Revitalized Gillard goes back to her ‘passion’

When Julia Gillard lost a crucial leadership vote and resigned as prime minister — and from politics — in late June 2013, many thought the feisty leader would retreat from the public eye. Indeed, appearances in the media from this once very public figure came few and far between. But Gillard seems ready to be back not only in the spotlight but to her “passion.” Last month, Australia’s first female prime minister and former education minister assumed a new post as chair of the Global Partnership for Education board of directors. GPE, which works with 66 developing countries, aims to raise $3.5 billion in pledges for its 2015-2018 replenishment campaign and launch a new funding model that, according to Gillard, will “reward change as it happens.” But more than just finding funds for education, GPE helps all partners at the country level — developing country governments, donor governments, international organizations, civil society and nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector — work together to ensure that education aid is better coordinated and more effective, based on countries' own education strategies. As GPE board chair, Gillard is responsible for making sure resources are channeled toward achieving some tough goals in global education: support 29 million children in primary and lower secondary school, with 23 million coming from fragile and conflict-affected states; help more girls complete primary and secondary school; and reduce dropout and repetition rates in both primary and lower secondary school by 10 percent. Gillard has been lobbying for better education for decades, beginning from her days as education vice president for the Australian Union of Students. She said her commitment to education stems from her family experience. “My family came to Australia for a great position to get a better life for my sister and [me] than my mother or father had led in Wales,” she said. “And key among their goals was to get us a better education.” While she considers her parents “very smart people,” poverty forced them to forgo education. Despite having had “very high academic ability,” her late father, John Gillard, had to quit school at 14 to work and help his family. Her mother Moira, meanwhile, “didn’t get great access to education, either.” “From that family background I always thought education was a life-transforming thing,” Gillard said. “It really made my life and gave me the opportunities that I’ve enjoyed, and so it’s been a public policy passion to see that access to the transformation that education can bring extended to others.” As Gillard settles into her new role, Devex caught up with her to discuss her priorities for GPE, launching a “data revolution” and why there’s no one-size-fits-all model for education. You said you're glad the discourse on education is now shifting from talks about access to education to conversations about the quality of education. What can you say about how the quality of education is currently measured? How could this be improved to more accurately reflect the quality of both teaching and learning? That’s a really great question. Of course we can’t forget that there’s more work to do on access because we know there are 57 million kids who aren’t in school and many of those kids are in fragile and conflict-affected areas. The Global Partnership for Education is working in those areas to support those children actually getting an education. So there’s more to do on access. But there is clearly a lot more to do on quality when we know there are 250 million children who are getting access to education but still aren’t reaching basic reading, writing [and] mathematics benchmarks. Here in my own country, as education minister and as prime minister, I led a revolution in the way we measure education quality, and all of the information is available school by school. Clearly, in developing country context, it’s going to be different ways of doing things. However education quality is measured and however it’s made transparent has to be well-adapted to the local environment. And I think we are starting to see some regional assessments that are doing a good job at measuring education quality. All of this work fascinates me and I’m very privileged through my capacity as a senior fellow at Brookings Institution to make a contribution to assisting the work of the Learning Metrics Task Force. So that’s a key global education initiative that the Global Partnership for Education supports. And it’s really about finding better ways of measuring quality, assisting developing countries to strengthen their own national assessment systems and in the way that they use that information to focus on quality and to improve it. The My School project you headed as Australia's minister of education showed that parents were really interested in schools' performance. Are you planning to attempt a similar transparency and accountability initiative at GPE? I certainly think that it’s in everybody’s interests in a nation to understand how well their education system is going. Obviously parents want to know how their own child’s education is going. They’ve got an interest in knowing how the whole school is going, how education in their country is going generally. And everybody in a nation has got a vested interest in a great quality education system. It’s only with really good quality and access that you’re going to be able to strengthen your economy, strengthen your nation’s prosperity, hit development objectives. Everybody’s got a vested interest in a great quality education system so I think everybody should get the information. Here in Australia, we sort of acted on that by creating My School. You can, for all of Australia’s schools, public and private, get online, look at literacy and numeracy results, the background of each school, their level of education advantage or disadvantage. You can compare their performance against national averages. You can compare their performance against schools teaching similar children, children from similar backgrounds. And you can also see how much money within the school is being spent to educate children. Now there’s not a one-size-fits-all way of getting good quality information about education systems. It’s not a question of lifting up My School and seeking to impose exactly that model on other nations. That obviously wouldn’t work. But it is about working globally and with developing countries so that around the world we see the strengthening of assessment systems — more work done on quality and more transparency about quality. Can you tell me more about GPE's new funding model? How does it give incentives to countries to improve their education systems? The Global Partnership for Education is always driving to improve what we do and so there is a new funding model. And core to it is offering powerful incentives to developing countries to change. We obviously want to see in countries around the world that both donor-sourced financing and domestic financing are allocated in the most efficient, effective and equitable way. We want to make sure that the reforms to education are systemwide and durable and that the countries that we’re working with are investing more of their own resources into education. The funding model will incentivize those sorts of deep-seated changes to education. You’ve mentioned that you were concerned about the decline in donor