Global Education: G20 Summit

Debate between Stephen Twigg and Graham Stringer

Thursday 6th July 2017 Westminster Hall

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Order. If hon. Members wish to remove their jackets, they have the Chair’s permission so to do.

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered promotion of education for all at the G20 summit.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. Before moving on to the subject of today’s debate, may I take this opportunity to welcome the letter that the Secretary of State for International Development sent to all MPs about the small charities challenge fund? This is a very positive development, which the International Development Committee called for in the previous two Parliaments. It gives smaller UK-based charities the opportunity to access Department for International Development funding to support projects to tackle extreme poverty in some of the poorest countries in the world.

As G20 leaders, including the Prime Minister, meet in Hamburg, this debate is an opportunity for the House to reaffirm the crucial importance of investment in education to tackle poverty and inequality across the world. Millennium development goal No. 2 related to the aspiration for universal primary education. There has been remarkable progress across the world: globally, the number of children not in primary school has been cut by 42% since the year 2000. We should pay tribute to all those who made that important progress possible, not least the civil society and campaigning organisations that worked so hard to secure those goals.

However, there remain about 263 million children and young people around the world who are not in school. Most disturbingly, in Africa today the number of out-of-school children is on the increase, and one in five girls there does not receive a basic education. Globally, millions of children are in school but are not getting even the basics of literacy and numeracy. It is estimated that there are 330 million such children around the world.

I pay tribute to Mark Williams, the former Member of Parliament for Ceredigion. Mark represented that constituency for 12 years, from 2005 until this general election. Between 2010 and 2017, he chaired the all-party parliamentary group on global education. During that period, he led two overseas delegations with the all-party group to Nigeria and Kenya. He hosted countless events and meetings, and engaged with several Ministers on this issue throughout his time as chair. I am sure Members on both sides of the House will wish to join me in wishing Mark Williams well for the future.

May I also take the opportunity to encourage Members on both sides of the House to join the all-party parliamentary group on global education, which does fantastic work? I thank RESULTS UK for its work in this area and for helping me prepare for this debate.

Education is at the heart of the battle against global poverty and inequality. The sustainable development goals include SDG 4, which I will return to in a moment, but education is linked inextricably to all 17 of the global goals. Investing in education can improve outcomes in health, empower women and girls, and reduce inequality. Educated populations are much better equipped to build sustainable societies that can move towards the self-financing of development programmes so they cease to be reliant on aid from wealthier countries. We know from our own experience that education is an investment in our economy. An extra year of schooling can increase someone’s earnings by up to 10%, so investing in education is critical if we are to close the global skills gap and secure the jobs of the future.

The Government’s aid strategy has at its core the goal of strengthening global peace, security and governance. Historical analysis demonstrates that inequality itself fuels social unrest, and evidence suggests that when educational inequality doubles, the probability of conflict more than doubles. Most importantly, education is a human right enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights, the United Nations convention on the rights of the child, and the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights. Every child should have the right to a quality education.

As we know, the United Kingdom is the only G7 country that allocates the UN-recommended 0.7% of GNI to overseas development assistance. As I said during the Queen’s Speech debate last week, I very much welcome the fact that the Queen’s Speech reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to 0.7%. The UK is recognised as a global leader in providing aid for education, and we rank second only after the United States in the amount of aid we invest in basic education.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rory Stewart]

The hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way. He raises a vital question: what does one do in a poor country with a stretched education budget that is finding it difficult to provide decent primary education or any secondary education at all? How does he envisage the conversation with the Education Minister in such a country about setting up the entire pre-primary education and early learning structure, and about the competing priorities that that involves? Has he seen any examples of that actually working on a systematic basis in a poor developing country?

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Order. This is a relaxed debate—it is not over-subscribed—but can Members please keep interventions relatively short?

[Stephen Twigg]

I am grateful to the Minister for his characteristically thoughtful intervention, which speaks to a broader debate about education and where spending priorities should lie. I certainly do not suggest a one-size-fits-all approach for every country in which DFID operates.

To answer the Minister’s question, we saw evidence of that working well in Kenya, where I was impressed by the existing investment programme for early childhood education. In a sense, this is linked to my earlier point about the domestic budgets of recipient countries. Those of us who went to Uganda and then to Kenya were struck that Kenya devotes a significantly larger part of its budget to education than Uganda, and it has chosen to allocate part of that to early childhood education. My argument is this: DFID should seek to increase its funding for early childhood education programmes and, importantly, to integrate those programmes with other relevant areas of the human development portfolio, such as child health and nutrition.

Many Members will be aware of the Send My Friend to School campaign, which for more than a decade has engaged with Members of Parliament up and down the country and invited us into schools in our constituencies to talk about global education. Last year, the campaign engaged something like 400,000 young people, and this year more than 2,000 schools have signed up to it. Next Wednesday, 12 July, 20 students from around the country will come here to Westminster to discuss their campaigning with key decision makers, both in Parliament and in the Government. I look forward to meeting them, and I know that other former members of the International Development Committee in the last Parliament will meet them too.

Many of the students will meet their own local MPs, the Foreign Secretary’s special envoy for gender equality will meet them, and I understand that they will pay a visit to No. 10 to hand in a letter. I believe that an invitation has been sent to the Secretary of State for International Development, and I hope that she might find time in her busy schedule to meet them too.

I am grateful to Mr Speaker for granting the debate, which gives Parliament an early opportunity to address the challenges of global education. It is especially timely because it comes at the beginning of the G20 summit. If I am re-elected as Chair of the International Development Committee in this Parliament, I will propose that the Committee resumes and completes its inquiry into global education.

I look forward to listening to contributions to the debate, but I am particularly keen to hear from the Minister a sense of when we might expect a full response to the letter that I sent on behalf of the previous Committee to the Secretary of State. I appreciate that I sent it just as we finished for the general election and it covered a lot of issues, but it would be useful to have a sense of when I might receive a full response.

As I said, it would also be useful to have, at an early opportunity, a full breakdown across Departments of all United Kingdom ODA spending on education. Given the focus of the G20, will the Government commit to making a substantial contribution to the Global Partnership for Education during its replenishment for 2018 to 2020 and push for a G20 leaders’ communiqué that commits to funding key multilateral organisations, including GPE, Education Cannot Wait and the international finance facility for education?

Investment in global education is vital to tackling poverty and inequality, to securing future economic growth, jobs and livelihoods, and to addressing the causes and consequences of conflict. I once again praise DFID for its global leadership in this area, but I urge the Department and the rest of the Government to go further, because investment in education today pays enormous social and economic dividends tomorrow.

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Before I call the Front-Bench spokespeople, I advise new hon. Members that, if any hon. Member wishes to speak, they need to stand. I have had no applications to speak; that is just advice.