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Conclusions and youth priorities and recommendations
• Provide more up-to-date, low-cost or free and relevant textbooks and other literature in necessary languages. Ensure that course literature meets international achievement standards and course requirements and is accessible to all learners at the start of and throughout their courses. Expand the number of school, university and community libraries and their holdings, and modernize these facilities, including through computerization and free Internet access. • Research and develop youth-driven solutions to address smoking, drug and alcohol use among youth. Determine and address gaps and differences in the geographic and demographic coverage of outreach efforts. Establish and/or fully enforce anti-smoking, drug and alcohol policies in schools and universities, ensuring that education personnel are not exempt. Build on successes. • Investigate violence in and around schools, including inter-ethnic and religious conflict, and enhance protective factors. Work with youth, parents, school and university officials and government and law enforcement authorities to develop, implement and evaluate violence prevention and response policies and programmes. • Increase opportunities for youth participation in education decision-making and action to improve education quality through student governments and other forums. Take advantage of widespread youth enthusiasm, ideas and willingness to shape education quality and improve their lives and the lives of others, from individual desires to study as much as possible to calls to work together with education authorities on ways forward. Step up awareness-raising efforts to inform all youth about education policy and programmes. Education authorities should make education policy and programme information easily accessible to youth, including through a dedicated website and via radio and print media. Education authorities and youth should work together to develop opportunities for youth involvement in decision-making and other activism, recalling youth suggestions provided in this study. Youth should take action and get involved with efforts to improve their education quality, taking advantage of structures that already stipulate student authority over education decision-making in some areas. • Decrease education costs, and expand financial support to students, with attention to the needs of the economically poorest students, female youth, youth with special needs and those in single-parent households. Increase the number of scholarships, stipends and other financial resources and tools available to students and their families to ensure that young people do not fail to complete their desired level of education due to financial constraints. Make these resources available especially at the secondary and tertiary levels of education, and tie them to both academic achievement and potential. • End teacher and other forms of corruption in education systems. Ensure students are not required to pay bribes or sustain other non-formal costs to instructors or education officials in order to get good grades and to access higher education institutions and other education services. Establish and/or enforce fair learning, assessment and promotion processes, where all students are treated equitably regardless of social status, political affiliation or family connection. Learning processes should be regularly monitored and evaluated by education authorities, with input and review by other areas of government and the public, including youth. Anonymous student complaints systems should be established in schools and universities to report corruption and other education quality issues with clear, accountable follow-up procedures. Youth should also desist from participating in corruption, including with peer-to-peer support. • Promote secondary school completion. Promote the value of secondary education among parents, youth and government authorities, emphasizing the rights of both females and males to complete their education. Support calls for education completion with action to facilitate both access and success. Ensure equal opportunity within the education system, and endeavour to maintain or improve its quality on an ongoing basis. Ensure youth have safe and effective avenues to enforce their right to education when parents or others post barriers.
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Demand for Education Innovation: Adolescent and youth perspectives on education quality in the CEECIS Region