Senior Policy Analyst on the Education for All Global Monitoring Report team Aaron Benavot reported yesterday that the Education for All goals has not been achieved.

Benavot made this report during his presentation at the 19th Conference of Commonwealth Education Minister’s (19CCEM) Youth Forum at Atlantis, as he presented the 40th launch of the Global Monitoring Report on Education.

Although, the global educational goals were not met, Benavot said progress has been made.

The first goal focuses on early childhood care and findings associated with this goal indicate that mortality dropped by 50 per cent, but 6.3 million children around the world still die before the age of five.

Also, malnutrition fell by 40 per cent, but one in four children are still short for their age.

The report noted that only half of the countries in the world achieved a pre-primary enrolment ratio of 80 per cent and only 40 countries have made pre-primary education compulsory.

The second goal focuses on access to quality education, including compulsory primary education, for children.

For this goal, findings indicate that despite progress, just over half of the countries have reached universal primary enrolment.

This year alone, 57 million children are out of primary school and 100 million children will not complete primary school in 2015, according to the report.

The third goal seeks to ensure that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life-skills programmes.

However, the finding revealed that less than half of the countries achieved universal lower secondary education by 2015.

Also, 63 million adolescents remain out of school and only one in three adolescents will complete lower secondary school in low-income countries in 2015.

The report added that the number of working youth has not decreased.

The fourth goal seeks to achieve a 50 per cent improvement in adult literacy by 2015 and equitable access to basic and continuing education for all adults.

However, the report indicates that progress towards EFA’s fourth goal has been slow.

“The global adult illiteracy rate will have fallen by only 23 per cent by 2015, far short of the 50 per cent target,” the report read.

The report pointed out that only a quarter of countries reduced their adult illiteracy rates by 50 per cent and 781 million adults are denied the right to literacy, of which two-thirds are women, unchanged since 2000.

In Sub-Saharan Africa half of all women cannot read or write to community standards.

The objective of the fifth goal is to eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005 and achieve gender equality in education by 2015.

As it relates to this goal, findings indicate the strong movement towards gender parity, but almost a third of the countries in the world did not reach gender parity in primary education and a half of the countries did not reach it in secondary education, while defining and measuring gender equality.

The final goal seeks to improve all aspects of the quality of education, especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills.

Findings associated with this goal reveal that while many countries made impressive gains in access to education, ensuring good quality education remains a challenge.

The findings also revealed that since 2000, twice the number of countries (from 70 to 142) has been monitoring learning outcomes in order to improve education quality.

In primary education, pupil/teacher ratios have declined in over 80 per cent of the countries.

In lower secondary education, 87 out of 105 countries have a pupil/teacher ratio below 30:1.

In addition, in one-third of the 91 countries with data for 2012, less than 75 per cent of primary school teachers were trained according to national standards.

Benavot charged the audience of more than 200 local and international delegates from more than 50 Commonwealth countries to “take note of the report and the progress that has been made regarding education, but more importantly read it, understand it, debate it and discuss it,” so that global policy changes result from it.