The tsunami: one year after

One year after the devastating tsunami struck Asia, life is still not back to normal. Some 200,000 people were killed or are still missing, according to UN figures, a third of them children. Lives were devastated. Many were left with nothing and remain deeply traumatised. Thousands in Somalia, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, southern India, Sri Lanka, Aceh in Indonesia and the Maldives are still in temporary shelters, their livelihoods destroyed.

But schools are providing a focus for rebuilding lives, and schools themselves are not merely patched together, but are being improved to enhance the quality of education. "If we give children who survived a better chance in life, then that’s a great thing and education is the best way to do that," says David Bull, director of Unicef UK, the United Nations Chidren’s Fund.

Many school buildings were destroyed, and for months those that still stood were used as camps for the displaced, or simply for storing disaster relief supplies. "When we asked local people what they needed, it was very surprising that all of them said, ‘we want our school back,’" says Manos Ranjan of Actionaid India.

Scores of solid prefabricated schools were erected within the first six months. Uniforms, books and supplies were quickly brought in. In Sri Lanka entire sets of textbooks were reprinted with donor assistance. "It is important to get children into school so that parents can get on with rebuilding their houses, earning an income or queuing for relief," says Bull.

‘Building back Better’ is the Unicef slogan for the affected region, where it co-ordinates international efforts in education and child health. Even the temporary schools made of prefabricated concrete panels are often better than the old schools, and have more light and ventilation.

In tsunami-affected areas in Myanmar, primary dropout rates were already high. Parents struggling to get by found that uniforms and school supplies made all the difference in getting children back to school quickly. In India and Sri Lanka, catch-up classes have been established for those who had not attended school for many months. The authorities are determined that educationally they should not emerge as the ‘lost generation’.

In Aceh, Unicef paid the salaries of 1,110 substitute primary teachers and 400 childcare workers for six months to keep schools open. A huge training effort is helping teachers provide psycho-social support, community-based help to learn to cope through play and activities. This has made teachers aware of child-centred teaching methods. "Traditional education systems in Asia have been formal, teaching from the front with the use of disciplinary measures. Now there is more listening, a more participative, child-friendly form of education," says Bull.

Massive teacher shortage forecasts

The economic downturn has left schools through Germany short of thousands of teachers despite the estimated 20,000 staff who are in need of jobs, according to a recent report. The report, a survey of nationwide teaching trends, was conducted by researchers at the Dursburg/ Essen University in north-western Germany.

Results reveal that 15,000 vacancies have built up in the nation’s schools over the past three years. The unfilled posts have accumulated despite a call two years ago by a forum representing 16 regional education ministers for an increased supply of teachers.

The problems are caused by regional states being reluctant to hire teachers because of the continuing economic downturn which has also discouraged many students from embarking on teacher training, not least because the average course lasts a daunting eight years. The profession’s image has also suffered because of increased violence in schools and social pressure on teachers.

Consequently, many states prefer to ‘save’ on new recruits by making teachers work longer hours and cope with bigger classes. GEW, the biggest teacher’s union, has criticised further cost-cutting, such as closing schools in underdeveloped eastern regions with too few pupils. The union pointed out that in the current academic year alone, schools were 4,600 teachers short.

DPhV, the grammar-school teachers’ union, says Germany is heading for a shortfall of 80,000 teachers over the next decade. By then, nearly half the country’s 785,000 teachers will have retired but there will be too few graduates to fill the gap, despite fewer school children because of Germany’s low birth rate.

Children today are disgusting little oiks, right? They eat with their mouths open, slam doors in people’s faces, never say please and thank you, and yell "Wot?" when asked a question. And that’s just for starters. But the London-based Daily Mail has a solution. It thinks that teachers need to teach them manners — and, surprisingly, a growing number of schools are starting to agree. Of course, all schools enforce rules about behaviour and most teachers will prod a sullen student into saying "thank you".

But that is half-hearted stuff compared to the formal teaching of etiquette that is now creeping back on the agenda. People everywhere, it seems, have had enough of uncouth youth. Visit any bookshop and you will see that it is not only Lynne Truss, the best- selling author, who is drawing the line with her book on rudeness, Talk To The Hand, but also rafts of lesser writers who are producing tomes on manners. The head butler of the Lanesborough Hotel in London regularly gives Saturday afternoon table manners lessons (£45 per head) to children aged eight to 13.

Then there is Gary Brown’s Knight school. This is an imaginative initiative set up in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, by the eponymous police sergeant to introduce youngsters to the old-fashioned virtues of honour and chivalry. So far about 100 six to eight-year-olds have gone through his eight-week programme.

Like most people, Penny Palmano, author of Yes, Please. Thanks!, a best-selling guide to teaching children manners, believes the job of teaching manners is that of parents, not schools. "It has to start at home. Children follow what their parents do, so we need to start expecting much more from parents. We always say ‘Ghastly children!’ but it’s really not their fault."

But what do schools do in the meantime? Do they put up with the dropped food and banging doors? Or do they roll up their sleeves and teach table manners and essential politeness?

Patricia Bateley, head of Quarry View primary in Sunderland says yes they do. She has brought rigour to lunchtimes with pupils being taught to sit properly at tables and handle their cutlery correctly. "There were one or two parents who said ‘Why does it matter if my child eats her peas with a fork or spoon?’ But we have a school writing script, and we have a school vocabulary and this is no different. Children don’t have to do it outside school if they don’t want to." And politeness, she points out , brings children big rewards. "If they say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and ‘good morning’ and ‘you’re welcome’, people respond well to them. It cuts out one whole layer of aggravation from life," says Bateley.

