and hygiene. The concept of early childhood development and that holistic approach should therefore be a central component of the new SDGs. We were mindful of that in our visits to Tanzania and Zanzibar. Is the early childhood development approach being reflected in DFID’s programmes? How does that work at country level?

Of the 58 million children of primary school age who are out of school, about half—28.5 million—live in conflict areas. A new generation of children hit by emergencies and protracted crises are being deprived of education. As we speak, that is affecting 65 million children in 35 countries, yet last year only 1% of the overall humanitarian aid and 2% of the money from humanitarian appeals went to supporting education in those settings.

Education does not just equip children for the future; it protects them in the present. Children in school are less likely to be trafficked, forced into early marriage or exploited as child soldiers, and they stand a better chance of escaping poverty. More than 30 countries around the world have been affected by widespread attacks on schools. Last year, the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack published new international guidelines to reduce the military use of schools and universities during armed conflict and to minimise the negative impact that armed conflict has on student safety and education. What consideration has the Minister’s Department given to signing up to the guidelines to prevent schools from attack and military use?

This is a vast subject, and I am grateful for the House’s indulgence on a hot Thursday afternoon in allowing me a full 15 minutes or thereabouts to make my case. The size of the subject presents DFID and the international community with huge challenges. The case for education is unquestionable, but it is important that the new goals and the plethora of work towards them are achievable. It is important that the SDGs on education clearly address the case for inclusivity in relation to gender and disability and the issue of conflict areas. Sheer numbers are crucial, and I do not in any way minimise the achievements over the past 15 years, but so too is the standard of education being delivered. We need to measure success and improvement.

One particular group concerns me—the unseen, uncounted and invisible children. That point was brought home to me graphically at the end of 2013, when I visited a street project in Dar es Salaam with the former Labour MP Cathy Jamieson. She did excellent work on this issue when she was in the House. The project was for teenage boys who had a talent for dance. It was located in a deprived district of Dar es Salaam, and the boys performed for us, showing their breakdancing skills. Mercifully, neither Cathy nor I were asked to participate. In that naïve politician’s way, I said to one of the boys, who was probably 15 or 16, “If you are ever in London, come look me up. Come to the Houses of Parliament.” He was intelligent, inspirational and had a dynamic personality, and he responded—not in a hostile way—by saying, “How can I, sir? I have no identity, no birth certificate and no passport. I don’t exist.” That graphically brought home to me the challenge of invisibility and the scale of the problem, but it also brought home to me the potential.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Desmond Swayne)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander). I thank the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) for calling this timely debate. We are well served in this Parliament by such an active all-party group, and I look forward to working with it to advance the agenda at such an important time. I will say a little more about that shortly.

Every Member who has spoken has mentioned the fantastic Send My Friend to School initiative. I recall that when I was the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, at this time of year I was continually ferrying those cardboard cut-outs to No. 10 Downing Street, and I was always impressed not only by the amount of physical work that had gone into them, but by the effort pupils had made to understand the problem and to advocate a solution. As the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) said, that is a guarantee of enthusiasm for our future.

I receive a great deal of correspondence from my constituents complaining about the level of international development aid and how much we are spending, so it is excellent that children in our schools are alive to the very reasons why we need such spending. I look forward to the time when they have more influence on their parents in getting that message across, and as they grow up and change the attitude of society generally. I have said in several forums that one of my ambitions for this Parliament is that, by the end of it, instead of being curmudgeonly about the amount that we spend on international development aid, my constituents will be proud of what we are doing and achieving.

I said that the debate was timely. I acknowledge entirely the concern of the hon. Member for Ceredigion that we have 16 goals and 169 targets. Where does sustainable development goal 4 and the seven targets that underpin it fit into that? I acknowledge the problem. Our ambition was for a smaller number of goals and of targets. The United Kingdom Government, with all their sophistication, measure our economic and social progress across about 60 targets, so I wonder how a Minister in Burkina Faso will be held to account on performance against 169 targets.

Our ambition was for something smaller, and we were prepared to expend a considerable amount of political and diplomatic capital on reopening the question and driving the numbers down to something more manageable. Frankly, our allies did not have the will to come with us, perhaps for understandable reasons. There was a genuine feeling that we had got a good set of goals and we were pleased with them, and any attempt to reopen the question and to narrow the numbers down, perhaps by combining some items—a whole process of reopening negotiations—might lead to a loss of some of the gains made. So we are where we are.

