Since ISHN is active in the global school health level, I have been following the documents and debates that have occurred about the role of education in the new 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. I am usually pretty good at this type of thing but by the time the various documents emerged from the peculiar dance of the UN, I was lost. It turns out I may not be alone. Several articles in Volume 52, 2015 of Network for International Policies and Cooperation in Education and Training reflect on the World Education Forum (WEF) held in August 2015 in Incheon, South Korea. There were three documents in play; a "targets" document describing outputs and indicators; a "'framework for action (FFA) which is essentially a plan and a "declaration" for the WEF Conference to consider. At the end of the WEF, only one of these documents came to the floor for ratification by delegates. In the very last session, delegates were asked if they had any comments on the FFA (no one dared to do so) and the "targets", which have been dealt with in as committee, was folded into the FFA document. In other words, easy consensus and no haggling over targets. If you read through the articles in the special issue of this journal, you can get even more confused but it appears that UNESCO was guiding the process so that these education sector discussions would not get out of step with a parallel set of UN meetings discussing all of the global goals, including education. If you read the articles in this issue, you will also learn that the language of the Incheon Declaration is stronger and more coherent than the "targets" document but it may be, once again in education, come to be that "what is measurable gets measured" and "what is measured ends up being what matters". Read more>> (An item from the ISHN Member information service)
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