Gordon Brown calls for global education fund

GORDON Brown, the former Prime Minister, has called for the creation of a worldwide fund to tackle a “hidden and silent emergency in education”.

In a new report, Mr Brown says he wants an independent Global Fund for Education to raise £13 billion a year and help achieve the United Nations’ vision of universal primary education by 2015.

He claims progress towards that aim has stalled in recent years, with 68 million children of primary school age not in formal education.

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Mr Brown wrote: “In the midst of our increasingly knowledge-based and interconnected global economy, millions of children in the world’s poorest countries are out of school.

“Millions more are in school, but receiving an education of such abysmal quality that they are unlikely to gain even the most basic literacy and numeracy skills.”

All 193 United Nations member states are signed up to a Global Millennium Goal for primary school education to be accessed by every child by 2015, agreed at the New York Millennium Summit in 2000.

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