support to education. How does the new funding model address this issue? I am very concerned about the declining donor support to education and we are working our way toward the Global Partnership’s replenishment round in the middle of this year. So we will be pressing hard to make sure that around the world we see good and sizable contributions made to the Global Partnership so we can not only continue the good work that’s been done, but add to it. Our replenishment goal is $3.5 billion. With the way that the new funding model works, I think it will help assure donors that money is going to leverage change. When we’re in a situation when you can point to an average annual decrease of 5 percent in aid to education since 2010, then clearly we’ve got to be working with donors and putting to the world more great arguments about why we should invest in education but also showing them that the funding will be effective and will make a real difference. The new funding model, I think, strengthens the ability of the Global Partnership for Education to do that. As former co-chair of the Millennium Development Goals Advocacy Group, you focused on universal education and female empowerment. You’ve also expressed support for Malala, who in 2012 was shot in the head by the Taliban for demanding education for girls. How are you planning to advance girls’ education as GPE board chair? One of the reasons I’m so delighted [to be chairing GPE] is I think so much work could get done through the Global Partnership on girls’ education. In the countries where the Global Partnership has been working, in eligible countries, we do see change and more girls going to school. And we’re committed in this replenishment round. We want to achieve $3.5 billion and what that in part would do is to make sure that in countries where the Global Partnership is working, that we see an increase in the number of girls completing primary and secondary education. We want to see a 10 percent increase in primary completion in 2018, the last year in the four-year funding period, and an increase in secondary completion by 10 percent, too. There will be a real focus on making sure that girls are included in education and aren’t getting left behind as education improves. There is a tendency to treat technology as a panacea for the issues plaguing education. How should technology be used? Has technology really made a dent in addressing the gaps in education? We live in a world of remarkable technological change. Just looking across my lifetime at what has changed in information technology is just truly amazing. The penetration of smartphones around the world — that kind of technology obviously can be used to support education. In my own nation, we went on a major drive to increase the number of computers in schools because we viewed them as a vital learning tool for the 21st century. But the technology needs to be part of, not a substitute for everything else in education. Technology can make some [of what used not to be possible] possible. But it needs to be rolled out in a whole education plan that focuses on access and good quality teaching. It’s part of the whole, not a substitute for the rest of our endeavors in education. You've pushed for eliminating the "indigenous disadvantage" in Australia. How do you think one can "close the gap" without compromising culture? For example, English may be the second or third language for many indigenous students, and this could contribute to the gap between their literacy and the literacy of non-indigenous students in Australia. How do you plan to similarly address the needs of other disadvantaged groups around the world? My experience in Australia has been the process of making sure that these children — aboriginal children and Torres Strait Islander children — are getting a great quality education. In order to do that, there needs to be a lot of community and local engagement. You can’t sit in our national capital in Canberra and just say, “I’ve got all the answers” and try and impose something from the top down. Our own history in Australia shows that such endeavors are almost always doomed to failure. You need to be working with local communities. And so here in Australia, for indigenous education, yes, we made sure that the national curriculum that is being taught to indigenous children helps them become literate in English — obviously it’s our national language. For them to make their way in Australia and contribute to our workforce and earn the money that will help them shape their own lives, literacy in English is a core component. But at the same time you could make sure that local schooling also embraces cultural practices and local languages and incorporates all of that indigenous culture. Now, it’s incredibly difficult to get right and requires a lot of patience and concentration, but I know from my own experience in Australia it can be done. Looking globally, I think the essence of that lesson is that there’s not one way of working. There are many ways of working that can work with local cultures and local communities to respect their beliefs and community structures while still ensuring that children get a great quality education. What are your top priorities for GPE this year? Priority No. 1 is the successful replenishment round, so the Global Partnership for Education has got our work cut out for us over the next few months because it’s a relatively short period of time until the replenishment conference. I will definitely be very focused on making sure that we have a strong replenishment. Then with those funds, I’m very enthusiastic about our ability to make a difference to education in developing countries. The Global Partnership has got a unique model; the word “partnership” is really important. It is about working with governments, with civil society to develop a whole education plan that makes a difference. I think the new funding model will help us get there, so that eligibility for funds is based on education needs and funding is increasingly based on performance. I think in this period in front of us, with the focus on quality that we’ve talked about, we will be able to work in improved ways to ensure that it’s not only access but it’s learning that is happening for the children of the world. And of course we do want to launch a data revolution. We can’t make sure that funds are making a real difference without having the information and so getting better information about what’s happening in schools is critically important. With all those ways of working, I think we can use that $3.5 billion to support 29 million children to get into primary and lower secondary school. Many of them, 23 million of them, will be in fragile and conflict-affected places. We can reduce the number of children who aren’t completing primary education. The goal there is to reduce it from 7.6 million to 4.8 million. We can do these 10 percent increases in girls completing primary and secondary school. We can improve core reading and numeracy skills by 25 percent. We want to see a 10 percent reduction in dropout rates and consequently a 10 percent reduction to repetition rates. So they’re big goals, but vital goals, and it’s these that I’ll be measuring our performance against. Join the Devex community and gain access to more in-depth analysis, breaking news and business advice — and a host of other services — on international development, humanitarian aid and global health.