This year, leaders and citizens from around the world will come together to devise the frameworks through which humanity can collaboratively address its most urgent challenges. September marks the unveiling of the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals—the long-awaited successors to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—and December will bring the establishment of new binding targets for tackling climate change.

Taken together, these opportunities mark a pivotal moment in history, an opportunity to chart a navigable course toward a lastingly equitable world. A world where, for us as education advocates, every child fulfills their right to a quality education. This is a fantastic opportunity. But the job is not done yet. It is critical that we all work together now to ensure that the Post-2015 framework lives up to this bold promise.

Driving forward progress on equity

To deliver on the transformational potential of education, it's crucial that we secure a strong focus on equity. The MDGs did a great job of galvanizing greater access to education, but in many cases, the most vulnerable and marginalized children have been left behind.

We cannot make the same mistake again. The post-2015 framework needs to put equity at its core, and incentivize action up front to ensure the educational needs of the most marginalized are addressed.

While there is currently recognition that the post-2015 education goal must drive progress on equity and learning, there is a need to translate this emerging consensus into specific mechanisms for doing so at the regional, national, and global levels.

Three actions to move ahead

Three clear actions would make a big difference here:

• There must be a strong commitment in the post-2015 framework that ‘no target be considered met unless met for all’.
• Education targets and indicators must clearly incentivise action on and make commitments to measure progress on equity, with insertion of language on indicators to ‘narrow the gaps between the most advantaged and disadvantaged children’.
• To help incentivize progress and support an equity agenda, clear and straightforward stepping stone equity-targets should be established at the national and global level to monitor progress on reaching the most marginalized.

No target met unless met for all

Over 3,000 civil society organizations signed a ‘No target met unless met for all’ statement to the UN Secretary-General (UNSG) in November 2014. This statement called for the UNSG’s Post-2015 Synthesis Report to commit that no one should be left behind by virtue of their gender, age, disability, income, geography or ethnicity.

It also asked for a clear commitment that ‘no target should be considered met unless for all social and economic groups’. This was included in the UNSG report. It must now be embedded firmly in the intergovernmental negotiations and, ultimately, in the final post-2015 agreement.

Need for clear targets and indicators on equity

To make sure a commitment to equity translates in practice, there is a need for clear targets and indicators to measure our progress on reaching the most marginalized.

Equity must be integrated as a core focus in education targets, and we recommend the insertion of language on ‘narrowing the gaps between the most advantaged and disadvantaged’ into the development of post-2015 education indicators.

Currently, the Open Working Group (OWG) for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Outcome Document, which now serves as the main basis for the intergovernmental post-2015 negotiations, includes a separate target on equity within the education goal.

The Education For All (EFA) Muscat Agreement, meanwhile, integrates equity considerations (‘with particular attention to gender equality and the most marginalized’) across targets 1 to 4 (on early childhood, basic education, literacy and numeracy, and knowledge and skills for decent work and life).

Along with the Global Partnership for Education, Save the Children, strongly supports this integration of equity as a core element in targets. This focus on equity must be retained in post-2015 negotiations on targets, and must be included in the development of indicators to track progress against these targets.

The Technical Advisory Group’s (TAG) consultation on post-2015 education indicators provides an important opportunity to keep this focus on equity in relation to indicators. However, right now, TAG’s proposed indicators revert to tracking sex, location, and wealth alone.

At a minimum, equity should be added as a “key concept to measure” in the TAG report, reflecting target-level specific emphasis on reaching first the most marginalized in early childhood, primary and secondary education, knowledge and skills, and literacy and numeracy.

In addition, there is a critical need to ensure that the Post-2015 education agenda includes clear consideration of the educational needs of children in emergency and conflict situations.

Stepping Stone Targets

Guaranteeing that all children and young people have equitable access to quality education and achieve relevant learning outcomes by 2030 will require increased financing, better data, and more targeted action to address the needs of the most marginalized kids. This needs to be done up front, and not left until we near the 2030 deadline.

As the TAG consultation report emphasizes, it is important that we capture how trends may differ between groups defined by group or individual characteristics. The stepping stones approach offers a way of doing this.

A stepping stones approach would set nationally-determined, interim targets (say in 2022), which assess progress for the most disadvantaged. This would help spur dialogue and action on pressing inequalities within societies.

And, fundamentally, the process of setting stepping stones would place immediate political and policy attention on those groups that are furthest behind.

New research paper: Stepping stones and prioritizing equity in the implementation of Post-2015 education agenda

It is critically important that we ensure equity is prioritized in the implementation and financing of the Post-2015 education agenda. Building on the work of Kevin Watkins [PDF], Save the Children has produced research [PDF] to demonstrate how this approach could work generally in the Post-2015 Framework. We are now working to explore how this could be applied to education specifically,

2015 is a pivotal moment in history. But unless we organize to build broad support to hold governments accountable and ensure that the major agreements are appropriately ambitious on driving equity, it's a moment we could miss. This requires us to pool our technical expertise, and to work together to bring our arguments to the most senior political levels. To help support this, the action/2015 campaign was launched in 53 countries on January 15^th.  Save the Children invites you to join this global citizens’ movement and help fulfill the great promise of this important year.

Save the Children is one of the core partners of the Global Partnership for Education and represents the NGO constituency on the Board of the Global Partnership. The Global Partnership and Save the Children along with many other education partners advocate for a strong and meaningful education goal to be included in the new Sustainable Development Goals that will succeed the Millennium Development Goals at the end of 2015.