Damascus-Sana
With the participation of Syria, a virtual meeting was held today in cooperation with the UNESCO Regional Office for Education in the Arab Countries in Beirut and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics on the process of setting regional standards for the fourth goal of the sustainable development goals via the Internet.
The meeting participants discussed the Education 2030 Framework for Action, developing appropriate reference standards for the SDG indicators in Member States, familiarizing regional stakeholders with issues, options and lessons learned from the process of developing these standards, deciding on setting reference standards at the sub-regional level and developing a roadmap for setting benchmarks at the regional level. And agreement on the roles and support to be undertaken within the framework of the Road Map.
In a speech in Syria during the meeting, Assistant Minister of Education Dr. Abdul Hakim Al-Hammad explained the importance of exchanging views, ideas and data on ways to set standards among experts and include some indicators in the short term in the health field, stressing the Ministry’s keenness to reach education for all and achieve equal opportunities among learners, especially those with disabilities.
Dr. Al-Hammad pointed to the importance of developing measurable indicators according to the specificity of each country and providing the National Committee and those interested in achieving the fourth goal with the experiences of the leading countries in this field to see and adapt them to the current reality with an emphasis on adherence to the reference standards and to be more flexible to perform the task.
UNESCO indicated that the standard setting and monitoring process depends on two basic factors, the first of which is the commitment to adopt and monitor standards at the regional level, and the second is practical solutions to measurement challenges and the proposal to define benchmarks as a minimum that each country in a region should achieve with the support of regional steering committees that have an agenda. Education that can support standard setting, adoption and adaptation to monitoring frameworks and their needs, and can provide platforms for peer-learning that link benchmark monitoring with policy-related follow-up actions.
It is noteworthy that the Technical Cooperation Team "TCG" adopted in August 2019 seven indicators to measure the benchmarks in the framework of monitoring the fourth goal of the sustainable development goals based on the proposals of member states, which are the minimum level of literacy, mathematics, achievement rate, out-of-school rate and pre-participation rate. Years of primary education, percentage of trained teachers, spending on education as a share of the budget and GDP, and the equity index is determined thereafter.
The Secretary of the National Committee for UNESCO, Dr. Nidal Hassan, the Director of the National Center for Educational Curriculum Development, Dr. Nadia Al-Ghazouli, and the Director of Guidance Al-Muthanna Khadour participated in the meeting.
Rehab Ali