I'd like to say a little bit about innovation, because in a way your question referred to innovation, as did the question about our work with the Gates foundation. As a partnership, this year we will be developing an innovation strategy, and one of the areas we are very interested in is the ability to leverage digital innovation, perhaps less at the level of the individual classroom and more at the level of the system. We think there are opportunities to digitize and to get information about service delivery. Is your teacher in the school or not in the school? For example, using SMS, we think there are opportunities for teacher education through digital formats.
When I met with the Gates foundation last week, we discussed some of the innovation areas where they are considering—they have not decided, but they are considering—investments in education. We discussed some of the areas where we might have a common interest in working on innovation.
GPE is a partnership-based organization very much focused on the core principle of development effectiveness, which is country ownership. We think it would not be appropriate to that core commitment to set an international standard and then impose it on countries. On the other hand, we believe that countries need to measure learning outcomes in order to track their own progress and, even more important, in order to target resources to those whose learning outcomes are weakest. Invariably, those are the children who are most marginalized. Those are girls. Those are children with disabilities.
Our goal in our sector planning process, which we support in our grants, is always to ensure that there is a good metric of outcomes for all children—not just the smartest children but all children—and that learning is the focus of those metrics.
Internationally, with SDG 4, we know that to measure outcomes against the SDG 4 goal there is going to have to be some kind of global learning measure. GPE partners with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics based in Montreal and supported generously by the Canadian government. It is developing a sophisticated way of ensuring some equivalency in the grade 5 or grade 6 test levels that are gradually growing across GPE partners so that we'll be able to say how effective an education system is against meeting a common learning-outcome target.
It will take a few years for the equivalency mechanism to be developed. In the meanwhile, GPE continues to encourage every country to test its students for learning outcomes, not so much as a stick, but more as an opportunity to look at how to target resources within their systems to achieve good outcomes for all children.
It will be an exciting day, I think, when every country has a nationally owned litmus test of the success of learning outcomes in its system and when those learning outcomes can be looked at for lessons in improvements across our partnership.