Lay emphasis on quality of education, says UN agency

A United Nations agency has advised the Government to lay more emphasis on quality of education in schools.

A new report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) titled 'Toward Universal Learning: Recommendations from the Learning Metrics Task Force' says some 250 million pupils around the world are not able to read, write or count well.

The report launched by Education PS Bellio Kipsang says meeting minimum learning standards was still a challenge to most governments.

"While you celebrate that millions of more children over the last decade have completed a basic primary education, the sad reality is that this victory is too often met with little or no learning," says the report.

Unesco commissioned the report under the auspices of the Institute of Statistics and the Centre for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.

The document calls for education systems that offer opportunities to children and youths to master competencies in seven key areas: Physical well being; social emotional growth; literacy and communication skills; culture and the arts; learning approaches and cognition; numeracy and mathematics and lastly science and technology.

The Government is still grappling with enhancing quality learning in schools after introducing free basic education.

Dzingai Mutumbuka, Learning Metrics Task Force chairperson said education should equip learners with strong ability to read, write and count to enable them be flexible.

"The jobs people are going to have in the next 10 years have not been identified. There is need for education to effectively prepare children for the future," said Mutumbuka.

The new report also calls for new global indicators to include "readiness to learn" in early childhood; skills and values for youth to be successful "citizens of the world."

The other indicator is "learning for all" that would combine measures of education access, completion and reading into one statistic.