Education, identified as UK priority, still badly hit by aid cuts

The United Kingdom’s aid spending on education was cut by a third in 2020, despite girls' education being a government priority. Education spending fell 30%, from £789 million ($1.1 billion) in 2019 to £545 million in 2020, according to annual statistics released by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office Wednesday. Longer term, the decline is even more stark — in 2016, the U.K. spent £961 million on education. Subsequent cuts as the government reduced the aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of national income will mean more education cuts have taken place. Programs have been slashed secretly and the U.K.’s five year pledge of £430 million at the Girls Education Summit was criticized as falling short. In Pakistan — which saw the largest reduction in aid from the U.K. last year, from £305 million to £200 million — “the sector experiencing the largest decrease was education,” said the report. Reducing radicalization in Pakistan used to be a key government argument for education spending in the country, according to a former official. Why does it matter? The U.K. has historically been an important education donor and Prime Minister Boris Johnson made girls education a priority in 2019. But Jack Rossiter, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, said reductions don’t “seem to be a particularly strategic cut” based on the FCDO’s global education plan. Rossiter also said FCDO’s statistics indicated a shift of remaining funds to focus on higher education. If this became a trend, he said it would be “a fairly substantial shift in the nature of the UK’s engagement with global education, because it’s been a champion for basic education — primary, pre-primary, lower secondary — [but] the 2020 structure looks very different, it’s much more about higher education.”