Guriya Khatun, 14, was once an ‘invisible’ child. When she was nine and her father became ill, she was forced to toil in the fields near her village in Gaya, in the impoverished Indian state of Bihar. Even then, she understood that education was her only hope. Against all the odds, and despite a four-mile walk every day, she now attends school thanks to a special bridging course sponsored by the United Nations children’s fund (Unicef).

Unicef says there are millions of children suffering from severe exploitation and discrimination who are ‘invisible’ to their communities, their governments and to the world. In its annual report, State of the World’s Children 2006, the charity recommends that governments must act promptly to bring these invisible children back from the brink.

These ‘invisible’ children fall through the cracks and are deprived of education because they are not registered at birth, are orphaned, or forced into labour or marriage. Others are fighting in conflicts or trafficked as slaves, or for sex.

The global problem has now been quantified for the first time. More than 50 million births — more than half of births in developing countries — remain unregistered every year, particularly in poor rural areas. "Without formal registration at birth or identification documents, children may find themselves excluded from access to vital services such as education, health and social security," the report says.

About 82 million girls aged 10-17 will be married before they are 18, losing out on education and often subjected to violence and abuse. Some 180 million children are involved in child labour, 8.4 million of them in near-slavery, prostitution and pornography, or in armed conflict; 1.2 million are trafficked for sex and labour and subjected to "unspeakable abuses", says Ann Veneman, Unicef’s executive director.

Governments must seek out marginalised and excluded children and bring them into schools, the report recommends. Comments Karin Landgrin, Unicef’s head of child protection: "Education is often a protective factor against exploitation."

Yet many governments have little data on these children and are often "in denial" about sexual exploitation. "It takes an extra effort," says Landgrin. "If you don’t go and look for such children, they will not come to you."

Italy’s gastronomic sciences university will open a faculty of agro-ecology in which traditional methods of food production, particularly in developing countries, will be studied. The university was created in 2004 by the Slow Food movement, set up in opposition to fast food, with a single faculty covering food and wine production.

Comments rector Alberto Capatti: "We want to train students from countries that either still use traditional techniques or have already been invaded by the methods of multinational agro-business, and offer a third alternative that is environmentally sustainable and safeguards quality and diversity."

The Universita di Scienze Gastronomiche (USG) is in its second year, with a current annual intake of some 70 students. A total of about 200 students is planned for 2005-06, divided between campuses near Turin and Parma.

So far, the university has focused on striving for food quality in richer countries but the new faculty will work with developing economies, where the dangers of mass production are greatest. "Slow Food and USG have chosen Miguel Altieri of the University of California, Berekely, to pilot this project," says Capatti. "Professor Altieri is an entomologist by training and also one of the world’s greatest authorities on ecologically sustainable agriculture. We will work with him on a list of possible teachers and specific educational objectives, and hope to have the new faculty operational by 2007 or 2008."

The university plans an annual intake of 50 students from developing countries, largely supported by scholarships. It will train them in agricultural methods that are both environmentally sustainable and economically viable, and in business skills. "We want to create experts who can go back to their countries to guide agricultural production policies," says Capatti. "Policies based on a Western agronomic model have often been a failure. We want to train people who can develop biodiversity in agriculture and animal breeding which existed in traditional farming."

Two months after riots devastated deprived suburban housing estates across France, attention remains focused on youth violence and educational inequality. Education minister Gilles de Robien says he will establish a permanent police presence in violent schools following the stabbing of a secondary teacher by one of her pupils. The minister also announced a relaunch of priority education in disadvantaged areas.

After the stabbing, Robien said it was "time to stop beating about the bush" and introduce a permanent police presence in problem schools so that teachers could alert officers to difficulties before tragedies occurred. According to the education ministry, such instances of armed violence occur four times a day in secondary schools. In 2004-05, 80,000 violent acts were reported, a rise of 1 percent on the previous year.

But teachers’ unions oppose a permanent police presence in schools. The federation FSU believes de Robien’s plan is "in the wrong direction", presented in "the heat of the moment" and "lacks reflection". Schools need more supervisory staff and social workers, not police. The police representative body UNSA-Police also disapproves. "We can’t open a police station in every secondary school," says a spokesman.

The assault took place three days after de Robien had announced a 33-point plan to relaunch priority education which prime minister Dominique de Villepin had promised last November after the restoration of order in the riot-torn areas. Under the plan educational priority zones (ZEPs) will be replaced by a system that targets particular schools and concentrates resources on between 200 and 250 colleges (lower secondary schools) facing the most difficulties.

Australian universities will be barred from imposing compulsory service fees on their students
from July, this year. Academic and student groups say 4,000 jobs will be lost as student services including childcare, careers and employment advice as well as personal, housing and financial counselling are shut. A last minute decision by Steven Fielding, an independent senator, to back the legislation allowed the Voluntary Student Unionism Bill to pass by one vote before parliament closed for summer.

The National Tertiary Education Union says Australia will become the only Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development country that prohibits the collection of fees to support extra-curricular campus activities. "Virtually every university worth its name in the Commonwealth, US and western Europe provides for a collection of a fee for such purposes," says Andrew Nette, NTEU policy and research co-ordinator. "The government has rushed through legislation on the last parliamentary sitting day of the year for the sake of fulfilling an ideological obsession that has nothing to do with students’ welfare," he adds.

Brendan Nelson, the federal education minister had planned to have the ban in place from the start of the new academic year in February. But with the prospect of the legislation not passing the senate, it was put back to second semester in 2006.

Universities will be subject to multimillion-dollar fines if they force students to pay fees. The legislation has been condemned by vice chancellors, academics, students, the opposition Labor Party and many of Australia’s sporting champions. The Australian vice chancellors’ committee warned that most of the services students now enjoyed would disappear if the act is passed.

(Compiled from Times Educational Supplement and Times Higher Education Supplement)