GI-ESCR is excited to announce the launch of the paper “Human rights to evaluate evidence on non-state involvement in education” commissioned by the Global Education Monitoring Report as background information to assist in drafting the 2021/2GEM Report, Non-state actors in education.

The paper, that was co-authored by GI-ESCR’s Director of Law and Policy, Sylvain Aubry and launched on 10th December presents a three-part analysis that illustrates how to use the intersection of human rights law and social science to evaluate the role of non-State actors in education. It builds on the recently adopted Abidjan Principles on the human rights obligations of States to provide public education and to regulate private involvement in education (hereafter “Abidjan Principles”), a landmark text for the interpretation of the right to education, in particular in the context of growing privatisation in and of education. The paper specifically applies the Abidjan Principles’ right to education framework to education research in the following steps: providing details about the right to education outlined in the Abidjan Principles; conceptually mapping differences between public and private education and how best to situate non-State actors; presenting a human-rights framework tool for evaluating educational systems; and applying this tool in three case study examples.

The paper finds that existing case studies seeking to assess the efficacy or impact of non-State actors omit aspects of education central to a human rights’ lens, even when they claim to do so. Furthermore, it notes that using the framework proposed to evaluate a State’s education sector helps to expand the research agenda beyond an outcomes-only basis to a systemic analysis at the legal (structural) level, while maintaining a coherent analytical frame based on agreed-upon and legitimate norms.

Here, we emphasize three noteworthy items regarding the paper’s findings.

First, using a human rights framework to analyse education can expand researchers’ perspectives beyond an outcomes-only basis to a systemic analysis of the efforts of the State – through its structural (in particular, the law) and procedural (looking in particular at budgets) levels.

Second, the right to education is often understood restrictively to mean only or mostly access to education (sometimes with an understanding of ‘equity’), while it encompasses much more. States have three types of obligations that are often under-regarded, yet especially relevant for the consideration of the role of non-State actors:

1) States must provide for public education of the highest attainable quality to all. This includes the removal of any barriers to access, the maximization of resources for public education, and the provision of plural and inclusive education.

2) States must respect parents’ liberty in education under certain conditions. They can limit this exercise of this liberty if it undermines the realisation of the right to education

3) States must regulate non-State providers. When part of the education sector, non-State actors must not be permitted to infringe on the realisation of the right to education across the system or at an individual institution.

Third and finally, researchers – and users of research – should be careful about studies which claim to be neutral about technical solutions and those which obfuscate trade-offs, especially if those are used to advise a position informed by human rights. Authors who fail to elucidate and elaborate on the assumptions and trade-offs they employ can undermine the study’s credibility and utility for the purpose of the right to education.