Articles from 2010/11

 


Managing change through a quality teaching workforce

Dr Pauline Greaves, head of education, commonwealth secretariat
In a world where instability is often portrayed as the norm and where more than half a billion people live in 35 states identified as fragile (EFA Global Monitoring Report 2008), education remains critical to the survival…

UNESCO and the commonwealth – our common education goals

Qian Tang
Both UNESCO and the Commonwealth are firmly committed to education as a human right and the key to sustainable human development. The reasons for this commitment are clear: education reduces…

‘The future is not what it used to be!’

Professor John
WoodOur world is changing at a faster rate than ever before. Global communications and an increasing awareness of the global challenges facing all citizens have opened the minds of policy-makers and governments…

Commonwealth of learning: review and improvement model

Dr Willie Clarke-Okah and Sir John Daniel
In countries where quality assurance systems are not well established, universities can find it useful to invite external visitation panels to advise them on quality improvement and wider issues. However, these can be costly. Drawing…

Access to and achievement of quality education in South Africa

Department of Basic Education, Petoria, South Africa
Since 1994, South Africa’s education policy and legislation has been largely concerned with processes of transforming the systemic legacy of apartheid. The burden upon all involved in the complex process of restructuring…

UNICEF’s work on gender and education in Rwanda

Iseult KestelynGirls’ education in Rwanda
The process of enhancing the rights of girls to education through the sector-wide approach (SWAp) in Rwanda began in 2004 with a national girls’ education campaign under the patronage of the First Lady…

Promoting success for Maori learners in New Zealand

Makere Smith and Carol Mutch
Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, comprise 15 per cent of the population. The educational achievement of Maori, as shown in national assessments1 and international comparative studies2 is much lower than…

Commentary on Aboriginal Education in Canada

The Right Honourable Paul Martin
The Issues
With few exceptions, the history of indigenous peoples throughout the world is one of unspeakable mistreatment, and Canada is…

Teacher education at a crossroads: the imperatives for reform

Bob Moon
Teaching has always been an uncertain profession. In Villette, Charlotte Bronte’s heroine, Lucy Snowe, anguishes over revealing to her future parents that she is a teacher. A protagonist in Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s…

Meeting the growing demand for teacher education

Commonwealth of learning
Developing countries in the Commonwealth are firmly committed to the attainment of the Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015, particularly the goal of providing access to…

Recognising teacher qualifications in the Commonwealth

James Keevy
How can a teacher’s qualifications be adequately recognised when he/she migrates to Canada from, say, the UK? Or decides to move from Barbados to New Zealand, or from South Africa to the Cameroon? Increasing…

The Commonwealth’s co-LEAD project

Professor Petros Pashiardis and Dr Stefan Brauckmann
School leadership: why does it (still) matter?
We live in an era of complexity. The only stable factor is constant change. In the last 30 years, we have seen change as never before and educational leaders around the globe must learn to adapt to…

The successes and failures of the campaign for Universal Primary Education

Sir John Daniel
Why Education for All?
In his classic, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote: The more (ordinary people) are instructed the less liable they are to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition, which, among ignorant nations…

Open school: catalysts for creating an education fit for the 21st century

Frances Ferreira
Open schools are urgently needed to provide access to education for millions of children who currently have no access to any formal schooling. While the world average for secondary school enrolment is 66%…

The evolution of the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth

John Lesperance
The Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC) is an initiative of the education ministers of the 32 small countries that account for two-thirds of Commonwealth membership…

Sharing the garden: working with OERs in African teacher education

Tessa Welch
The title for this article comes from The Selfish Giant, a short story by Oscar Wilde. This children’s story is about a giant who goes away from his castle for seven years only to come back and find that the garden, full of beautiful flowers and…

 Multi-grade teaching in South Africa

Dr Jurie Jouber
In order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), specifically the first two which focus on reducing hunger and poverty by half and ensuring universal primary education (UPE) by 2015, we need to change…

Including pastoralists in education for all

Caroline Dyer
In 1990, Article 3 of the World Declaration on Education for All identified nomads as one of several groups who are discriminated against in access to education services. It demanded ‘an active commitment’ to…

Coming to terms with boys at risk in Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean

Mark Figueroa
A Regional Caribbean Initiative on Keeping Boys Out of Risk, currently supported by the World Bank and the Commonwealth Secretariat, resulted in two recent conferences. One of them, Boys and Education: A Life…

Gender differentials in Caribbean educational systems

Barbara Bailey and Suzanne Charles
The Dakar Framework for Action1 emanating from the 2000 Education for All conference advocates that education is not only a fundamental human right, but is a requisite to meeting the demands of the 21st century…

Key areas of disparity in the provision of education in Solomon Islands

Stanley Houma
Solomon Islands is an archipelago of 922 islands located in the South West Pacific about 1,860km northeast of Australia. The group consists of six large islands and hundreds of small islands and islets…

Making education inclusive of children with disabilities in Samoa

Galumalemana Nuufou Petaia
In April 2010, eight Pacific States met in Apia, Samoa, for the first time for a Commonwealth Secretariat Consultation on Education. They were given the opportunity to ‘make connections and build partnerships’…

The Global Campaign for Education (GCE)

Kailash Satyarthi
The world is full of urgent and emotive causes. Whether it’s the floods in Pakistan or the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, we are never far from heart-wrenching images that are beamed around the world…

Creating new schools using evidence-based solutions – a case study

Jenny Lewis
In a world that is constantly changing, there is not one subject or set of subjects that will serve you well for the foreseeable future, let alone for the rest of your life. The most important skill to acquire now is…