Key Terms and Basic Facts
The Right to Education: Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child - "all children have the right to receive a quality basic education"
Save the Children's Objective: To improve access to, and completion of, inclusive, quality, basic education.
This has the following meanings -
Access: Children are able to access an education. For example, barriers such as poverty and being unable to buy a uniform, or being disabled, are removed so that genuine access to education is available to all children.
Completion: Children are assisted to move successfully between different stages of education. For example, many children find the transition from home to pre-school, or primary to secondary school particularly difficult. This can result in children having to repeat grades or drop out, and prevents them from completing their basic education.
Inclusive: Enabling all children, rather than just some, to learn and participate effectively in school. This is important as providing access to education does not always mean that every child is able to receive an education. Many children find themselves discriminated against in more subtle ways, for example they may be from a minority ethnic group, or they may not be fluent in the language of the school.
Quality: Enhancing children's ability to learn and teaching them information that it is useful and relevant to their lives. Too often schools emphasise rote learning and the memorising of facts rather than achieving this.
Basic: The term 'basic' education is used to mean 10 years of education, ideally between the ages of 4 and 14 years old, but this can vary between countries.
Target Groups: Save the Children's education work will ensure that three key groups of children are reached by our work, as there is evidence that these groups are particularly under-served by the education system.
These groups are: children affected by conflict, children marginalised by their poverty and the poorest 10 per cent of children, children have disabilities and those who are marginalised by other factors like language or ethnicity.