The important debate on much of what the hon. Gentleman discussed begins now. There is a continuing conversation to be had with him and the all-party group about how we should proceed. I extend to him an invitation to meet and continue the discussion with my fellow Minister of State at the Department for International Development, my right hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), who will be dealing with the matter. What underpins the targets are the indicators—the indicators that will be measured to see whether the targets have been achieved—and that discussion will get under way more substantially and be agreed in March next year, so this is a good time for the all-party group and for the Government to consider what the indicators should be and what we believe needs to be counted.

The hon. Member for Lewisham East is right to draw attention to the huge question about the statistics and how we are to disaggregate them in order to be able to measure the very things that we need to measure. For example, we need to know how many disabled children there are and the nature of their disabilities. We have to be able to disaggregate and break down all the statistics to measure properly. We are ahead of the game—indeed, the British Government have been driving the agenda forward—but we all know the political reality: if we cannot count it, it will not count. It is vital that we get the metrics right in order to hold Governments to account for whether they have met the targets.

We have seen what was millennium development goal 1 morph into sustainable development goal 4. The hon. Member for Ceredigion was quite right to express a measure of disappointment about our achievements in relation to the original aim of getting all children into primary education by this year. That will not be achieved. We can say that 90% of children have at least got some sort of education, and he was right to draw attention to the fact that whereas there were 100 million children out of school, that figure is now 58 million—notwithstanding an increase in population, which could mean that the measure is better than it would appear on the surface—but the hon. Gentleman was right indeed to draw attention to the fact that, under those headline figures, there are some real worries, particularly with regard to sub-Saharan Africa and girls’ education. On the latter, if we take the headline figure for those at school, the balance is about 50-50, but there are places where the education of girls is greatly lacking. That has to be dealt with. The hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) is absolutely right that if we are looking for an investment to reduce poverty, the best thing to do to have the greatest impact is secure education for girls.

The hon. Member for Ceredigion was right to suggest that we focused too much on enrolment rather than on the quality of education. As the hon. Member for Lewisham East pointed out, it is all very well to have 250 million children in school for four years, but if they come out unable to read, write or count, the whole enterprise will have been a waste of time. It is a question not just of access but of outcomes. It is worth repeating the sustainable development goal:

“Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”.

I point out to the hon. Gentleman that half of the expenditure on our relevant multilateral programmes is on teacher training. Concentrating on quality is key. I know one of his particular concerns is the need to get away from chalk and talk and to have much more engaging education for children. I entirely support that agenda.

[Mr Mark Williams]

The Minister is right—that is a great interest of mine. Is he satisfied that DFID-promoted teacher training programmes are moving away from chalk and talk and more into diagnostic methods of teaching? That is particularly important for inclusivity with regard to disability. When one travels to schools—something he has done far more than I—one can see the great omission in that respect.

[Mr Swayne]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman’s analysis. Those are the key issues. I share his concerns about the way we teach. I was a teacher myself once; I used a great deal of chalk and talk, and I regret it.

On disability, we have imposed a framework on our Department, after a great deal of thought and a huge amount of consultation, especially with disability groups and their advocates, on the grounds that there should be no decision made about them without them. An enormous effort went into the framework, and it is a living document, to be continually updated and reviewed and republished annually. We have doubled the number of staff working on disability and appointed a champion to take forward the agenda, which will inform absolutely every project that we undertake. Every DFID project must now consider disability on the principle of “nobody left behind”. The hon. Gentleman asked whether our teacher training work takes disability into account. Clearly, the answer ought to be yes, absolutely, because that requirement is now a condition on which the whole Department has to operate.

We are stepping up to the plate. We are spending about £800 million a year on our education effort—a figure that has risen since last year by £180 million. Generally speaking, ICAI’s follow-up report gave us pretty good marks for how we are dealing with education. Our target is that by the end of this year we will have trained 190,000 teachers and educated 11 million children through primary and early secondary school, and I am confident we will meet that target. The manifesto commitment of the new Government is to do that for another 11 million children by 2020.

The principle on which DFID works in delivering our education effort is to combine learning with equity. By learning, we mean that all boys and girls are to gain a foundation in skills to further their education and employment and realise their potential. That means a quality education that delivers what it is supposed to. As I say, that is done on the basis of equity. The hon. Members for Ceredigion, for Glasgow North and for Lewisham East all rightly drew attention to that agenda. It is the key principle.

