Julia Gillard: "We"ve made progress in education and gender equality – but more must be done"

A few years ago, an outbreak of cholera and other deadly diseases swept through one of the poorest villages in the northern region of Ghana, taking the life of Ruhainatu’s mother, Jamila.

Ruhainatu was in her teens. A decade ago, Jamila’s death would have extinguished Ruhainatu’s chances of getting the education she needs to succeed in life. Instead of going to school, she would have taken on her mother’s role of caring full time for her home and family.

But efforts by the Ghanaian government, together with development partners like the Global Partnership for Education, have strengthened the country’s education system. Now Ruhainatu and girls like her have a more hopeful prospect for life. One of the top performing students in the local school, Ruhainatu has ambitions to go away to university to become a nurse and then return to her village to help others remain healthy.

Ruhainatu has ambitions to go away and train as a nurse. Photograph: GPE/ Stephan Bachenheimer

Her story is one of countless affirmative real-life testimonials showing how educating girls can help them be healthier, more economically prosperous and become more civically empowered women. Their new knowledge can also improve the health and wellbeing of others around them.

But enabling children to succeed requires the right combination of support, so that they will be healthy, well-nourished and can attend a quality school that has access to clean drinking water and toilets.

Providing school meals and deworming programmes, for example, can have an important impact. The 2016 Unesco global education monitoring report notes that school meals and deworming programmes promote better education outcomes, especially for girls. For very poor families, the prospect that their daughter will be fed means that sending her to school is a more attractive option than keeping her at home so she can attend to domestic duties, farm work or taking goods to market. Greater access to clean water can also translate into education improvements for girls, by reducing the time they take to collect water for the family and giving them more time for school.

This give-and-take between education and other social development factors has received more emphasis since the unveiling of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) last year. We are breaking down the silos that have historically divided development sectors. Education and global health groups now understand that improvements in each are essential to progress for both and we are already creating opportunities for deeper collaboration.

Now the evidence of what works is increasingly clear, let’s just get on with it and drive progress on the mutually reinforcing goals for global education (SDG 4) and gender equality and women’s empowerment (SDG 5).

For groups like the Global Partnership for Education, whose board I chair and which partially funded the program in Ghana that helped Ruhainatu, “getting on with it” includes continuing to support countries to close the gender gaps in their education systems.

We are breaking down the silos that have historically divided development sectors.

Closing those gaps requires recognising and breaking down barriers to gender equality. Poverty is the biggest, but other significant factors include ethnicity, language, disability, early marriage, the distance from home to school, gender-biased pedagogy, fragility and conflict, absence of proper sanitary facilities, pressure to take care of family or earn money, and insecurity within and on the way to school.

We – in education or in any other related development sectors – could accomplish much more in less time if there was sufficient political support and enough financing. This includes first and foremost more domestic financing for education by developing countries themselves. But it also requires more donor funding. We can’t “just get on with it” when education’s share of overseas development aid has fallen from 13% to 10% since 2002. The International Commission for Financing Global Education Opportunities, notes in its just-released report that under present trends, only one in 10 young people in low-income countries will be on track to gain basic secondary-level skills by 2030. Clearly, this is completely unacceptable.

The Education Commission, on which I serve as a commissioner, advocates for a range of far-reaching transformations to improve education. The commission’s work provides new evidence on what works and costs out what it would take for the world to educate every child.

The call to action in financing is to increase total spending on education from $ 1.2tn (£0.9tn) per year today to $ 3tn (£2.3tn) by 2030. That’s a big jump but not an insurmountable one.

Making the leap starts with developing countries, donors, NGOs, the private sector and many others choosing right now to just get on with it.

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Julia Gillard: "We"ve made progress in education and gender equality – but more must be done"

Role-play exam for GP trainees fails equality and race bias test, court informed

Karon Monaghan, for the British Association of Doctors of Indian Origin, says the clinical expertise evaluation ‘risks subjective bias’. Photograph: Matrix Chambers

A crucial element of the examination process for GP trainees is racially discriminatory, a court has heard.

The British Association of Doctors of Indian Origin (Bapio) has brought a higher-court action towards the two the Royal School of General Practitioners, which conducts the clinical capabilities assessment (CSA), and the Basic Medical Council, which is accountable for guaranteeing a honest procedure.

At the start of the hearing in central London on Tuesday, Karon Monaghan QC, for Bapio, explained the Royal College’s yearly reports showed that United kingdom graduates from ethnic minority backgrounds have been nearly four occasions more very likely to fail the CSA, and worldwide medical graduates were nearly 15 occasions more probably to fail than white Uk graduates. Nevertheless, nothing at all had been carried out to address the disparity.

Monaghan explained: “The situation arising in this claim is whether, in continuing to adopt and apply the CSA and exit examination for those in search of to join the register of GPs, the defendants failed to comply with the public-sector equality duty and, in the situation of the initial defendant only, is racially discriminatory.”

The CSA was introduced in 2007 to change an existing assessment. It varieties portion of the exit exams taken at the end of 3 many years of vocational education and involves function-enjoying assessments.

Monaghan said it “dangers subjective bias by hunting at a individual and assessing whether or not this particular person communicates [effectively] or not”. She suggested that BME (black and minority ethnic) candidates were significantly less likely to possess the linguistic and cultural capital that would enable them to tell the examiners “what they want to hear”.

She extra: “It really is not ample to say, ‘we are treating you all the identical way’, due to the fact BME candidates could be starting up from a various place.”

Global healthcare graduates had been mainly Indian and Pakistani, the court heard.

Monaghan stated the CSA had “the effect of treating particular racial groups less favourably”.

She explained that the disparate outcome was adequate in establishing indirect discrimination and that it was for the RCGP to display that this was a consequence of non-racial grounds.

The judge, Mr Justice Kenneth Parker, advised that the discrepancy between Uk and non-United kingdom college students could be down to the latter acquiring inferior schooling overseas.

The RCGP and GMC both deny the claims. The hearing is expected to last three days.

Role-play exam for GP trainees fails equality and race bias test, court informed