Education International Research
Box 6: In the UK, Ensuring a Coordinated Strategy for Implementing SDG 4 Has Not Been Prioritised; Abroad, DFID Support for Privatisation Continues to Undermine Public Education. Education unions NASUWT and NEU are concerned that the UK government has not put in place the necessary mechanisms and policies to implement SDG 4 domestically, viewing its implementation as something that the UK can support in developing countries, but not as a domestic concern.
UK SDG monitoring and implementation processes fall short For the SDGs to be prioritised in the UK, there needs to be leadership at the very highest level of government and within government departments. However, education unions report that there is currently no strategic leadership to implement the SDGs across government or within the Department for Education (DfE). According to the Chair of the International Development Committee, cross-government engagement with the SDGs has been “woefully insufficient”.52 The Department for International Development (DFID) is the lead department responsible for implementing the SDGs in the UK, but according to NASUWT, DFID does not have the necessary authority and oversight to coordinate implementation. DFID coordinated the UK’s 2019 VNR submission. There was a lack of meaningful engagement with unions and civil society as part of the process. The UK government asked that individuals and organisations to inform them of what they are doing to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals,53 but NASUWT notes that the request appeared to be more “about collecting information to enable the Government to suggest that it is doing a substantial amount of work to implement the SDGs” rather than real engagement. It is ironic that government discourse purports that the SDGs are a shared endeavour (thereby transferring their responsibility for the implementation of the SDGs to individuals, civil society, organisations and private corporations) whilst simultaneously failing to engage in meaningful social dialogue or provide strategic leadership for the implementation process.
Government policies undermine domestic implementation Unfortunately, the government has not undertaken a review and evaluation of its existing policies to establish whether and how they contribute to or undermine progress towards the SDGs, as well as identify any policy gaps. This is a grave omission, as civil society analysts’ measurements of progress toward the SDGs in the UK rate the government as performing well in only four of the ten SDG 4 targets,54 and education unions identify numerous education policies that are undermining the implementation of SDG 4, a few of which are outlined below. Firstly, Brexit distracts government attention from important policy concerns such as education; it is estimated that about one sixth of DfE officials have been redeployed to work on Brexit. 55
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Meanwhile, austerity has led to high levels of poverty and drastic social cuts. Fourteen million people (about a fifth of the population) live in poverty, with 4 million being more than 50% below the poverty line and living in absolute poverty. 56 Evidence from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England reveals that between 2009 and 2019, public spending on children has been cut by 12%; local authority Children’s Services have been cut by 20%; children’s welfare has been cut by 17%; and education has been cut by 3%. According to NEU, the funding cuts that schools are suffering are “nothing short of a crisis”; recent reports show that head teachers are having to seek support to pay for basic pastoral support services for students.57
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52 See: www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/international-development/Letter-to-SoS-re-UK-VNR-on-SDGs-FINAL.pdf 53 See: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/contribute-to-the-uks-voluntary-national-review-of-the-sustainable-development-goals 54 UKSSD. 2018. Measuring Up. Retrieved from: https://www.ukssd.co.uk/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=c7d15beb-5e82-4e65-a84a-13d15d6e6b89 55 Times Education Supplement. 2019. Exclusive: DfE could lose 1,000 staff to no-deal Brexit planning. Retrieved from: www.tes.com/news/exclusive-dfe-couldlose-1000-staff-no-deal-brexit-planning 56 Philip Alston. 2018. Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights. Retrieved from: https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23881&LangID=E 57 See: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jun/12/school-asks-bbc-children-in-need-to-cover-funding-gap
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