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Tanzania and Burundi, for instance, have recorded a 99 per cent enrolment rate into the first grade of primary school.The pertinent question is: How effective are these funds in retaining children in school? Once enrolled, how long can the pupils be expected to last in the education system, and how many years of schooling, on average, are actually attained by East African pupils?

However, East Africa is faring badly a 9.1 years, equivalent to a pupil completing primary school, but dropping out of high school. The average number of school years actually completed regionally was a mere 4.7 years. The scenario is particularly dismal in Burundi, where on average pupils completed only 2.7 years of school.

According to the Global Education Digest 2010 published by Unesco, in the late 1990s, developing countries began to recover some of the educational ground lost in the 1980s, when enrolments stagnated or even declined in sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In fact, the pace of progress accelerated since 2000 and if trends between 2000 and 2008 continue, the increase in school life expectancy in the current decade will be three times the level achieved in the 1970s.In sub-Saharan Africa, school life expectancy nearly doubled from 4.4 years to 8.4 years in the past 30 years. Despite this progress, the region has the lowest number of school years — almost half of the number of years in North America and Western Europe (16.0 years).

Despite a decade-old commitment by world leaders to tackle the crisis, some 8.8 million children still die annually before they reach the age of 5. Nearly all of these needless deaths are easily preventable at little cost. Consider that number, 8.8 million. That is more than all Canadians aged 19 or younger. And that's how many young children die every year. It works out to 24,000 children per day. Seventeen per minute. Or 400 school bus loads every day, 365 days a year. All dead.At the same time, 500,000 mothers die annually in childbirth or from other pregnancy-related causes. In other words, simply being pregnant can kill you, depending on where you live. As the mother of a nearly 2-year-old child, I am reminded daily how fortunate I am to live in Canada. It is unimaginable to me that my child could die, as 1 million do every year, from the lack of a $10 bed net to protect him from malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Diarrhea kills 1.5 million children annually. It is easily treated. So is malaria. Also, child blindness, too common in the developing world, can be prevented by just two vitamin A pills per year. Total cost: 4 cents. Better nutrition and safer birth conditions would annually save the lives of several hundred thousand pregnant women. Ten years ago, the nations of the world pledged to reduce hunger and death from a lack of basic health care. In one of their UN Millennium Development Goals, leaders committed to reduce maternal mortality rates by three-quarters and child mortality rates by two-thirds within 15 years. But, sadly, neither will be achieved by that target date, just five years away, unless donor countries like Canada reinvigorate the initiative.

Today, the world spends $49 billion (U.S.) on pet food every year. If half of that amount were added to current annual spending on maternal and child health, the child death rate could be cut nearly in half.

The increased funding has enabled the education ministry to implement a number of projects. The ministry distributed over sh8.8b to the Universal Secondary Education programme to purchase laboratory equipment.

The construction and renovation of 217 secondary schools countrywide started this year. The 217 schools are part of the 1,400 schools which will be repaired under a World Bank funded project. About 4,297 classrooms, 41 administration blocks, 144 libraries, 405 science rooms and 71 staff quarters are to be constructed.

In a bid to improve quality, the P6 and P7 curriculum was reviewed. The new upper primary curriculum is to focus on "what a child can gain from a lesson, other than what a teacher can complete in a syllabus". Illustrations like graphs and tables have been simplified.

A year after the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) system has been implemented, and two years since the introduction of the new grading system in schools affiliated to the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE), teachers appear to be groping in the dark. There are vast variations in the manner in which the system is being implemented.

Though the approach, when it was first introduced, was touted as being child-centric, many teachers feel that its implementation is not practical, given the reality of large class sizes in many schools.

“It is a very detailed system of evaluation, and teachers are ill-equipped to do it. It’s too idealistic,” remarked Raman.

Seoul (CNN) -- Most South Korean students consider their final year in high school "the year of hell." It is when all students are put to the ultimate test. About 700,000 test applicants sat down in classrooms across the country Thursday to take their college entrance exams -- also known as the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT).

For many, this one test -- which lasts a good eight hours -- will determine which university they enter. It is considered the chance to make or break one's future. In a country where more than 80% of high school students move on to higher-level education, getting into a prestigious school is all the more competitive. The final year leading up to the test is one of most intense periods students will ever experience.

