Quality Education – Results Canada

School offers a safe space for children to grow and thrive while learning the critical skills needed to advance in their communities, such as reading, writing, and mathematics, as well as basic reasoning and socio-emotional skills.  

Despite the advances in access to education in recent decades, the United Nations (UN) warns that quality education is shockingly low and signals a global learning crisis for children. According to UNESCO, more than 617 million children and adolescents of primary and lower secondary school age do not achieve minimum proficiency levels in reading and math. It is estimated that 88% of all students in Sub-Saharan Africa will not be able to read proficiently by the time they complete primary and lower secondary education. 

The data from UNESCO points to three root causes for this alarming situation: lack of access to school to learn foundational skills, low retention rates of students with high drop-out rates, and poor quality of classroom practices that leave millions of children unable to read, write, and do math. This learning crisis jeopardizes opportunities for youth and young adults to succeed and thrive in communities once they leave school. This level of learning poverty further translates to a reduction of quality in the labour force and shortage of skills that threaten the economic future of many countries.