It’s time we transformed education. Here’s how

Currently, more than 250 million school-aged children are out of school. This number is not diminishing nearly as fast as the multiple crises that are trapping children in a spiral of desperation, violence and hopelessness. In high-income countries, out-of-school children represent only 3% of the total, whereas in low-income countries they account for 33%. Among the 79 poorest nations — often those dealing with war, internal displacement or climate-related emergencies— an estimated $100 billion per year is required to reverse this trend.

However, that figure does not include the considerable public expenditures on servicing debt payments, the billions lost in potential tax revenue, or the trillions lost in untapped GDP growth.

For the almost nearly forgotten generations in these countries, two compounding issues are stagnating progress:

1. A global shortage of 44 million teachers, meaning the poorest lack a trained, well-equipped and caring teacher; and

2. Broadband remains out of reach for one-third of the population, constraining the adoption of the most innovative methods to reach children in need.

In top-quintile education systems, powerful teaching enables meaningful learning, but in many underserved areas this remains a massive challenge and distant possibility.

As we approach the last five years until 2030, it is imperative that leaders from governments, industry and civil society deeply grasp the social, political and economic costs of inaction and rethink how to drive change. At the Transforming Education Summit in 2022, world leaders committed to a financing roadmap intended to secure the fiscal space needed to accelerate and close the massive funding gap in the poorest countries. Unfortunately, education investment is dropping at an alarming rate, just as new developments and innovations for reaching the most marginalized are increasing exponentially.

Recommendations from the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession, launched earlier this year, highlight that the poorest nations are those where the global teacher shortage is most acute. This is particularly dire for countries facing protracted conflict and crisis where children have been out of school for months or even years. In these countries, there are education champion donors who are finding ways to build schools with bomb shelters, deliver school meals despite record heat or develop local-language curricula. However, certain aid restrictions are not able to address the fact that the teachers in these countries have not been paid in months and therefore cannot afford to feed their families, let alone travel to a school and provide instruction.

But what if we thought differently about our collective investment in the teaching profession itself? What if we ensured the teaching profession as an attractive alternative for graduates? And what if teachers' organizations, and the investments they manage for their members, could become a multiplier, for example via an instrument such as bonds for teachers in emergencies?

Few professions are as generous in helping their colleagues as teachers, with millions marshalled to support those living in conflict and educating children as bombs fall around them.

In terms of technological advances, we know in high-income countries that generative artificial intelligence (AI) can help children with disabilities overcome historical barriers to their learning. When carefully tested, trialed and deployed pedagogically, such tools have the potential to not only enhance AI literacy, but also supercharge the collective effort to educate all the world's children in relevant and meaningful ways — ways that support them to become confident, informed and knowledgeable citizens as they face the multiple crises upending their countries, regions and planet.

Yet less than 10% of the innovations being used in schools are based on any evidence that they will have a positive effect and even less are being developed with practitioners or even with practitioners in mind. But what if we saw AI as a global public good? What if education technology companies large and small joined forces with governments and teachers to identify, trial, vet and scale the best tools? In health, we do this with new medicines and vaccines – why not in education?

At this critical crossroad, Education 4.0 cannot simply focus on the knowledge economy. We need to invest equally in a knowledge society, meaning we recruit, train and retain the requisite knowledge workers who will help students distinguish fact from fiction and devise creative solutions to problems they did not create. Our conflicted world requires an education transformation that invests in tomorrow’s leaders so that our interconnected economies and societies work for the benefit of all. The United Nations Pact for the Future gives us an opportunity to make multilateralism work for people’s rights and prosperity. As new agreements on Financing for Development take shape and we prepare for the Second World Social Summit on Social Development, we must prioritize education as a critically important investment and a fundamental, enabling right.