Leading up to the Transforming Education Summit
All images created by the Transforming Education Summit Team
The urgent need for education systems to evolve will be front and center during the 77th United Nations General Assembly. UN Secretary General António Guterres has convened the Transforming Education Summit (TES) in the “context of two dramatic and deeply interconnected challenges to ensuring quality education and lifelong learning for all.”
“The Transforming Education Summit will seek to renew our collective commitment to education and lifelong learning as a pre-eminent public good.” – António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General
The global learning crisis, where hundreds of millions of children, youth, and adults are being denied their right to quality education, is listed as the first reason for the summit. Secondly, it is widely agreed that traditional education systems are not flexible enough to adapt to modern challenges, ultimately failing learners in our global society. One current test, the COVID-19 pandemic, has highlighted such lack of nimbleness in the education system, causing hundreds of millions of learning hours lost, an impact we won’t fully understand for years to come. UN SG Guterres hopes to engage influential actors to mitigate the harshest effects of this learning loss by convening the summit.
The Transforming Education Summit is a critical effort to “mobilize political ambition, action, solutions and solidarity to transform education.” The specific objectives listed for the summit are:
- National and international commitments to transform education;
- greater public engagement around and support for transforming education; and
- a Secretary General’s Summary and Call to Action (summit outcome document), which will capture the knowledge/commitments generated by the Summit.
Today, 28 June, activities that will shape the TES in September are underway in the form of the Transforming Education Pre-Summit. Occurring over the course of three days in Paris, the pre-summit’s primary objectives are “to harness the evolving discussions on transforming education, elaborate initial content and establish a shared vision and suggested actions for the Summit, and generate greater momentum in the lead up to September.”
Action Track 3 of the TES, teachers, teaching and the teaching profession, will be brought more into focus on day 3 of the pre-summit. The International Task Force of Teachers for Education 2030 (TTF) will launch the #TeachersTransform campaign on 30 June at 11:25–11:45 CET (6:25 – 6:45 am EDT).
To watch the summit, including the #TeachersTransform campaign launch, click here: http://webcast.unesco.org/events/2022-06-TES-Pre-Summit/