Educational Equity as a Key Component in Universal Primary Education

“If you wanted to change a culture in a single generation, how would you do it?

You would change the way it educates its children.” Schooling the world documentary

The race towards universal primary education has been ongoing since the start of this millennium. The annual GEM Report 2017 indicates that only 1 out of every 5 countries in the world guarantees free primary education. Even in developed countries where the high rates of school drops are reported the race for universal primary education is far from over. Closer home in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), governments and education stakeholders are making efforts to ensure that every child has access to equal educational opportunities irrespective of their circumstances. But the challenges remains; including the lack of total elimination of school dropout and lack of equal opportunity of access to educational opportunities for all learners regardless of their social and economic background. In Schooling the World documentary, the issue of equitable access to education even among the poor is explored. An equitable approach recognizes that some people, because of an accident of birth or circumstance, need more help than others to achieve their goals in life. However, it is this very designation of equity when it comes to education that presents a challenge to provision of educational opportunities to children from poorest families in the society.

Whereas it is difficult to achieve total equality in learning outcomes in every individual learner, every child is able-d differently. Therefore, equity in learning provides every child with an opportunity to an equal playing field in education. Evidence has shown that children from poor families are disproportionately under-represented or lack of it thereof, in school and hence cannot not run at the same pace with those from comparatively richer families.  This notwithstanding, all children can achieve high performance rates if the educational opportunities are distributed based on meritocracy. Though merit remains a contested measure of educational performance, it could be used alongside the egalitarian principles which advocates for universal access to primary education.

A minimum standards approach to education can help education stakeholders to view their effort through a binary lens. This means that either the learner is enrolled in school or not; the learner is literate or not. In this case, the criteria for each learner must be fulfilled and therefore use an absolute measure of learners who meet minimum standards, for example, being in school and being literate is an absolute measure of basic equity in education. Where all the children have an equal access to education, then it can be said that education equity is present. However, the approach should be with a lot of care as minimum standards are not sufficient with the characteristic of education equity envisaged in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). An outstanding element of SDGs when it comes to education equity is the focus on the element of impartiality in which goal-setting compares groups such as boys and girls, rural and urban areas, and rich and poor, with the explicit aim that group differences in educational outcomes should be reduced and eventually eliminated.

An important aspect in embrace for impartiality in education to check the minimum standards and how they are being met across the learning spectrum. But it can also be used to identify the inherent differences in learning outcomes across the spectra. This approach prevents the meritocratic system to justify an unfair distribution. Most importantly though is that impartiality measures are a great tool to identify most disadvantaged groups and therefore help in pinpointing the policy to deserving learners.

As the race towards universal primary education continues in SSA, there is a need to address holistically the issue of equity of education to ensure that all targeted learners benefit despite their conditions in life. The graph has skewed towards those who are underprivileged in one way or the other (gender, poverty, resources, exclusion, discrimination etc) but enhancing the explored factors can help to institute equity in education. Moreover, governments, investors, and sponsors of education programs must put in place policies to promote equality of opportunities for all potential learners from wherever place they may be in the country. The earlier the realization that universal primary education cannot be achieved unless education equity is entrenched in the system the better.