As the year comes to a close, we are keeping up with tradition and looking back at the most popular Education for All blog posts of 2016.
As always we would like to thank all bloggers who have contributed posts showcasing the broad reach of GPE, the diverse work of its partners, the importance of education, and the challenges facing our sector.
Thanks to their contributions, we have published 270 blogs this year (as of today) in English and French covering a diverse range of topics – from teachers, to civil society, to education in crisis settings, to equity and inclusion.
A few authors made the top 20 list more than once so we have included their top post as well as links to their other popular posts.
We hope you enjoy re-discovering some of this year's highlights below, and we invite you to go even further down memory lane and look at our top 20 from 2013, 2014, and 2015.
While admitting that silver bullets are hard to come by, the author outlines seven direct, effective, and relatively simple interventions in education can help tackle extreme poverty in developing countries and offer valid paths to important improvements in learning and life.
The shift from access to quality in education is fundamental to the new Sustainable Development Agenda. This blog emphasize the intrinsic links between teaching and quality learning and argues that re-thinking what we consider to be effective teaching—and how we facilitate it—is an integral part of ensuring students receive a quality education.
Mother tongue or the national language is widely preferred for reading instruction. The author identified 8 best practices that can help practitioners and governments alike to create curriculum, materials, and learning environments that are responsive and sensitive to complex multilingual contexts.
Countries increasingly recognize that teaching in the children's mother tongues during the early grades, can bring good results. To mark International mother language day, we looked at four examples of GPE support to mother tongue education.
Our Chief Technical Officer looks at the 2016 GEM Report, which documents progress against the Global Goal for education, and lays out role that education plays in achieving the other 16 SDGs. It also offers a persuasive argument that efforts to educate more of the world's out-of-school children deserve more of the international community's attention, energy and funding.
The world needs more and better teachers—teachers who are well-prepared, qualified, caring, and motivated. This is particularly true for disadvantaged students from low-income contexts. Such children are often taught by poorly trained and poorly qualified teachers, or teachers who have very low levels of motivation. This combination of poor preparation and low motivation is lethal in terms of children learning.
More top blogs by Mary Burns
According to the International Labour Organization there are still 168 million child laborers worldwide. We know that poverty often pushes children to work, yet when children leave school early to enter the labor force they are more likely to end up in occupations that limit their chances of breaking out of poverty.
More top blogs by GPE Secretariat
Two new initiatives currently in the works will be critical to monitor and achieve SDG 4, which focuses on learning and quality. Firstly, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) is launching the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning, which includes GPE, and secondly, the Assessment for Learning initiative being developed through the Learning Metrics Task Force, of which GPE is a member.
More top blogs by Silvia Montoya
On the eve of the Supporting Syria conference, Save the Children's Joseph Nhan-O'Reilly made a passionate plea for the children of Syria warning that, “the continued neglect of educational provision will have serious, far-reaching consequences for societies and economies across the region.”
One of the finalists of the 2015 Global Teacher Prize, Haiti's Guy Etienne shares his experiences as a headmaster. He believes that rapid advances in technology can widen the rifts between rich, the middle class and the poor unless educational systems adapt to offer the same opportunities to succeed to all, starting with quality STEM education.
The vast majority (86%) of refugees live in developing countries. GPE CEO Alice Albright sheds light on how countries that are already struggling to provide basic services, such as education, to their own populations are also carrying the additional burden of providing for millions of people displaced from their own countries.
For the first time, ASER Pakistan included children with disabilities in their 2015 large scale assessment with the aim of identifying both the numbers of children with disabilities enrolled in schools and their level of learning.
Leonora MacEwan of UNESCO's International Institute for Educational Planning shares five lessons on planning for resilience during the development of an education sector plan that will guide South Sudan's education system through 2021 and beyond.
The Out-of-School Children Initiative operates on the assumption that if we can get really good data on exactly which children aren't in school, then we can find out what is keeping them away, and also decide the bet approach to overcome these barriers.
GPE and UNESCO's International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) published new guidelines for preparing transitional education plans (TEP). A TEP is a policy instrument that enables authorities to bring together humanitarian and development partners to prepare a structured plan to help steer and mobilize resources that will help maintain education services in the wake of civil or cross-border conflict, health emergencies or natural disaster.
UNICEF's Peacebuilding, Education and Advocacy initiative Learning for Peace – asks how can we use education and social services to contribute to peacebuilding, social cohesion and resilience? This blog provides some initial key results of the initiative.
The Government of Uganda, through the Ministry of Education, is committed to addressing both conflict and disaster through and in education. It is doing so by developing and implementing systemic policies, plans, programs and curricula for conflict and disaster risk management (CDRM) to ensure that the right to a quality education is delivered regardless of the circumstances.
During a debate at the Global Education and Skills Forum, GPE Secretariat Partnerships and External Relations Manager Charles Tapp argued that external aid to education in developing countries is indispensable.
The Partners for Education Group (PEG), a civil society advocacy organization, is contributing to the national discussion in South Sudan about the importance of linking education in emergencies and education sector development.
Good planning for crisis in education—whether due to disaster or conflict—can save the lives of students and teachers. It can also significantly reduce the cost of rebuilding or repairing expensive infrastructure. This frees resources for investing in prevention measures.