Reports

The Special Rapporteur examines public-private partnerships in education, which are inextricably linked to rapidly expanding privatisation. He highlights their implications for the right to education and for the principles of social justice and equity.

In Asia, private supplementary tutoring consumes huge amounts of household finance, and has far-reaching implications for social inequalities, let alone the huge implications it has for school education services. Yet few governments have satisfactory regulations for the phenomenon. 

This 94-page report found that South Africa has failed to guarantee the right to education for many of the country’s children and young adults due to widespread discrimination against children with disabilities in enrolment decisions. Human Rights Watch research in five out of South Africa’s nine provinces showed that children with disabilities face discriminatory physical and attitudinal barriers, often beginning early in children’s lives when government officials classify them according to their disabilities. 

This paper highlights key concluding observations adopted between 2014 and 2016 by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), and the UN Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) regarding the role of private actors in education in Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, Morocco, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

Scholars at Risk announces the release of Free to Think, a report of the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project. The culmination of four years of monitoring and analysis by SAR staff and researchers around the world, the report analyzes 333 attacks on higher education communities in 65 countries from January 2011 to May 2015, demonstrating the pressing need to raise awareness and document attacks on higher education:

In this report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteur on the right to education looks with concern at the rapid increase in the number of private education providers and the resulting commercialisation of education, and examines the negative effects of this on the norms and principles underlying the legal framework of the right to education as established by international human rights treaties.

The 2015 Global Monitoring Report – Education for All 2000-2015: Achievements and Challenges – provides a complete assessment of progress since 2000 towards the target date for reaching the Dakar Framework’s goals.

It takes stock of whether the world achieved the EFA goals and stakeholders upheld their commitments. It explains possible determinants of the pace of progress.

Finally, it identifies key lessons for shaping the post-2015 global education agenda.

In a unique collaboration with UNICEF, Minority Rights Group International reports on what minority and indigenous children around the world face in their struggle to learn. This report profiles the programmes that are being developed to help them – from better bilingual education to meeting the needs of nomadic populations – giving examples of what works and why. It describes efforts to overcome exclusion so that education is available, accessible, acceptable and adaptable for minorities and indigenous peoples, and shows how far there is still to go.