The Educational Consequences of Poverty in Childhood
Research from the Young Lives study of childhood poverty has contributed to a major report on the UN’s aim to achieve Education for All by 2015.
A decade has passed since world leaders adopted the Education for All goals. While progress has been made, millions of children are still missing out on their right to education. A major UN report, published in 2010, identifies some of the root causes of disadvantage, both within education and beyond, and provides examples of targeted policies that successfully combat exclusion.
The Young Lives team, based at ODID, drew on research in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam to contribute background papers for key sections of the 2010 UNESCO Global Monitoring Report.
Research from Young Lives has identified the relationship between malnutrition and educational disadvantage. The results are striking and show a strong association between height-for-age (or stunting, an indicator of long-term malnutrition) in the early months and the scores children achieved in tests at age 4 to 5. By age 7 to 8, the disadvantage this creates is likely to be equivalent to the loss of a full term of schooling. Given the high levels of stunting among the Young Lives children, the results underline the significant costs imposed by malnutrition on education.
In Peru, children from indigenous communities face a matrix of disadvantage, not just poverty. Although most of them are enrolled in school, the schools they attend have fewer resources and bilingual education is available for less than half of them, so they have to learn Spanish very quickly when they start school or fail. Their school achievement is likely to be much worse than their Spanish-speaking peers and they are more likely to repeat a year or drop out. The paper concludes that bilingual education policies are necessary to provide more resources for their school and to support individual students to help them catch up with their peers.
In Vietnam, our research examines the mixed impact of education policies for ethnic minority children. While access to school has increased, as well as availability of mother-tongue teaching, ethnic minority children are still likely to do less well at school. Inequalities also exist between minority groups, due to uneven allocation of resources. While schooling outcomes are heavily influenced by factors that may not relate directly to education policies, it is important to consider how the school system interacts with these external factors in shaping children’s experiences of education and their learning.
Photo: © Young Lives/Farhatullah Beig
