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Africa’s educational systems are suffering from growing pains.  More students than ever are enrolling in school, but the supply of teachers and infrastructure have not kept up with demand. Educators say about 80 percent of African students are completing primary school -- thanks in part to the push to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. They call for universal primary education by the 2015. John Daniel, the president and CEO of the intergovernmental organization the Commonwealth of Learning, says success is bringing more challenges. SCOPESecondary school students at KwaMhlanga High School in Mpumalanga, South Africa. “The African countries achieved in 10 years what it took many developed countries 100 years to do two centuries ago," he said, "and they don’t have many resources left over to do secondary.”

“Girls who have secondary education … have on average worldwide one-point-eight fewer children than girls who don’t," he said. "That’s a difference of two or three billion to the population of the world by 2050. There is [one educational researcher, Joel Cohen] who says therefore girls’ education is best way of stopping population growth and climate change.”

The Commonwealth of Learning proposes open schools, using new technologies and new ways to meet the needs of school aged children, drop-outs, mothers who want to learn at home and working adults. He said the schools cut costs and save time by using new technologies, including cell phones. Secondary school curricula can be created and shared among schools without costly intellectual property rights.

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.

Yet despite its overwhelming success with exams, China’s education system still lags in a number of areas, not the least of which is its ability to teach analytical thinking. Focusing almost solely on preparation for benchmarking tests and entrance exams, the Chinese classrooms I visited in my previous work in China offered few interactive learning and problem-solving opportunities, and student-led extra-curricular activities remain relatively rare. Students I encountered in both rural and urban areas of China were often extremely bright, yet many struggled to verbalize their own opinions or respond to questions that probe beyond the factual level.

Students I encountered in both rural and urban areas of China were often extremely bright, yet many struggled to verbalize their own opinions or respond to questions that probe beyond the factual level.

The program’s innovative curriculum provides a fresh departure from conventional lecture-based learning, yet it also builds upon the requirements of Chinese university entrance exams to ensure buy-in from students and teachers who know their success depends on exam performance. Within the collaborative atmosphere of these student newsrooms – in which student writing is not graded by the teacher, but is critiqued in peer discussions – students are gaining a rare opportunity to be a part of a cooperative and interactive learning environment and to voice their own opinions about issues in their community.

On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them. In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.

South Korea's hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country's culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. "One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable," President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.

There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore's Education Minister was asked last year about his nation's reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We're not as bad as the Koreans."

More than 3,500 schools in England and Wales will be closed and some 2,600 partially closed on Thursday when two teaching unions stage strike action.

Action is being taken by members of the National Union of Teachers and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers. They say the changes will mean they will have to work longer, pay more and get less when they retire. Mr Gove told the Commons the strike would cause "massive inconvenience to hard-working families" and would hit working women particularly hard.

He said his department had established that 3,206 schools in England would be closed and 2,206 would be partially closed on Thursday.