Education standards and monitoring practices.

 

It is paramount that States perform good monitoring practices of the education system to ensure its efficiency and effectiveness. This includes ensuring that these practices are participatory, regular and transparent. The Global Conversation demonstrated that, while many accept that their national constitutions and laws reflect and uphold the principles of the right to education, the State has not

always been successful at the implementation stage. This implementation gap was perceived to be caused by a lack of capacity, funding, infrastructure or political will. The consultative process revealed that participants were enthusiastic about building better independent monitoring mechanisms, both on a national and international scale, including through the collection of disaggregated data to ensure that policy measures are reaching the most vulnerable. States have several interconnected obligations as to minimum standards and monitoring under the current international legal framework. The first is through the submission of periodic reports, for example those that are submitted to the General Conference of UNESCO under article 7 of the CADE, or those submitted to the CESCR under articles 16 and 17 of the ICESCR. In both instances, States should submit reports which cover the measures taken and progress made in achieving the observation of the rights in the treaties, indicating that they have some measure of the current state of the right to education. The second obligation for States is to ensure a right to quality education. The Special Rapporteur onthe right to education (2012) confirms that this right can be read into the wording of the CADE article 1 (para. 2), that refers to education as ‘all types and levels of education, and includes access toeducation, the standard and quality of education, and the conditions under which it is given’. The Special Rapporteur finds that States therefore: ‘have an obligation to lay down a uniform framework of quality standards applicable throughout the country’, suggesting a corresponding duty to monitor whether these standards are met. Similarly, article 13 (3) of the ICESCR provides that States must establish minimum education standards that private education institutions must also conform to. Third, the CESCR’s General Comment No. 13 (1999, para. 49) confirms that States are obliged to establish and maintain a transparent and effective system which monitors whether or not education is, in fact, directed to the educational objectives set out in the aims of education, article 13 (1). This General Comment also requires States to monitor education closely to eliminate discrimination, including by collecting educational data disaggregated by the prohibited grounds of discrimination (para. 37) and to adopt and implement a national educational strategy for the implementation of secondary, higher and fundamental education that includes mechanisms, such as indicators and benchmarks on the right to education, by which progress can be closely monitored (para. 52). Finally, General Comment No. 13 (CESCR, 1999, para. 44) confirms that the obligation of States to progressive realize of the right to education indicates a ‘strong presumption of impermissibility of any retrogressive measures taken in relation to the right to education’ and implies a way to measure this progressive action. Furthermore, the Incheon Declaration (2015, para. 13) calls for ‘strong global and regional collaboration, cooperation, coordination and monitoring of the implementation of the education agenda’, including through instituting and improving mechanisms, education managementinformation systems, financing procedures, institutional management arrangements and making data available. The importance of strong, disaggregated education data to tackle discrimination is paramount (Education 2030: Framework for Action, 2015, para. 18)

Guidance exists in the form of the ‘UNESCO Guidelines to strengthen the right to education innational frameworks’ (2021), which provide States with a proposed template for monitoring processes, containing a clear guiding checklist of the indicators and data that must be collected and examined to evaluate the implementation of their duties under the right to education. Although there exists a range of State obligations to monitor their implementation of the right to education, much of the clarity around monitoring practices stems from General Comment No. 13 of the CESCR, which is considered a guiding authority, but is not legally binding. An argument could be made for more explicit and precise responsibilities relating to minimum standards and monitoring in international law.