Karen Bradley, MP for Staffordshire Moorlands, joined Gary and Danielle Lineker at the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday last week (14th September) to show support for the 1 GOAL campaign. Gary is an Ambassador for 1GOAL which is an initiative which aims to mobilise support for education for all by using football to get through to a worldwide audience. During the World Cup Dani Lineker joined 1 GOAL on an education trip to Khayleitsha, one of the fastest growing townships in South Africa, where opportunities for children are very limited.
Karen met Dani and Gary at a parliamentary event to highlight the needs of so many children across the world for education. The Global Campaign for Education, which organises 1GOAL, is promoting education as a human right but also the fastest route out of poverty. The UK government has an existing commitment to provide £1billion per year, until 2015, to support education internationally.
Karen said: "This is a really wonderful approach to promoting education for children across the world. It was a pleasure to meet Gary and Danielle and help get their message out to support the 1GOAL campaign. We're lucky in Staffordshire Moorlands to have some great schools and we can sometimes take it for granted that education is available for all our children. If we can improve literacy levels and education standards in poorer countries we can help them improve their economies too.
Gary said: "Delivering education for the 72 million children that are currently denied access to education is an achievable dream. We know that the world has the resources to deliver it. Now it's time for world leaders to make it happen - for rich countries to deliver the funding needed, and for governments of developing countries to ensure that education is the top priority in their country."
World leaders are meeting this week in New York (20 - 22 September) to review progress on the UN Millennium Goals. Two of those involve tackling poverty by ensuring that by 2015 all boys and girls complete primary schooling. It remains a real challenge since with just five years to go there are still 72 million children who are being denied even a basic primary education.
David Archer, International Board Member for the Global Campaign for Education explained about the campaign:
"This year 1 million pupils, in 9,000 schools across the UK, joined the Global Campaign for Education's 1GOAL Send My Friend to School campaign, linked to the World Cup, which focused on getting every child in the world into school. Pupils and teachers understand the importance of this issue. The UK government has already committed to keep up overall spending on aid but we need them to become a real champion by recommitting to the target of £1 billion in aid to education each year and by calling on other world leaders to put their hands up for education at the UN Summit next week".