On disability, the principle of “nobody left behind” must underpin the delivery of our efforts. It is how we will measure whether the goal and the targets have been achieved, and we are making enormous strides on that agenda. For example, any school we fund has to be accessible by disabled people. However, we do not want simply to make things accessible—it is no good children getting into a school if they are not actually learning anything when they are in there. Disabled children must have the same access to education, which is why we have invested heavily in specific projects dealing with the needs of disabled people—for example, providing Braille resources for 10,000 blind children in Ethiopia and for the Ghana Blind Union. We must be much more alive to this issue in the design of our future projects if we are to meet the targets.

The hon. Members for Glasgow North and for Lewisham East both talked about children in conflict areas, Syria in particular. We have put enormous effort into ensuring not just that no child is left behind but that there should be no lost generation. We have invested a huge amount of resource into ensuring that in both Jordan and Lebanon refugee children can be enrolled, through having two shifts, one in the morning and one in the afternoon; there are also enrolment targets.

We are also funding the education Ministries. A new funding model is required for these emergencies. It is no good stumping up money and saying, “Here’s our commitment of £50 million” or £100 million, or whatever it is. Ministers who are delivering education in Lebanon and Jordan need to be assured that the finance will be there next year and the year after if they are to have plans. Therefore, part of our effort has been driving forward the agenda of delivering education over the longer term. That will be part of our agenda in Oslo and Addis: to make sure that finance is available not just as a one-off donation, but on the basis of a commitment on which Governments and Ministers can plan to provide for the educational needs as required.

As for the systems that underpin the principles of learning and equity, I have drawn attention to the fact that we need to address a whole series of statistics and metrics—things that we need to be able to measure—in order to ensure that data are used properly to deliver the outcome that we require.

The new SDG is a considerable expansion beyond the primary objective of the MDG. That raises all sorts of questions about finance, and the hon. Member for Ceredigion was right to consider whether we can provide the finance to deliver the goal. I think that we have to take a step back and consider policy and what we can do to address the needs of lifelong learning in a way that goes well beyond the emphasis on primary education. We are already active in that area. We have been supplying early years education for 150,000 children in Burma, and through the organisation BRAC in Bangladesh we have supplied 2.7 million children with pre-primary education, but we also have to address the needs of tertiary education. We are certainly active in technical and vocational education, but we need to consider particularly the concerns of further education beyond that. Most of our fellow donors deal with that through scholarships, but there is a weakness with scholarships in that all the expenditure is carried out in the donor country. It does not actually get out beyond that to the nations that are developing and that require it. How we deliver such things will have to be considered in more detail than perhaps it has been hitherto. There is a great policy decision to be made.

My view remains that primary education is of key importance in building foundations for development. It is one of the things that delivers huge improvements in delivery of other goals. Education is not only a goal in itself, but the door to other SDGs in terms of health outcomes and economic development. If education has not been delivered on, it will not be possible to deliver economic growth and the healthcare benefits that accrue as a consequence of having educated girls, which leads to later marriage and fewer problems with maternal health. All sort of things are transformed because of education. An additional year of education can increase a worker’s income by 10%, with all the effects that that has.

I would go further and say that the huge benefit of an educated population is that it delivers a stable, well governed country that provides for development—for the golden thread of economic development. Countries are poor because their elites choose to keep their people poor, because it suits them to do so and there is not an educated, active, civil society able to hold them to account. Education will deliver so much more than just the delivery of educational results in themselves.

[Mr Mark Williams]

I am grateful to all the hon. Members who have taken part this afternoon. I look forward to facilitating, on behalf of the all-party group on global education for all, the opportunity to see the Minister’s colleague, the Minister of State, Department for International Development, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps). Yes, education is the great key to individual prosperity and economic growth, and as people of all political persuasions have said in the Chamber this afternoon, it is the key to global and community cohesion as well.

I am genuinely grateful to hon. Members who have taken part. There has been consensus across the House that although the period from 2000 to 2015 has been one of achievement, it has been one of some disappointment as well. It is incumbent on all of us, in all parties in this House, to carry on making the case, particularly in the weeks and months ahead of the discussions in September, so that the SDGs really are meaningful. I would not want anybody to think that my concern about the multiplicity of targets and sub-targets in any way diminishes the need for them. Those targets have emerged for good reason. My intention in raising this issue is to say that if those goals, however many there are, are not achievable, we will be failing many people around the world.

