By Dr Tony Mays
Director: Education COL

In a recent report entitled, The Price of Inaction, UNESCO estimated the global cost of inadequate access to schooling and school drop-out rate at a staggering USD 10,000 trillion annually.

We have simply been unable to build enough secondary schools and adequately employ secondary teachers to accommodate all the learners exiting primary school or dropping out somewhere along the way.

The scale of the challenge makes clear that it can be addressed only through open and distance learning (ODL):

• According to UNESCO, at the height of the pandemic, more than 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries had their schooling disrupted; not all came back.
• According to the World Bank, reporting UIS data, the Gross Enrollment Ratio at secondary level was still only 77 per cent in 2022; and
• According to Statista, on average, 21.78 per cent of young people are not in employment, education or training in 2024.
• The Price of Inaction cited above indicates that 128 million boys and 122 million girls are currently excluded from schooling.

In much of sub-Saharan Africa, where the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) supports several open schooling initiatives, education at the schooling level – including when offered through open schooling – is fee-free. This is a good thing, as cost should not be a barrier to access to school. However, there is the challenge that open schooling providers are altogether reliant on government subsidies with competing demands on the fiscus. Moreover, post-pandemic, many countries experienced an economic decline. So, despite international movements to increase spending, Education Finance Watch reported that the allocated budget remains inadequate in many countries to address the need. When open schooling providers need to cut their budgets due to static or decreased government subsidies, they may be tempted to cut student support by closing support centres and reducing the number of part-time support staff. This has a double impact of increased drop-out/stop-out and decreased enrolment – potentially making future provision even more precarious.

However, the current dominant process for allocating budgets is often detrimental to quality improvement. We also lack contemporary costing data to make an alternative case because the cost of blended and online provision is not well understood, particularly at the level of schooling. Although there are some indicators of the challenges involved in moving from print-based and contact-supported models, where economies of scale are critical, to blended and online provision, which tends to favour smaller group sizes and personalised learning, it should be possible to scale online and digital learning in financially sustainable ways.

Therefore, better guidelines for costing education are needed. As noted, there is too little contemporary understanding of the costing dimensions of the kind of hybrid open schooling provision needed in many countries (print and contact-based models for some; broadcast-based provision and open textbooks for others, along with blended and online provision for others). This means it becomes impossible for institutions and ministries to have meaningful discussions about business and funding models which can be scaled and sustained. This is a crucial deficit we need to address. What is clear is that there is a vast disparity between low, middle and high-income countries in terms of financial resources dedicated to schooling provision, with comparative rates per child per year on average USD 56, USD 1,1195 and USD 8,515, respectively, in 2021.

It is also important to realise that it is not just about the costs of establishing and sustaining new open schools. We also need to pay attention to creating learning pathways back into schooling and then through schooling for those we have lost in the schooling process in the past and who may not be overly motivated to return for more of the same in the future. There are also costs associated with these processes. However, as noted at the start, the cost of inaction will be even higher.