NN37, May 2006
Special Theme on Education and Training out of Poverty? A Status Report
RESEARCH CONSORTIUM ON EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES AND POVERTY (RECOUP)
By Christopher Colclough, Cambridge
A new Research Consortium on Educational Outcomes and Poverty, has recently won funding of £2.5 million over a five year period from DFID. The Consortium, led by Professor Colclough of the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge includes partner institutions from Ghana, Kenya, India and Pakistan and from the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford.A core idea of this research programme is that simple expansion of education does not necessarily benefit the poor: poverty often leads to inferior educational outcomes; those outcomes in turn play a major role in determining the future incidence and extent of poverty. The research will study the mechanisms that drive this cycle of deprivation, and identify the policies needed to ensure that educational outcomes benefit the disadvantaged.
Over the next decade, more children than ever before ? particularly those from poor households ? will be moving through schooling and training to become working youths and adults. Their fortunes will be affected not only by their educational experiences, but also by the broader context of welfare and opportunity they confront. The multi-sectoral objectives of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) acknowledge this inter-dependence. Yet its nature and strength are not fully understood, and judgements about priorities for policy change, or about their sequencing, are not always firmly based. The research will help clarify these matters, focusing upon the circumstances of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa ? the two regions where the challenge of achieving the MDG objective of halving world poverty by 2015 is greatest and where the policy benefits are most urgently required.
Research has shown that schooling increases earnings; that primary schooling can deliver particularly strong economic benefits; that schooling helps to improve productivity in urban and rural self-employment; that other development goals in the areas of population control, health and nutrition are more rapidly achieved where education is widely available; and that education affects values and attitudes, the acquisition of ?social capital? and more democratic governance.
However, we are less sure of why some of these relationships occur, and about whether they continue to hold. Extant estimates of rates of return to education are methodologically unsound, often out of date, and frequently omit consideration of differences in ability, parental background or school quality. Circumstances have changed, particularly in Africa, where labour market conditions (with at best slowly growing formal employment and greatly increased outflows of primary leavers from quality-constrained school systems) suggest that economic returns at primary level have fallen relative to higher levels of education. Primary schooling alone may, then, no longer deliver the full benefits previously associated with it. The intrinsic and human rights cases provide sufficient justification for the universalisation of primary schooling, but the full development benefits of its achievement may, in future, be gained only if secondary level expansion targets are increased, and/or if much greater attention is paid to improving the quality of primary schooling. The research should facilitate a more subtle interpretation of the MDG goals and targets, contributing to our understanding of the processes and consequences of educational development and of priorities for national and international policy.
RECOUP Website http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/RECOUP/index.html
Email recoup@hermes.cam.ac.uk