NN37, May 2006
Special Theme on Education and Training out of Poverty? A Status Report
EDITORIAL
By Kenneth King, Hong Kong (and Edinburgh)
This issue is about Education and Poverty, and also about Skills and Poverty. It should provide the readership with a rich range of the debates about this topic. It is difficult to synthesise the sheer range of what our members and contributors have written on this. The range is enormous ? from pre-schools and the reproduction of poverty, to the role of skills in poverty alleviation, to universities, and to literacy campaigns.We also provide the reader with guidance on where very fresh work has just been published on this topic, but also on what are the plans of the three new consortia funded by DFID that will be looking at access, quality and outcomes in international education. All of these consortia are of course working both in the North and the South, and as luck would have it, all are working in Ghana. Hence the development of a special centre on basic education research.
This special issue of NORRAG NEWS also draws on the fact that at the recent Oxford conference in September 2005, a whole Symposium over the length of the conference was dedicated to analysing Educating and Training out of Poverty. This section was organised by Pauline Rose and Kenneth King. We are including many of the summary arguments (revised) from that conference symposium.
This issue of NN is being edited in China; hence it is entirely appropriate to interrogate our Chinese colleagues on what they think the lessons have been here on educating so many millions out of poverty.
Since NN36, many of us involved in the core organisation of NORRAG have been doing some intensive reflection about NORRAG?s ability to get its messages into the policy and academic arena more effectively. And we have reached the conclusion that this process can be much helped by having short sharp Policy Briefs. We have done a trial one on NN36, which is on the website. But for this issue on Educating out of Poverty we shall try in the next couple of weeks to get a pithy Executive Summary of these next many pages on to the website. We shall let you know when we do that.
Of course we are aware of the dangers of seeking to over-summarise things. Over-summarising endangers the necessary complexity of reality. We all know the famous over-summary: ?Four years of education makes a difference to agricultural productivity.? Nothing so simple was said by the three researchers who did the work back in the early 1980s! And the same will be true of this issue. There is no single message, for example, about China or India or even about Ghana. There are several Indias, Chinas and Ghanas.
Still, protected by several health warnings, we shall try to produce a policy brief for this issue.
A second thing we are going to do, starting today, is to encourage more country level engagement by those who are members of NORRAG. Thanks to the access free to the website, the numbers of NORRAG members has grown rapidly. Instead of a handful of individuals in a country like South Africa, Ghana, Netherlands or Switzerland, there are now 20, 30 or 40. Hence we have asked two or three individuals to become catalysts at the country level for brokering NORRAG and NN with the academic and policy communities. We shall run a series of meetings around this concept. Starting with China on the 25th May, and then Ghana in July, and UK in September, there are meetings to discuss the whole issue of dissemination and policy interaction at the country level. Of course if there are no policy people who are members of NORRAG, that wont work. But for most countries, it seems that there are. The challenge is more effectively to engage with them.
We want to welcome Gerrit Holtland to NORRAG. He is based in NUFFIC but he has begun to do some keen thinking on how we best address this policy access question. We should also welcome Robert Palmer who will become NORRAG Assistant for Development, following Barbara Trudell. The names of some of the country coordinators are mentioned later on.
We want to note the passing of Phil Coombs. There are few of us who are not aware of his World Crisis in Education, or who have not engaged with his reconceptualisation of formal, non-formal and informal education. He was the first Director of the IIEP. And it is appropriate here to note the arrival of the new Director, Mark Bray. We wish him well in this institute fashioned and given independence by Phil.
Kenneth King
Hong Kong
26th May 2006