By YVONNE T. CHUA
THE number of out-of-school children in the Philippines has breached the one-million mark and one in four pupils is dropping out before Grade 5, prompting the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to declare the country in “real danger” of not achieving universal primary education by 2015.
In its latest Education for All global monitoring report launched in New York on Tuesday, Unesco said the Philippines accounts for the biggest share of the East Asia-Pacific region’s nine million primary school age children who are out of school. Indonesia, whose population is 2.8 times bigger than the Philippines, has half a million out-of-school children.
The 2010 report, Reaching the marginalized, pointed out that the country’s net enrolment ratio in the elementary grades has stagnated from 92 percent in 1999 to 91 percent in 2007.
Unesco said achieving universal primary education ought to have been a “formality” for the Philippines, given its level of wealth and starting point at the time the six EFA goals were adopted by 160 countries in Dakar in 2000.
Net enrolment ratio or NER is the number of children of official school age who are enrolled in primary school to the total population of children of official school age.
The 2010 report acknowledged that progress toward achieving EFA in many poor countries will stall or be reversed as a result of the global economic downturn. The EFA goals are early childhood care and education, universal primary education, life skills and lifelong learning, adult literacy, gender party and equality, and quality of education.
“While rich countries nurture their economic recovery, many poor countries face the imminent prospect of education reversals,” UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova said in a press statement. “We cannot afford to create a lost generation of children who have been deprived of their chance for an education that might lift them out of poverty.”
But Unesco traced the Philippines’ underperformance largely to “national inequalities,” citing the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao as among the most “educationally disadvantaged” areas because of extreme poverty.
Years of conflict have also displaced 750,000 people and severely disrupted children’s schooling in the region, it said.
A new data tool used by Unesco to measure marginalization in education found that education poverty rates—or the number of those aged 17 to 22 with fewer than four years of education—among the poor are four times the national average. Four years of schooling is the minimum required for basic literacy.
Those aged 17 to 22 in the poorest quintile average about seven years of education, more than four years fewer than in the wealthiest 20 percent, Unesco said.
Data also show that children in the poorest 20 percent of households are 12 times less likely to participate in early childhood programs than children in the wealthiest 20 percent of households.
Unesco said childhood stunting and low birth weight have held back progress in education in a few countries, including the Philippines where severe and moderate stunting among children under five stood at 30 percent between 2000 and 2007 and one in five children has low birth weight.
About 6 percent of 7- to 16-year-olds from the poorest households were reported as not attending school or never having attended.
Having a poor parent with a disability also increases the likelihood of 7- to 16-year olds never having been to school by 25 percentage points in the Philippines, Unesco said.
Although the adult literacy rate has remained constant in the Philippines, Unesco reported that the number of adult illiterates rose to 1.4 million between 1985-1994 and 2000-2007 partly because of population growth.
It also noted that the wealth gap in the Philippines has affected literacy a great deal: Literacy rates among women in the poorest households average 65 percent, compared with more than 96 percent for those in the wealthiest households.
The school environment in the country’s urban and rural areas is also markedly different, according to Unesco. Over 70 percent of urban Grade 4 students attend schools with basic facilities such as blackboards and toilets, but the figure dropped to half in rural schools.
In pre-primary education, the pupil-to-teacher ratio is 33 to one, a far cry from the region’s average of 21 to one, according to Unesco’s data.
“Current policies are not breaking down inherited disadvantage due in part to low investment in education,” noted the report.
The Philippines invests only 2.3 percent of its gross national product in education, compared with East Asia’s regional average of 3.6 percent.
It has also experienced steep declines in aid to education. Total aid to basic education per primary school age child averaged only $4 in 2006-2007, data show.
Unesco said a “decisive political leadership” is needed if the Philippines is to achieve universal primary education and other EFA goals five years from now.By YVONNE T. CHUA
THE number of out-of-school children in the Philippines has breached the one-million mark and one in four pupils is dropping out before Grade 5, prompting the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to declare the country in “real danger” of not achieving universal primary education by 2015.
In its latest Education for All global monitoring report launched in New York on Tuesday, Unesco said the Philippines accounts for the biggest share of the East Asia-Pacific region’s nine million primary school age children who are out of school. Indonesia, whose population is 2.8 times bigger than the Philippines, has half a million out-of-school children.
The 2010 report, Reaching the marginalized, pointed out that the country’s net enrolment ratio in the elementary grades has stagnated from 92 percent in 1999 to 91 percent in 2007.
Unesco said achieving universal primary education ought to have been a “formality” for the Philippines, given its level of wealth and starting point at the time the six EFA goals were adopted by 160 countries in Dakar in 2000.
Net enrolment ratio or NER is the number of children of official school age who are enrolled in primary school to the total population of children of official school age.
The 2010 report acknowledged that progress toward achieving EFA in many poor countries will stall or be reversed as a result of the global economic downturn. The EFA goals are early childhood care and education, universal primary education, life skills and lifelong learning, adult literacy, gender party and equality, and quality of education.
“While rich countries nurture their economic recovery, many poor countries face the imminent prospect of education reversals,” UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova said in a press statement. “We cannot afford to create a lost generation of children who have been deprived of their chance for an education that might lift them out of poverty.”
But Unesco traced the Philippines’ underperformance largely to “national inequalities,” citing the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao as among the most “educationally disadvantaged” areas because of extreme poverty.
Years of conflict have also displaced 750,000 people and severely disrupted children’s schooling in the region, it said.
A new data tool used by Unesco to measure marginalization in education found that education poverty rates—or the number of those aged 17 to 22 with fewer than four years of education—among the poor are four times the national average. Four years of schooling is the minimum required for basic literacy.
Those aged 17 to 22 in the poorest quintile average about seven years of education, more than four years fewer than in the wealthiest 20 percent, Unesco said.
Data also show that children in the poorest 20 percent of households are 12 times less likely to participate in early childhood programs than children in the wealthiest 20 percent of households.
Unesco said childhood stunting and low birth weight have held back progress in education in a few countries, including the Philippines where severe and moderate stunting among children under five stood at 30 percent between 2000 and 2007 and one in five children has low birth weight.
About 6 percent of 7- to 16-year-olds from the poorest households were reported as not attending school or never having attended.
Having a poor parent with a disability also increases the likelihood of 7- to 16-year olds never having been to school by 25 percentage points in the Philippines, Unesco said.
Although the adult literacy rate has remained constant in the Philippines, Unesco reported that the number of adult illiterates rose to 1.4 million between 1985-1994 and 2000-2007 partly because of population growth.
It also noted that the wealth gap in the Philippines has affected literacy a great deal: Literacy rates among women in the poorest households average 65 percent, compared with more than 96 percent for those in the wealthiest households.
The school environment in the country’s urban and rural areas is also markedly different, according to Unesco. Over 70 percent of urban Grade 4 students attend schools with basic facilities such as blackboards and toilets, but the figure dropped to half in rural schools.
In pre-primary education, the pupil-to-teacher ratio is 33 to one, a far cry from the region’s average of 21 to one, according to Unesco’s data.
“Current policies are not breaking down inherited disadvantage due in part to low investment in education,” noted the report.
The Philippines invests only 2.3 percent of its gross national product in education, compared with East Asia’s regional average of 3.6 percent.
It has also experienced steep declines in aid to education. Total aid to basic education per primary school age child averaged only $4 in 2006-2007, data show.
Unesco said a “decisive political leadership” is needed if the Philippines is to achieve universal primary education and other EFA goals five years from now.