Many test-takers will give up sleep, living sometimes on only five hours of rest a day throughout the year. Family members live nervously in fear that they will disrupt the mood of their high-school child.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 12-year-old Abigail Appetey is forced to miss her classes at primary school to sell fried fish door-to-door in Apimsu, her farming village in eastern Ghana. She gets up at 5am to buy the fish three miles away.The little she earns won't go on the exercise books she needs; her parents will spend it on her 20-year-old brother Joseph's education. Abigail wants to be a teacher, she says, but is always tired in class.There are 41 million girls around the world who should be in primary school all week, but aren't, the Department for International Development says. At least 20 million of them are, like Abigail, in sub-Saharan Africa.

In Ghana, 91% of boys, but only 79% of girls finish primary school.

Here in Asesewa – one of Ghana's poorest districts – Abigail's nearest junior high school has just five girls out of 20 pupils in its most senior class. The school improvement plan is torn, written in felt tip and peeling from a wall in a corridor. It is the middle of the dry season and temperatures can reach 31C, but the school's tap is empty and the toilets don't work. The most the school seems to have is a few exercise and textbooks that look as though they date back to the 1950s.The average income for Asesewa's population of 90,000 is between £11 and £14 a month, according to the international charity Plan, which has a base here.

A teacher is in the universal education category, which is one of the eight main components of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the world hopes to achieve by the year 2015.

A teacher is in the universal education category, which is one of the eight main components of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the world hopes to achieve by the year 2015.

A teacher is in the universal education category, which is one of the eight main components of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the world hopes to achieve by the year 2015.

A total of 1 493 schoolgirls dropped out of school last year because they fell pregnant. Furthermore, a total of 31 teachers "were recorded to have been responsible for some pregnancies". This shocking revelation was made by Education Minister Abraham Iyambo during his New Year's address yesterday.

According to him, "current measures to punish those who impregnate learners must be revised urgently and strengthened immediately. We have no excuse to wait. Management must attend to this." Iyambo promised that all the bad apples will be eradicated this year. He said 2011 will be "a year of recommitment, better education outcomes, mass drive and mobilisation".

Iyambo emphasised that "education is not an asset if it is not quality education". He said: "We need a serious inventory to pinpoint possible misfits ... before they become a system. We need urgent transformation of our education system from the bottom to the top."

Education is a key ingredient of the political crisis facing Arab states. Superficially, the education profile of the region is starting to resemble that of East Asia. The past two decades have witnessed dramatic advances in primary and secondary school enrollment, with a step-increase in tertiary education. Many governments have increased public spending on education. The 7% of GDP that Tunisia invests in the sector puts the country near the top of the global league table for financial effort.

In Egypt, the education group most likely to be unemployed is university level and above, followed by post-secondary. Around one quarter of the country’s male university graduates are unemployed, and almost half of its female graduates.

For all the expansion of access and investment in education, the Arab states have some of the world’s worst performing education systems. The problems start early. In this year’s Global Monitoring Report we carry a table showing the distribution of performance across different countries in reading test scores at grade 4. In Kuwait, Qatar and Morocco, over 90% of students scored below the lowest benchmark, indicating that they lacked even basic comprehension.  In fact, these countries held the bottom three positions in a group of 37 countries covered.

Chinese students’ obsession with learning English is apparent. Chinese cities are littered with billboards and fliers for teaching institutes, and the demand for native-speaking teachers and tutors seems endless. For many, the TOEFL, or Test of English as a Foreign Language, ranks second only to the infamous gaokao college entrance exam as a driver of candle-burning study habits. Worried that this preoccupation with English is contributing to a decline in native language skills, officials at the Ministry of Education are now trying to get students to return to their linguistic roots. How? By introducing another test.

The test comes amid worrying signs of declining language proficiency in China. More than 30% of students failed a ministry-sponsored test administered last year to evaluate Beijing college students’ language skills, according to Xinhua. Many language instructors and others worry that young people in China are neglecting their mother tongue as technological advances like cellphones and computers have greatly reduced the need to hand-write Chinese characters — of which there are tens of thousands.

“In recent years, more and more Chinese people are paying attention to foreign-language studies while neglecting to polish their native language,” Dai Jiagan, director of the authority overseeing the exam, told Xinhua. “And many newly coined, nonstandard Internet phrases are confusing their Chinese.” There are around 300 million Chinese people learning English, China’s premier Wen Jiabao boasted in a 2009 speech. Last year, ETS, the creator of the TOEFL, said it saw a 30% increase year-to-year in the number of Chinese test takers.

