Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what assessment he has made of the implications for his Department's policies of the findings of the UNESCO report entitled Meeting commitments: are countries on track to achieve sustainable development goal four that more than 220 million children, adolescents and youth will not be in school in 2030.

We welcome the recent UNESCO reports focusing on how to achieve SDG 4 on Global Education by 2030. These reports resonate well with DFID’s Education Policy: Get Children Learning. The UK will continue to support 12 years of quality education for girls and boys, starting with the basics of literacy and numeracy.

To achieve this, we:

a) Drive improvements in teaching which benefit all children in the classroom;

b) Support ambitious system reform which helps teachers succeed and keeps children safe; and

c) Provide targeted support to disadvantaged girls, children with disabilities and those affected by conflict and crisis.

We use our leadership on the world stage to shine a spotlight on the needs of the most marginalised and strengthen the multilateral system of support for education.