Finally, the Minister alluded to community engagement. One of the great DFID projects that I visited in Lagos was a system of school-based management committees engaging not only children and their parents in education, but the whole community in the value of education. It was an admirable project, and projects such as that need to be encouraged and developed in the future.

Thank you very much, Mr Walker, and I am very grateful to everybody for participating this afternoon.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered education and the sustainable development goals.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mark Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

We have been involved in providing medical support both outside Syria, to refugees in the region, and inside Syria. The hon. Gentleman will be aware that there are now a quarter of a million people living in besieged towns and cities with no access to medical supplies. The situation is dire.

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

4. What assessment she has made of the adequacy of UK support to the Global Partnership for Education.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Lynne Featherstone)]

The UK is currently the largest donor to the Global Partnership for Education, providing on average of £50 million per year from 2012 to 2014. GPE estimates that in 2012 its funding supported around 4.5 million children in primary school, 1.3 million of whom with DFID support.

[Mr Williams]

I thank my hon. Friend for that answer and welcome the Government’s leading role in the Global Partnership for Education, which has done so much to fulfil the entitlement of all children to an education and is now turning its sights to the quality of education through teacher training. Given the Government’s strong support for it, what plans does she have to champion the GP’s replenishment this year and to encourage other donors to come forward?

[Lynne Featherstone]

I thank my hon. Friend for that, and I pay tribute to his work and interest in this area. The UK is currently the largest bilateral donor to basic education. That is the sector in which aid is now declining. We strongly encourage other donors to step up to the plate alongside us, as well as mother countries themselves. We will determine our plans for support to the GP based on the case they make for replenishment. We will use that as a basis for—

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—

UK’s Development Work (Girls and Women)

Mark Williams Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

The hon. Gentleman will be pleased to hear that we are nearing completion of a programme that will up our game in combating human trafficking. We have done a lot of work on it, although it is not quite finished in the sense of us being able to roll it out. We want to do more work on the subject. I have met the head of the all-party parliamentary group on human trafficking, my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone), who has campaigned tirelessly on the issue himself. One of my Department’s roles is not just to focus on countries in which we see women’s rights being eroded, but where aspects of that relate to the UK, to see what we can do by working with UK Government Departments to stop this terrible trade.

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

The Secretary of State rightly makes a lot of empowerment, and I commend the work of her Department in Nigeria, particularly on the development of school-based management committees and girls’ clubs in primary schools. Solidarity is an important facet of dealing with the problem and the Department has gone a long way to achieving it, although there remains much to do. Also critical is the need for more women teachers.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mark Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

1. What steps her Department is taking to improve standards in education in Nigeria.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Lynne Featherstone)]

As discussed with you, Mr Speaker, and as Labour Front Benchers have been advised, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is in Kuwait for an international conference on the humanitarian crisis in Syria. I hope that the House will accept her apologies for not being here to answer questions today.

Our education programmes in Nigeria have already reached 1.25 million children by improving the quality of education in 3,700 schools, and 6,800 more schools will be reached by 2014. We are supporting school-based management committees to make schools and teachers more accountable to parents, and we are providing training to more than 60,000 teachers.

[Mr Williams]

I thank my hon. Friend for that answer and for the reaffirmation of the Government’s commitment to Nigeria, where there are 10.5 million out-of-school children. Inevitably, we focus on the number of children at school, but given the pressures on teacher training, the infrastructure of schools, and the number of children in classes, can we also focus on the quality of the education that those children are receiving?

[Lynne Featherstone]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question and for his work on the all-party group on global education for all. He goes to the heart of the matter, which is not just the number of children coming into school but the quality of the teaching. The statistics show that in Kwara, for example, only 75 of 19,000 teachers passed a test for nine-year-olds—that gives some idea of the scale of the challenge that we are facing. My hon. Friend will therefore be pleased to know that we have a new teacher development programme supporting over 60,000 teachers.

Education Projects (Nigeria)

Mark Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

First, let me congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) on securing the debate. Harrow is a lot easier to pronounce than Ceredigion, but I thank him for his efforts and for allowing me to make a brief contribution to the debate.

