The SDG 4 – Education 2030 agenda emphasizes equity and inclusion and echoes to the fact that human rights and the right to education have taken on renewed importance in recent years. The global education agenda can be seen, on the one hand, as another steering mechanism to realize the right to education but, on the other hand, the continued focus on national performance might steer education processes and reforms away from the rights of individuals. Many hurdles persist to realize the vision and values behind the right to education, which remains a loosely defined imperative. Within this cluster a particular focus is put on second-chance education, that is, on those youth that either never enrolled or dropped out from formal schooling. One of the great barriers for never-enrollment or drop-out youth is the language of instruction in schools. As a result, NORRAG pays special attention to bilingual education and community schools.

As the number and type of private and non-state actors engaging in education and development sector is growing across the world, NORRAG aims to deepen the collective knowledge of the sector and its evolution. It seeks to unpack the engagement of philanthropies, the mounting numbers and modalities of alternative and innovative financing mechanisms, and the private sector in general, in terms of their impact on the provision, quality and equality in education.

With a growing emphasis being put on the needs to equip youth with the means to adapt to the fast-paced changing relationship between education and the labor market, this thematic cluster focuses on the relationship between basic education and vocational skills development (VSD). Basic education lays the foundations for VSD and provides youth with transversal skills that support them throughout their lives as citizens. Vocational skills are, for many, a mean to be lifted out of poverty. As such, a particular attention is given to interlinked basic education and skills development approaches for marginalized populations and drop-outs for the reintegration into the education system and the labor market.