§ Tony BaldryTo ask the Secretary of State for International Development if she will make education a higher priority within the international aid budget. [27864]
§ Clare ShortEducation is a precondition of development and poverty reduction and is given high priority within our development assistance programme. The Government are strongly committed to achieving the millennium development goals of universal primary education (UPE) in all countries by the year 2015 and gender equity in primary and secondary schooling by 2005. DFID' s education strategy paper, "The Challenge of Universal Primary Education", sets out our overall approach and three-fold strategy for achieving these goals. Our recent paper "Children out of School" identifies the different circumstances of children who are not in school and proposes an eight-point plan of international action for accelerating progress towards the 2015 target.