In her job as a teacher-training co-ordinator in Huíla province, 43-year-old nun, Sister Cecília Kuyela witnesses school overcrowding every day. Primary School 200, which serves the poor area of João de Almeida, has 7,348 pupils for 138 teachers and eight permanent classrooms. At peak periods, classes are held in the street. But that is the least of Sister Cecília's worries.

During the war, people with only a grade 3 or 4 education became teachers. Since 2002, the pressure to meet MDG2 and to reduce Angola's 27% teenage illiteracy rate has seen the country recruit thousands of untrained school-leavers into teaching.

According to Unicef, less than 10% of five-year-olds have access to preschool. Only 76% of children between six and 11 are in primary school. Overall, more than 1 million six- to 17-year-olds are out of school.

Syrian army and security officers have detained and tortured children with impunity during the past year, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch has documented at least 12 cases of children detained under inhumane conditions and tortured, as well as children shot while in their homes or on the street. Human Rights Watch has also documented government use of schools as detention centres, military bases or barracks, and sniper posts, as well as the arrest of children from schools.

“Children have not been spared the horror of Syria’s crackdown,” said Lois Whitman, children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Syrian security forces have killed, arrested, and tortured children in their homes, their schools, or on the streets. In many cases, security forces have targeted children just as they have targeted adults.”

Some of the arrests took place in schools. “Nazih” (not her real name), a 17-year-old girl from Tal Kalakh, told Human Rights Watch that in May 2011, security forces entered her school and arrested all the boys in her class, after questioning them about the anti-regime slogans painted on the school walls.

Associated Press= TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — Boys and girls chanted slogans against Moammar Gadhafi and teachers hanged an effigy of the fugitive leader Saturday as many Libyan children started their first school year without the "brother leader" dictating the curriculum. Euphoria filled the halls, but teachers admitted a lot needed to be done to overhaul an educational system where a main goal for nearly 42 years was to instill adoration of Gadhafi and what he touted as the greatest system of rule in the world — the "Jamahiriya," a utopian "rule by the masses" that in reality boiled down to rule by Gadhafi.

Not all facilities in Tripoli opened their doors, and school officials urged patience, saying it will take time to build a new curriculum and provide new equipment after years of strict control by Gadhafi's regime. "I believe the National Transitional Council will give us new books, computers and tapes," said headmistress Moofidha Nashnoush as she rushed through the halls hanging up new flags and hugging her colleagues. "We need to help the children forget the Gadhafi era and start fresh."

The school opening is part of attempts by the National Transitional Council, once the leadership of the rebellion and now closest thing to a government in the North African nation, to restore a sense of normalcy despite continued fighting in three southern and central areas that remain loyal to Gadhafi.

The I Can’t Funeral Amanda ended her first day of school with an “I Can’t Funeral.” “This is a stolen treasure that has worked wonders for my class.  During my years of college I had to bring in a classroom method that I wanted to use in my class.  While browsing the Internet I came upon a true jewel,” she said. The I Can’t Funeral started with every student thinking of one thing they either did not feel successful in last year, or that often made them think, “I can’t do that.”  They each wrote their “I Can’t” on an index card.  Then, while playing very sad music, they placed the card in a “funeral box” and said their farewells to their “I Can’ts.”  They buried the “I Can’t” funeral box in Amanda’s car trunk. Amanda informed her students they were burying the words “I Can’t,” and wouldn’t be seeing them again.  They would dig up the funeral box at the end of the school year and celebrate how they had conquered their “I Can’ts.” Amanda said, “The students really enjoyed this, and I assured them each thing they couldn’t do or felt unsure about would be mastered during the school year.  It was an awesome day.” In January Amanda sent a note saying, “My students often ask when we are going to resurrect our ‘I Can’ts!’ . . . I often hear students saying they just conquered their ‘I can’t’ and we high five.” 

New research suggests that females such as Ms. Lee may be particularly vulnerable to bullying from other females, even as rates of male bullying decline. It’s a troubling finding that highlights where parents, educators and policy makers may need to focus their efforts to counter the effects of school-related bullying.

A comprehensive report released last month by researchers from the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health found that while overall rates of bullying have remained relatively stable in recent years, some significant gender disparities have emerged.

The study found that nearly one-third, or 29 per cent, of students reported being bullied since the start of the school year.