My hon. Friend has covered much of the ground regarding our visit to Nigeria, but I just want to reflect briefly on the position of teachers in Nigeria and particularly on the opportunities for meaningful teacher training. The four schools we visited near Abuja and in Lagos were certainly characterised by enthusiastic young people but also by inadequate resources and old-style “chalk and talk” teaching delivered from the front of overcrowded classrooms rather than through engagement with young people. Despite that, the young people we met seemed captivated by the experience and willing to sit it out to progress and try to advance themselves. I shall not forget being taken to a library in one of the schools we visited and seeing a couple of shelves of books, most of which seemed to be redundant computer manuals relating to four redundant computers—redundant because the school had no electricity supply—in the corner of the room.

In addition to what my hon. Friend said in reporting back our experiences, my hope tonight is that DFID will ensure in its reflections on strategies to support teacher training that teachers have the skills they need to teach in a way that is participatory and responsive to individual young people. In other words, while we remain concerned about the scale of the challenge, with the 800,000 people whom DFID projects are going to help back into classrooms, including 600,000 young girls, I hope that quality will become a feature of the teaching debate, not just quantity.

[Mrs Grant]

Does my hon. Friend agree that notwithstanding the enthusiasm of both children and teachers, while we were there we certainly saw evidence of the very large classes, lots of children and sometimes the inadequacy of teacher training?

[Mr Williams]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. I shall come on to that. In a previous life I used to be a primary school teacher. The prospect of teaching 36 children in a school in the west country or in rural Powys fades into insignificance when compared with the size of the classes that we saw in Nigeria.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East will recall a conversation that he and I had in Abuja with Mrs Ozumba, the federal head of primary education, which revealed the problems that Nigeria clasically faces. She said that Nigeria does not have enough people willing to be teachers, especially in rural areas. The profession is not incentivised. There is minimal job security and there are instances of teachers not being paid at all. There is little focus on technical and vocational areas of the curriculum which could benefit the Nigerian economy. Only pre-service teacher training is available. There is little, if any, in-service teacher training, and there is a need to build and cascade down some semblance of a teacher training structure.

There is, as my hon. Friend mentioned, a severe shortage of female teachers, who are essential as role models for young girls in school, and to encourage girls to stay in school and to be allowed by their parents to remain in school. With reference to the conditions that teachers as well as children face, I also remember the Yangoji junior secondary school near Abuja, where there were 788 children with no water supply whatsoever, the borehole that did not yield any water, and the children sitting in classes of 70. That was an issue for the children, but it was an issue also for the teachers.

Despite all the problems, the scale of the problems, the estimated 8.5 million children out of school, the huge sensitivities in the northern territories, and the gender divide, there is vast potential. That is the word that stays in my mind from my first visit to Africa, to Nigeria—the huge potential for that country. It is being advanced through laudable DFID schemes, the awakening of civic society via the school-based management committees that we heard about this evening, and a healthy questioning of where money is being spent. The press in Nigeria is a free press, challenging politicians to account for the money that is being spent and challenging the federal Government to honour the spending commitments that they have made.

DFID’s work remains essential and is much appreciated. The infrastructure works, and sanitation and building projects are evidently succeeding, but I hope DFID will continue with the third sector and the Nigerian Government to look at the human investment required in education. I end with one harrowing piece of research, commissioned by DFID, which suggested that of 42,000 grade 3 teachers in Kwara state who were given a test that their young students should have passed, only 19 passed. In short, I hope we will continue to emphasise and build upon the quality of education, as well as the quantity.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mark Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr O'Brien]

We pressed for that to take place, and I am aware that the candidates who will be considered for the post are well forward in the process. We are encouraged that that is going to be taking place, and it has our full support.

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

13. What steps he is taking to seek to ensure that the millennium development goals relating to education are met.

[The Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Andrew Mitchell)]

Achieving the millennium development goals, including those for education, is at the heart of the Government’s development policy. We are reviewing all our programmes to ensure we focus on those that deliver maximum value for money.

[Mr Williams]

I thank the Secretary of State for that response, but may I also commend to him the Global Campaign for Education’s work on this matter, in particular its request that the UK Government commit themselves to a 10-year sector plan for education? If there is one thing that education needs, particularly primary education, it is stability in those funding streams.

[Mr Mitchell]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about consistency and clarity of funding, and we will be looking at all these points in connection with the bilateral review of how we spend money in each of our target countries. As he knows, an important conference is taking place this weekend in South Africa, which I hope a Minister will be able to attend.