Learning, pedagogy and the post-2015 education and development agenda

Abstract

It now seems almost inevitable that by the end of the year a target for learning will have a central place within a renewed set of Education for All goals and highly probable that it will also appear within a development goal for education. For 15 years the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for education has been narrowly focused on universalising access to primary education and for 25 years the Education for All agenda has also acted to prioritise expansion of formal primary education. The two special issues, IJED (see also Mcgrath et al., 2014) has dedicated to what is now termed the ‘post-2015 debate’, together with a number of articles appearing in open issues, will be an indicator to readers in future years of the excitement generated by the opportunity 2015 affords to review, revise and revitalise the global development agenda. In reviewing progress against the existing EFA goals, one of the greatest disappointments has been steadily growing evidence that whilst many more children are completing six years of primary education, many are leaving school barely able to read and write in the language of instruction. Consequently, 2015 is widely seen as an opportunity to shift the focus of Education for All from access to school to the learning that takes place in schools. This special issue takes a look at how learning has been conceptualised and deployed in the post-2015 debate, as well as the questions that have most vexed the debate around how learning can be measured, monitored and targeted on a global scale.