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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Inequality: The Case of Education

Wed, March 8, 9:45 to 11:15am, Sheraton Atlanta, Grand Ballroom B (South Tower)

Proposal

Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for sustainable development (UN, 2015) has a good deal to say about inequality, as well as about equality, quality and equitable access to education and health.

Indeed, there is a whole SDG 10 which is dedicated to inequality: ‘Reduce inequality within and among nations’. It covers many dimensions of inequality from income to inclusion, and global financial markets to migration. Surprisingly there is no specific mention of educational inequality in any of the ten targets of SDG 10. There is of course an important emphasis on equity at the heart of SDG 4 on education: ‘ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education’, and this is reflected in the SDG 4 target 4.1.

But this valuable emphasis on free, equitable and quality education for all boys and girls says nothing about the many dimensions of educational inequality that are evident in both developed and developing economies. These would include the massively influential private, fee-paying institutions (from pre-school to university) that are operating usually in English or another international language. They would also encompass those systems of education where early selection (from age 11 or younger) divides pupils into highly differentiated secondary and further education, whether these options are termed traditional, academic, vocational or grammar. There are also educational inequalities by location, where there are major differences in provision between schools in urban slums or in poor rural areas and those in wealthy urban suburbs.

It may be argued that these and many other dimensions of educational inequality will be made evident and controlled if there is a very thorough reporting and monitoring on targets such as SDG 4.1 with its clear emphasis on free, equitable and quality education. However, what the UN’s member states will be reporting upon are the global indicators for the SDG targets. And in the current draft of such indicators there is no longer any mention of ‘free’. And ‘quality’ gets translated into merely ‘a minimum proficiency level’ in reading and mathematics.

Similar concerns may be raised about what gets lost in translation when relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment and decent jobs get translated into a global indicator that is only concerned with ICT skills.

The paper will interrogate how the highly inclusive multi-stakeholder process of setting the global goals and targets is in danger of being watered down and even lost in the crucially important process of setting the global indicators for their monitoring and reporting.

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