Blog

By 2050, nearly every child will face more frequent heatwaves — threatening their health, disrupting their education, and putting their future at risk. Heat does not affect all children equally. Cruelly, and like so many climate impacts, it will be those with the fewest resources who will be worst affected. Heat could therefore further stratify classrooms and communities along economic, gender, and disability lines. At the micro level, children who have access – either financially or geographically – to schools with climate control could have more schooling, be better able to focus, and ultimately secure better learning outcomes. This is as true in Lusaka as it is in London. But it is also not an inevitability. If the global community is serious about realizing every child’s right to learn, it is time to move heat from a climate issue to an education issue.

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Since 1995, the world has moved closer to gender parity in education. Girls now enrol in primary, lower and upper secondary school at rates equal to boys. Globally, 91 million more girls are in primary education than three decades ago, and 136 million more are in secondary. Yet the picture is far from complete.

Today, 133 million girls remain out of school. Progress differs sharply by region: Central and Southern Asia has achieved parity in secondary enrolment, while sub-Saharan Africa continues to trail behind. Oceania, once at parity, now sees girls at a disadvantage. In Latin America and the Caribbean, boys are less likely than girls to advance through secondary education. When poverty and location intersect with gender, the disadvantages become even more severe: in Guinea and Mali, practically no poor young women are in school.

The unfinished business of girls’ education is not just about rights. It is about futures for women, for their children, and for societies. The promise made in Beijing remains possible, but only if we match evidence with action.

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Joselyn Atyang is the headteacher of the Bidong Primary School in Uganda’s Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement. The school has 2,550 learners of whom over 1,500 are refugee children. Classrooms are overcrowded.

In addition to overcrowding, Joselyn’s school faces shortages of critical resources, including desks and toilets – especially for girls. Language barriers further complicate classroom instruction and inclusion.

To address these challenges, investment by Education Cannot Wait (ECW) has been used to create more inclusive learning environments and to support and offer development opportunities for teachers. The approach to improve the quality of teaching uses an adapted version of Uganda’s Teacher Competency Framework to help educators identify key areas for growth and receive targeted, longer-term professional development.

In 2023, ECW renewed its programme in the country. The expanded programme focuses on access, quality of delivery and the strengthening of systems in support of inclusion across Uganda’s education system. The investment is addressing barriers to quality formal and non-formal education by building and rehabilitating schools and providing children with MHPSS.

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UKFIET has published the opening and closing plenary sessions of the 2025 UKFIET conference. The first keynote speaker was Ahmed Kamal Junina, Assistant Professor and Head of the English Department, Al-Aqsa University, Gaza. Ahmed joined virtually from Gaza city as it was being attacked by Israel.

He reminded the participants of the fragility of education – more than 650,000 students in Gaza are being denied education for a third year. Nearly every school has been damaged, many turned into overcrowded shelters. Universities, too, have been flattened, leaving tens of thousands without access to higher education. An entire generation’s future hangs in the balance.

The second keynote speaker was Yusuf Sayed, Professor of International Education, REAL Centre, University of Cambridge. Yusuf reminded the participants that in Gaza, for the last two years, a classroom of children are being killed every day. This killing is not only physical but also in every other way (relating to hopes, dignity and human rights for example).

Watch the video and listen to the keynote speakers.

In this blog, Dr Ashmeet Kaur introduces the reader to the Multi-grade and Multi-level Approach (MGML) as an educational method exemplary of teaching children by their strengths (and weaknesses) regardless of their age and grade.

Dr Kaur argues: “Embedded in decolonial thinking, MGML highlights how eurocentric learning systems remain incompatible with the interests and abilities of the marginalised and least advantaged learners and teachers especially in low-resource settings.” And:

“The MGML model is based on principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and acknowledges diversity in learning experiences wherein every student learns (at) and develops her own pace based on the learning ladder. The methodology by its design supports each learner (slow or fast paced) in becoming independent and goal-directed by choosing a path that is most appropriate for them, becoming a model for child-centric learning.”

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